Unified Command

This is going to be a dashed-off piece, triggered by a new story I saw a couple of days back.

One of the core tenets of the Incident Command System (ICS), as pushed by the US through the National Incident Management System (NIMS) is unified command. Briefly stated this is the idea that all people with authority for an incident are "at the table" and making decisions collectively. In Federally managed event (i.e., when FEMA is involved) this is done through the Unified Coordination Group (UCG). Most UCGs will include:

• Federal Coordinating Officer (FCO) - the individual named by the President in the Stafford Act declaration to oversee all Federal personnel
• Governor or Governor's Authorized Representative (GAR)
• Defense Coordinating Officer (DCO) - liaison from DoD to FEMA
• State National Guard
• Local leadership

This group meets regularly, based on the operational period, to outline the objectives for the next operational period. Operations and Planning personnel take those objectives and develop the Incident Action Plan, which outlines the tactics that will be employed.

An example of this working very well is the recent Federal response to the American Samoa earthquake and tsunami in October 2009. The FCO and DCO assigned are based in Hawaii, and the Governor of American Samoa was visiting Hawaii at the time the event occurred which allowed the three of them to get together before assets had begun flowing to discuss priorities and begin coordination.

Moving to the current disaster, I saw this article from the Guardian a couple of days ago:

The Haitian prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, told the Montreal conference that his government needed to rely strongly on its partners but said Haiti was able to lead the rebuilding effort.

"Haitians continue to work in precarious conditions but it is in the position to assume the leadership expected of it by its people in order to relaunch the country on the path to reconstruction," he said. However, Bellerive admitted the government was facing serious legitimacy issues as people question whether it exists at all. The destruction of key government buildings has hampered the work of what was already a weak and inefficient state.

In short, the article outlines the Haitian Prime Minister speaking to a conference of supporting countries and explaining that Haiti is ready to take the lead in the response effort. This is where things can get messy, if the impacted nation is truly ready to take leadership they should be able to but many of the responding agencies are acting under their own authorities and might not acknowledge a foreign nation's right to direct their actions. In this case it is even more messy than a normal response (domestic or with a US territory or protectorate) because if we don't cooperate appropriately the Haitian government might find itself having to ask our personnel to leave, even with the massive negative impacts.

That being said, implementing a unified command and making sure there is full participation from all involved can lessen or remove this obstacle. Having the Haitian government in the UCG allows them to set the priorities and objectives, but doing it collaboratively allows the other nations and agencies (I'm thinking primarily of US DoD) to remain in their chain of command. It also will assist the Haitian government in reasserting itself and demonstrating that it is ready to lead the nation again, while having the full resources of the international response community backing it up. The most important thing to avoid, for the sake of the Haitian people, is the international community setting up in one place and the Haitian government setting up in another.

He [Prime Minister Bellerive] said Haiti's government had set up six groups to deal with issues such as humanitarian aid, housing and security. He said each group was being led by a minister as well as an international party. But the Italian government official who led the country's response to the L'Aquila earthquake condemned the relief efforts in Haiti as a disorganised "vanity parade". Guido Bertolaso, the head of Italy's civil protection service, said there had been a fundamental lack of leadership thus far in foreign aid missions to Haiti

It's not a perfect system, but it does work.