The fire service is one of the most highly respected and regarded professions in the world, and we owe that distinction to the hard work and limitless energy of our company officers. The company officer is the only person in the food chain who can directly control how a department looks, acts, and is known to the public. How a department invests in company officer development and training will determine how that organization will be perceived, how it will react, and how it will move forward into the challenges of the future. The safety and survival of a company are largely attributed to the ability of a company officer to evaluate conditions and make decisions. Are we doing all we can to prepare our first line of decision makers with enough knowledge and skill to survive and succeed? The importance of equipping our company officers with the skills to make good decisions in combat cannot be understated.
Following the tragic loss of 14 firefighters on Storm King Mountain in 1994, a U.S. Forest Service researcher, Ted Putman, in reviewing the technical report’s recommendations, which included improving fire weather forecasting, making better fuel-load estimates, and providing better fire predictions, came to an important conclusion. Although the recommendations were valid and worthy, they really did not address the real cause for those fatalities. Putman wrote, “These tried and true solutions simply fail to deal with the major cause of the fatalities. We lost firefighters on Storm King Mountain because decision processes naturally degraded.” Putman assessed correctly that the U.S. Forest Service needed to do a better job of teaching its leaders how to make decisions.
After Storm King Mountain, the National Wildland Coordinating Group (NWCG) began to formulate a training program that would recreate in simulation the types of decisions required to lead tactical events on the ground. The NWCG has over time evolved this course to be a Type 3 (small to medium-sized incident) Incident Management Team requirement and modified the delivery for different threats. The goal of the training is to provide future leaders of divisions, groups, and type 3 incidents with the leadership tools to effectively command and control a quickly assembled team in a time-constrained and rapidly changing incident environment. It focuses on the most important aspects of leading effectively as an incident commander or leader. The NWCG’s Incident Leadership is a multiday 16-hour simulation mirroring, in real time, the progression of a growing emergency incident. The program uses several simulation cycles to give the student experience that would come at a dear price on the fireground.
The average company officer is not going to go to many type 3 events in his career, even though in federal government terms those are medium-sized events. The perspective of the size of an event is relative to the size of the organization; a medium-sized type 3 to the feds is huge to you and me. Company officers need to have access to programs that will provide the same type of education and decision-making training on type 4 and 5 events. Type 4 and 5 incidents are locally managed; they can be very large but local in that county/city resources can handle them.
For the past 20 years, we have spent a great deal of time involved in developing the social skills of our company officers. However, the most important job of company officers is not public relations but managing risk-they manage risk by the decisions they make. Company officers, wildland and structural, manage risks in the most dynamic, hostile, unforgiving, disorienting, and complicated environments: highways, fires, collapses, medical emergencies, and on and on. We find that those environments are a little different each time and yet a little the same. We are training participants in the most challenging times ever in the fire service.
Structurally and industrially, we are training and working with the first generation of firefighters who always expect to extend an aggressive interior attack as the default position for all fire events. Unfortunately, that position may not always be the correct first position for the event. Much of the time, an aggressive interior attack is correct, or it may be following some ventilation and access work, but the issue is the same: No decision on the fireground should ever be automatic. We must be a nation of thinking firefighters. Thinking firefighters are aware; they are focused on what effect their actions are having and know why they are doing what they are doing.
To prepare our company officers to make those decisions-when fire calls are less frequent; when the demands on their time are increasing; and when the threats are ever more complicated than in years past, requiring new methods based on 2,000 years of evaluated experience-we must focus on the development of company officers in ways in which we have seen proven successful outcomes. We must begin to use very creative ways to pass on our experiences. We now have the ability to recreate decision points in events and review the tactical decisions as they are made. We can simulate almost any fire and actively put our minds into the event as airline pilots do in their simulation training and as the NWCG Incident Leadership program and Phoenix, New York City, Philadelphia, and several other cities do in their simulation-based training centers. They are not trying to provide a simulation for every event but to equip officers to make decisions in context.
Context means in similar conditions and environments as the real event, the same conditions we would find ourselves in on the fireground-limited information, severe time pressure, and dynamic conditions. It is providing models of standard and nonstandard events and allowing the decision maker an opportunity to practice making decisions and then evaluating those choices. The construction of those models or simulations must be done by very experienced and realistic persons. Bad models and bad simulations will not help anyone’s ability to make decisions in the real world. The fire service needs our senior members to step up and participate in the development of good simulations to give back to the next generation some of the wisdom they have acquired.
All of this is very doable. The National Fire Academy (NFA) has been working in low-fidelity simulations for years and could quickly transition to high fidelity with minimal expense. The development of solid cognitive skills must be accompanied by excellent physical skill sets, which can be practiced in drill towers and acquired structures-training company officers in context with their crews. The very best fire departments in the world ensure that all firefighters can do their job and the job of the firefighter above and below them.
The art of training officers using fireground simulations is all about organizing tactics. Understanding tactics requires that you know fire, buildings, tools, and people. Strategy is accomplished by the skillful application of tactics. We all recognize the inherent superiority of well-defined and well-practiced standard tactical approaches to standard events. We refuse to accept any losses ever. We know we are in a dangerous profession, but we have identified what risks we can change and how. We have decided to set goals for safety and survival and are expecting our leadership to live the example. Let’s live up to that expectation. The tools are available. Let’s get them to the troops.
