With more natural disasters and extreme weather events occurring, the pressure on the Fire Agencies and Emergency Services remains high. This demand from the general public and Agency and Services political masters creates a vexing problem for the Chief Officers. The requirement to reduce this pressure and corresponding risks to Commanders, directs that actions must be taken to improve the ability for Agencies to respond to crises. How can operational performance be improved while reducing risks and pressure to those in charge? Making informed and timely decisions using all available information will increase the likelihood of success.

Commanders can achieve this if they have Situational Awareness (SA). SA is a term that is a cornerstone of military Command and Control lexicon. It is what drives commanders to utilise their assets to inform them of what is happening, how, where and when in their battlespace. SA doesn’t necessitate success, but without it, it ensures defeat. Military commanders utilise their intelligence collection capabilities (referred to as Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Electronic Warfare) to achieve this battlespace awareness. This increased SA enhances their decision making ability, inturn speeding  up their decision making cycle, allowing faster, more accurate decisions. This increased decision making speed transpires to more timely responses where critical events are occurring, and can often mean the difference between life and death.

Agencies are yet to fully embrace this revolutionary edge that harnessing intelligence collection and subsequent processing. Such collection assets as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), open source information collection, imagery intelligence, and intelligence preparation of the battle space have proven to be successful tools and processes within with the military, so why not within Fire and Emergency Services? How can these approaches, skills and methodologies be adapted and used within emergency management generating transformational change that will redefine future capabilities and responses.