Beyond incident command: Strategic coordination fordisaster consequence management

Abstract

In 2003, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5 (HSPD-5) directed that crisis management and consequence management operate as a “single, integrated function.” Implementation focused almost exclusively on strengthening crisis management through the incident command system (ICS), while the complementary architecture for strategic consequence management evolved unevenly. As a result, ICS is routinely extended beyond its design parameters into environments characterized by distributed authority, cross-sector interdependence, and multiweek stabilization demands, conditions for which disaster scholarship has long shown command-and-control models to be poorly suited. Given this structural mismatch and the absence of a strategic alternative, this paper proposes Strategic Disaster Coordination (SDC) as the conceptual framework that completes the integration HSPD-5 intended. Drawing on four decades of disaster research, recent after-action findings, operational experience, and practitioner innovations, SDC articulates ten core principles—spanning coordination governance, information transparency, community enablement, and strategic planning—necessary for effective and efficient community stabilization. The paper establishes SDC’s conceptual architecture and identifies research and development needed for operationalization, offering emergency management a pathway to transform a tactically sophisticated but strategically underdeveloped system into a genuinely integrated approach to disaster management.