CRITICAL INCIDENT MANAGEMENT PAPER

Critical Incident Management Paper

Critical Incident Management Paper

Introduction

President Bush's Homeland Security Presidential Directive 8 (HSPD-8) required the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary to develop a national domestic all-hazards preparedness goal. The intent was to establish measurable readiness priorities and balance threats and consequences with resources required to prevent, respond to, and recover from them. The goal would include readiness measures, standards for preparedness assessments and strategies, and a system to assess the nation's overall preparedness to respond to major events, especially terrorist acts. (Taylor, 2004)

Critical Incident Management Paper

Paying attention to the goal and related readiness priorities, particularly at the state and local levels, is vital, for at least one simple reason—federal funding. Under the directive, state all-hazard preparedness strategies consistent with the national preparedness goal will determine federal preparedness assistance.1 This direction was affirmed when Congress subsequently cited HSPD-8 for preparedness requirements and funding in the fiscal year 2005 DHS appropriations' language. The National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 also required DHS to set national performance standards and ensure state homeland security plans' conformance with those standards.

Capabilities-based planning is one approach that is intended to manage risk, set specific preparedness goals and priorities, make investment choices, and evaluate preparedness results. Proponents describe CPB as developing the means—capabilities—to respond to a wide range of potential challenges and circumstances while mindful of costs and sustainability. CBP uses intelligence, strategic studies, and experiences to describe potential future threats and specific event or longer-term scenarios. (Taylor, 2004) The scenarios are used to define specific capabilities through an analytical framework starting with mission objectives and measures of strategic and operational success and ending with an assessment of options on factors such as risk. Choices consider capability tradeoffs and impacts at multiple levels within and across organizational components.2 All member nations of the defense community's Technical Cooperation Program (TCP)—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States—use capability concepts for long-term future defense force structure planning. The central audience for the defense community's CBP is the “combatant commander” who must achieve specific missions.

First, CBP adoption requires a strong business case to justify the organizational commitment and investment. In the defense communities, the business case grew primarily out of the need to shift defense planning from a “threat-based” model to a “capabilities-based” model. Instead of planning for large conventional wars in a few distant theaters under the threat-based model, (Kiefer, 2004) the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review proposed identifying capabilities that relied on surprise, deception, and asymmetric warfare to deter and defeat adversaries. DoD used threat-based planning since DoD instituted the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System in 1962. However, threat-based planning meant strong response to a few situations while largely ignoring all other potential challenges. DoD's threatbased approach and illustrative official planning scenarios for major theater wars served as specifications, defining necessary and sufficient characteristics of the force structure, thereby leading to consistent support of current programs. The approach only considered conventional-wisdom threats and point-in-time versions of detailed scenarios, as though the circumstances of ...