Marc Duncan

Marc Duncan is a risk, preparedness, security, and resilience executive with more than 30 years of experience helping governments, airports, critical-infrastructure organizations, and corporate leaders understand complex threats, evaluate organizational capabilities, and make better, more defensible decisions about risk.

As Chief Operating Officer of Salus Solutions, Marc leads multidisciplinary programs spanning emergency management, aviation, counterterrorism, intelligence, executive protection, investigations, crisis communications, critical-infrastructure resilience, cybersecurity, disaster operations, and organizational preparedness. Throughout his career, his work has consistently operated at the intersection of research, strategy, and real-world operations: identifying what can happen, understanding the consequences, determining what an organization must be capable of doing, measuring its actual capabilities, and addressing the gaps that matter most.

Marc has contributed directly to the development of national preparedness doctrine. In 2012, he co-authored and peer reviewed FEMA’s Comprehensive Preparedness Guide 101: Developing and Maintaining Emergency Operations Plans, contributing to national guidance for developing, integrating, maintaining, and evaluating emergency operations plans. In 2013, he served as a co-author and subject-matter expert on the team supporting development of FEMA’s Comprehensive Preparedness Guide 201, which advanced the federal Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment methodology.

His national research experience also includes leadership of Airport Cooperative Research Program Project 04-13, which resulted in ACRP Report 95, Integrating Community Emergency Response Teams at Airports. As Principal Investigator for Salus Solutions, Marc later led multiple aviation-security research programs addressing Active Shooter Mitigation and Recovery Strategies, Insider Threat Mitigation at Airports, and Mental Health and Airport Security. These initiatives examined not simply individual threats, but the capabilities, policies, technologies, organizational structures, resources, and operational practices necessary to prevent incidents, reduce consequences, respond effectively, and recover.

Marc’s public-sector and aviation work has included leadership of emergency-management and public-safety assessments involving Los Angeles World Airports, Raleigh-Durham International Airport, the City of Raleigh, and New York City. He has led energy-assurance planning, cybersecurity program assessments, counterterrorism planning and preparedness teams, red-team programs and assessments, logistics initiatives, and large-scale evacuation and repopulation efforts.

From 2012 through 2017, under FEMA Marc led the consultant team that ran the government's CONUS air-operations planning and preparedness, operations, integrating aviation, logistics, emergency management, interagency coordination, and large-scale disaster operations. Under his leadership, Salus Solutions also developed and led the crisis communications program for Raleigh-Durham International Airport, a program that customer representatives characterized as among the strongest of its kind in the country.

In the New York metropolitan region, Marc initiated and led a major emergency-management research and program-development effort addressing preparedness for people with disabilities and others with access and functional needs. He directed the project from inception through completion of its substantive research and deliverables before transitioning to launch another, highly complex assignment.

Marc’s experience extends directly into intelligence, protective operations, and high-risk environments. He has led intelligence and assessment activities in the Middle East and was extensively involved in operations following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has also sponsored, led, or coordinated search-and-rescue, disaster-response, and recovery efforts following significant natural disasters in the Caribbean, North Carolina, and Texas.

Today, Marc leads Salus Station Managers and protective operations throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Middle East. Salus provides executive protection, security, protective intelligence, logistics, and operational support to leaders of organizations responsible for some of the most critical infrastructure and essential services in the region. Those organizations span sectors including energy, transportation, artificial intelligence and advanced technology, financial services, and governance.

That continuing operational responsibility gives Marc and the Salus team a perspective that cannot be gained through assessment alone. They see how leadership protection, physical security, intelligence, cyber risk, supply chains, infrastructure dependencies, crisis communications, continuity, and organizational resilience intersect in real environments and across multiple threat conditions.

Marc is a licensed diplomatic and executive protection professional, a licensed private investigator, and a firearms instructor. He also sponsored a Junior Olympic precision-rifle team that produced multiple nationally ranked shooters, reflecting a longstanding commitment to developing people, establishing measurable standards, and building capabilities that perform under pressure.

Marc has also become an increasingly visible voice on the relationship between security, emergency management, compliance, and enterprise risk. He has appeared with compliance and risk thought leader Tom Fox on The Hill Country Podcast and the Compliance Podcast Network, discussing disaster preparedness and recovery, international security, crisis communications, enterprise risk, and the application of THIRA principles to executive decision-making.

The common thread throughout Marc’s career is capability.

Whether the problem involves terrorism, an active shooter, cyber risk, energy disruption, a natural disaster, insider threat, aviation interruption, executive security, international instability, or failure of critical infrastructure, the fundamental questions remain the same:

What can happen? What are the consequences? What must we be capable of doing? What can we do today? Where are the gaps? And where will investment make the greatest difference?

Those questions became the foundation of SalCAPA.

Drawing upon established federal preparedness doctrine, including principles embodied in FEMA’s CPG 101 and CPG 201, and informed by decades of practical application across government, aviation, security, intelligence, critical infrastructure, executive protection, and real-world operations, Marc has led the development of Salus THIRA into an enterprise risk and capability-management methodology.

SalCAPA uses a six-step process to identify threats and hazards, establish their context, define capability targets, assess existing capabilities, identify risks and capability gaps, and determine how proposed changes will affect the organization’s risk profile.

The final step is critical.

Traditional assessments frequently stop after identifying deficiencies. Salus THIRA is designed to help executives and boards go further—to determine what should be fixed first, where limited resources will have the greatest impact, what risks can reasonably be accepted, and how those decisions can be documented, communicated, and defended.

Today, Marc is leading the development and rollout of SalCAPA as the flagship methodology of Salus Solutions. It represents the convergence of more than three decades of research, public safety, aviation, security, intelligence, critical-infrastructure planning, executive protection, preparedness, and real-world crisis operations.

For Marc, SalCAPA is not simply another process methodology. It is the culmination of a career spent answering one fundamental leadership question:

How do we know what can happen—and how do we know whether we are actually prepared for it?