Comparing Types of the Common Operating Picture - Research Paper Example

Civilian and Military Incident Response: Comparing Types of the Common Operating Picture Travis J. Dauer American Military Thispaper examines the variations of the common operating picture (COP) within civilian and military organizations that respond to various types of incidents. The COP is the single most important method for maintaining continuity of operations and interoperability by providing the latest information about the incident to personnel in command positions. Four types of COPs were observed and compared based on research found on the internet, real time use of the sites, and interviews conducted with civilian and military first responders. These types include Defense Connect Online (DCO), Web Emergency Operations Center (EOC), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and non-web based systems. All four types were found to have similarities, differences, and preferences based on the situation and type of user. By the end of this paper, the reader will have a general overview of the various COPs and how they impact incident response with the Incident Command System (ICS). Keywords: common operating picture, Defense Connect Online, Emergency Operating Picture, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Incident Command System Comparing Types of the Common Operating Picture Civilian and Military Incident Response DCO is a communication platform that enables the sharing of information related to incidents. The homeland security has Homeland Security information Network (HSIN), which is a secure and unclassified web communication system that serves the nation-wide information network (Copeland, 2008). It provides real time chat and instant messaging and a document library that stores reports from federal, state and local resources. The network is used to supply incident and pre-incident information, mapping and imaging tools, situation awareness, and analysis of terror threats, weapons, and tactics. The network interconnects homeland security operations center, federal and local organizations combating terrorism and critical private industry (Copeland, 2008). The military and the National Guard responding to an incident or managing special events have access to information in the network. It provides the primary national level real-time threat monitoring, incident management, and information sharing center. Several governments and emergency response communities utilize the network for information sharing. However, DHS lacks clear information sharing process, reference materials, and user training (Copeland, 2008). The department has not developed a baseline and a specific performance measure that can enable it track and assess information sharing. As of the military, the civilians have a role to play to ensure that they respond to various incidents especially emergencies and disasters. Civilian response has been adapted since the occurrence of various catastrophes including the Katrina as well as the earthquake in Haiti (Copeland, 2008). Incident response appears to be a primary function of the military, the police or even the fire personnel. This implies that if the civilians are not present when catastrophes strikes there will be more casualties. As a result of this factor, civilian incident response has come in to ensure that when catastrophes strike, the civilians can be able to come into combat with it to reduce the number of casualties since the police, the military or the fire personnel may not be close at that moment (Copeland, 2008). Majority of incidents that occur and require response from the civilians are simple in nature and there are no complex technical structures required. For the incidents which require complexity, there are structural adaptabilities that the civilians put into place to enhance adaptability of the whole system and establish a robust incident command. Some of the most common incidents that civilians may get involved range from multi-vehicle accidents to fires which are multi-structural (Copeland, 2008). Since only the military can combat such incidents, training to the civilians is underway. The introduction of the joint action plan has largely represented the combine efforts by the government and the department of defense to ensure that the civilians are well aware and equipped to deal with any incident. The National Guard is a home entity in several local communities and provides an advantage to the federal and state governments responding to domestic emergencies (Copeland, 2008). The National Guard is prepared and equipped to respond to emergencies quickly on short notice (Copeland, 2008). It is the military’s force of choice for responding to domestic disasters. They are part of the emergency response community and possess an understanding, familiarity, and relationship with the state and local authorities. They are called upon during emergencies that extend beyond the borders of a particular state in order to provide a regional response team that fill the gap between state governments. The National Guard Bureau (NGB) is the focal point of the response team and the channel of communication among the Army, Air Force and the National Guard (Copeland, 2008). The NGB is a joint bureau of the Army and Air Force and serves the staff and an operating agency. It monitors and assists states in organizing, maintaining, and in operations of National Guard units to ensure that they fulfill their federal and state missions (Copeland, 2008). The governor of the affected state acts as the commander-in-chief of the National Guard unless the force is acting on a federal service when mobilized by the president. USNORTHCOM has several different systems that comprise the Common Operation Picture in the classified and the unclassified format. These systems operate in conjunction with the DTRA. These systems have commercial products and in-house applications that constitute the incident command system (Copeland, 2008). The USNORTHCOM COP fuses, analyses, and assesses information necessary for creating and sharing situation awareness. Information into the COP that support homeland support and civil support are in accordance to the missions of the Joint Forces Land, Air, Maritime, and assigned task forces within the USNORTHCOM organization (Copeland, 2008). The COP provides an understanding of friendly and threat information. The information requires timeliness, relevance, completeness, security, simplicity, usefulness, and conciseness. NGB has contracted commercial partners to establish a Joint Information Exchange Enterprise (JIEE) that serves the NGB COP. JIEE provides real-time awareness of the situation by supporting information collection, collation, organization, and dissemination (Copeland, 2008). The system provides the Joint Operations Center with a platform to share event and crisis management information and provides an operational picture that allows the directors to make rapid and accurate decisions. The system supports content and document management and provides data mining and operation tracking tools. This is important for requesting information necessary for managing an incident. JIEE helps the operations center organize responses and coordinate support to assist response teams (Copeland, 2008). Guard units are continuously updated of the incident events and decision requirements for the response teams. The efficient information sharing platform assists the response team to gather and disseminate information without overloading other organizations. The National Guard in every state has a Joint Force Headquarters (JFHQ) that provides the governor with the command and control of the forces in the state or territory. JFHQ supports the deployed units and the Joint Task Force commanders within the state (Copeland, 2008). It also provides an avenue for channeling information to NFB regarding the incident. JFHQ is responsible form mobilizing additional forces and providing logistical support to the response teams. The National Guard operates at the interface between the governor and the state government emergency authorities (Copeland, 2008). An efficient information channel is necessary for an efficient incident command system. Establishing a COP experiences several obstacles for the emergency response organizations (Copeland, 2008). Smaller organizations face more challenges than larger agencies. Local organizations have fewer resources and lack an incentive to establish a COP for use beyond their intermediate organizations (Copeland, 2008). These institutions respond to small scale incidents that require few resources without the need for external assistance. Large organizations have more resources and have incentives to establish COPs. They have to deal with diverse groups of agencies that have systems and processes that are reluctant to embrace change (Copeland, 2008). The proprietary systems have the ability to meet the local needs and lack integrated exercises among participating agencies. This leads to inefficient and uncoordinated emergency response efforts. Incidents requiring national assistance involve agencies that lack interoperable systems. The standards contained in these systems allow for sharing, access, and manipulation of data that provide situation awareness. Different regulations and jurisdictions hinder the operation procedures and preclude unity of command. Unity of command means that the individuals participating in an operation report to one supervisor. This eliminates inefficiencies caused by conflicting commands from different supervisors. A unified command increases accountability and improves the flow of information leading to a streamlined operation (Copeland, 2008). The response to domestic emergencies works well and local and state levels where first responders are utilized in reacting, making decisions, and managing the situation. Local and state responders are familiar with the area and have pre-planned responses with a clear hierarchy of command. Unity of command is a challenge in incidents involving federal and state militaries within the same area of operations. Federal and state militaries have similar equipment, but have different command structures (Copeland, 2008). This creates the need for shared perspectives and unified efforts in multi-force response teams. The incident command system is a management system that enables effective and efficient incident management. It combines facilities, equipment, procedures, personnel and communication operating in a common structure (Salmon, Jenkins, Stanton, and Walker, 2008). ICS enables incident managers identify the key requirements of the incident and urgent conditions that may require specialized response teams. ICS can operate in complex and small incidents, both natural and manmade. The field team carries out emergency management under the command of the relevant authority. Federal and state resources deployed to the incident become part of the local ICS (Salmon, Jenkins, Stanton, and Walker, 2008). The ICS provides the guidelines for planning, building, and deploying a structure for incident management. To promote civilian response, there have been properly configured controls and commands arrangements established for events that may compromise the security of the civilians (Alberts and Hayes, 2006). As a result of these arrangements, it has been possible for civilians to play a major role in incident response. Since the military is more equipped for any incident response, there have been numerous collaborations with the civilians to ensure that there is no coordination problems arising during the operations since lack of cooperation between civilians and the military has become a major problem in incident response. Though major hiccups arise when the military incorporates civilians in incident response, various factors have been put into place to ensure that the two parties work together cordially. Research indicates that limited sharing of vital information between the civilians has undermined the effectiveness of civilians in incident response (Alberts and Hayes, 2006). Other issues that undermine civilian incident response include communication of information which is inaccurate or incomplete. Civilian incident response though effective gets challenged as a result of poor management of information among the civilians (Mittu and Segaria, 2000). To illustrate this, consider the military that have sophisticated gadgets to store information and gather intelligence, sharing of such information is mutiny. On the other hand, civilians do not have such gadgets and thus information gathered is held by the civilians hence easy to lose (Mittu and Segaria, 2000). The communication technology held by the civilians is inadequate and hence there is lack of an appropriate common operational picture leading to failure of the incident response. Most civilians have different perceptions to information implying that there may be lack of clarity and understanding of the role and responsibility of each individual in incident response. Incidents response by civilians faces poor, unclear and inadequate commands and control structures which helps to facilitate the operations by civilians. These in most instances occur due to lack of preparation and lack of well-equipped and tested center of command. Cultural differences which include decision making and the organization of civilians undermines the process of incident response. Most civilians have not been trained to cater for various command level incidents leading to poor decision making and commands when responding to various incidents. Though there are hiccups that surround incident response by the civilians, there has been assistance from various bodies to ensure that civilians are well prepared in case of any incidence (Salmon, Jenkins, Stanton and Walker, 2008). The issue of lack of clarity when requests are made by civilian organization has been cited since most requests lack clarity in terms of the effects, the manpower, the tasks and capability of civilians to respond to incidents (Salmon, Jenkins, Stanton and Walker, 2008). Collaboration of the military and civilians has been alleviated over time where the civilians when seeking assistance from the military may lack to use the military language leading to poor understanding and late response by the military. This has been eliminated through education of the civilians on the various terms to use while seeking assistance from the military. Some of the things that have been done to ensure that the civilians cooperate with the military in incident response have been the introduction of a pro-forma which uses tick box system so as to ensure that requesting agencies provide enough details regarding to the requirements thus ensuring correct framing and understanding (Salmon, Jenkins, Stanton and Walker, 2008). Coordination between the military and civilians during incident response has become a major issue which affects the quality of system performance which is multi-agency. Over time there has been increased requirement of the military to work with civilians to combat various incidents. Such incidents which require the cooperation of the military with civilians include disaster management, emergency response in large scale and operations dealing with humanitarian assistance. Coordination of civilians especially when responding to emergencies is challenging since there is factoring of exigencies that entail great uncertainties, events which are sudden and unexpected, incidents which may entail possible mass casualty, large-scale damage and impact and incidents that may involve destruction of electricity, telecommunication and transportation lines (Salmon, Jenkins, Stanton and Walker, 2008). In such incidents the military needs to intervene but has to work with the civilians since they are the eye witnesses of the incident and may be aware of the terrain of that area where the incident has occurred. Since the military cannot be available when a certain incident occurs, the civilians are left with no option but to deal with the emergency on their own. Questions have risen regarding incidents which entail the factors stated such as infrastructure, telecommunication and electricity lines. To solve this puzzle, the military has come up with a special force whose major agenda is to educate civilians of all runs of life on who to respond to incidents where the stated structures are present (Salmon, Jenkins, Stanton and Walker, 2008). Major common operational pictures have been reviewed and discussed to ensure that civilians can respond to incidents appropriately (McMaster and Baber, 2008). Though the civilians have received adequate training on how to respond to various incidents, major hiccups still exist. Lack of proper tools to deal with various incidents is a challenge. In incidents where fire is involved, civilians have only an option of using homemade vessels to put out the fire unlike the military which has able equipments to combat fires. Civilian emergency services may require ambulance which may not be available and thus reducing the effectiveness of the civilians in responding to the incident. There has been review of alternative interpretations of common operational picture as used when explaining civilian incident response. In the event of these hiccups, there has been the introduction of military-civilian multi-agency operation (McMaster and Baber, 2008). In conclusion, both the military and the civilian organizations have roles to play when responding to national and state incidents. COPs are efficient in organizations that might encounter overlapping command structures when deployed to an incident. The ICS is effective in providing a management system that creates a response structure with effective and efficient structure. COPs provide streamlined information flow and provide avenues for real-time information sharing between responding teams. This is necessary for decision making among participating agencies that may encounter conflicting jurisdictions and procedures. Civilian incident response has been viewed by many as a way of reducing casualties of various incidents. It is irrational to consider the civilian incident response without considering the involvement of the military which is helpful to the civilians in responding to the incidents. Over time, the involvement of civilians in responding to incidents has accelerated sharply leading to the formation of multi-agency cooperation which works to ensure that the efforts of civilians are not futile. References Alberts, D., and Hayes, R. (2006). Understanding Command and Control. Research Document. Washington DC: CCRP. Copeland, J. (2008) Emergency Response: Unity of Effort through a Common Operational Picture. U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks. McMaster, R. and Baber, C. (2008). Multi-agency operations: Cooperation during flooding. unpublished HFI DTC report. Mittu, R. and Segaria, F. (2000). Common Operational Picture (COP) and Common Tactical Picture (CTP) management via consistent networked information stream CNIS), Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory. Salmon, P., Jenkins, D., Stanton, N. and Walker, G. (2008). Coordination between the military and civilian organisations, HFI DTC Work Package 3.1.4 (presentation to Human Capability Quarterly Review). Read More