Ep 116: Incident Management vs. Tactics
Episode 116
Published Jul 21, 2025
Last updated Feb 18, 2026
Duration: 24:40
Episode Summary
Are you making the most of your training time? In this episode, our hosts tackle the crucial question: How do you balance tactics training with incident management training – and are you missing opportunities to get more value from both?
Episode Notes
Emergency response agencies tend to spend much more time on tactics training—like room clearing or forming rescue teams—than on incident management, which focuses on organizing resources and ensuring everyone works together effectively. The podcast argues that both are equally important and should be integrated, suggesting agencies use small, realistic joint drills with law enforcement, fire, and EMS to build communication skills, clarify roles, and improve overall incident outcomes, rather than keeping these trainings separate or overly complicated.
We dive deep into:
- The differences and importance of tactics vs. incident management training for law enforcement, fire, and EMS.
- Why agencies often train in silos and how this can leave critical communication and coordination gaps.
- The need for cross-training—why everyone, from street patrol to senior leadership, should understand both tactical skills and incident management.
- Practical ways to integrate incident management into everyday tactical drills, including micro-trainings, roll call scenarios, and low-cost, high-impact joint exercises.
- How better collaboration between law enforcement and fire/EMS during training leads to more effective real-world responses.
- Overcoming common barriers like scheduling, resource constraints, and leadership buy-in.
Whether you’re a first responder, trainer, or agency leader, this episode is packed with actionable insights on building a more resilient, better-prepared team. Don’t wait for a crisis to reveal your training gaps—learn how to bridge them now!
View this episode on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/_N9N3pwz72g
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:Everyone needs tactics training, and everyone needs incident management training. But how are you balancing your training time and are you missing opportunities to get a better bang for your buck in training? That's today's topic. Stick around.
Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. I am joined today by two of my fellow instructors here at the National Center for Integrated Emergency Response. I have Kami Maertz from our law enforcement side, also joined by Pete Kelting. Thanks for coming in.
Pete Kelting:
It's great to be here, bill.
Bill Godfrey:
All right, so today's topic, we're gonna talk about incident management training versus tactics training, and a little bit of the difference between the two. Both are important. I'm not sure we really have to make the case why both are important, but do we balance them now or is there a problem?
Pete Kelting:
I think when you look at tactics training, the first thing that comes to mind is kicking doors, clearing rooms, hard corners. You know,the brunt of tactics. When you say the word incident management training, everybody immediately thinks full scale exercise, full day scenario. And so they tend...
Bill Godfrey:
FEMA paperwork.
Pete Kelting:
FEMA paperwork.
Kami Maertz:
A lot of paperwork,
Pete Kelting:
A lot of training dollars. They tend, we tend to think that we're gonna stay in that silo of training for tactics, and we're gonna stay in the silo of training for incident management. And I think we can do a little bit better in that sense.
Kami Maertz:
Absolutely. And I think it's important for us to have both of them, right? And realize the importance of both of them in controlling the entire incident. Tactics are always gonna be important. Incident management is always gonna be important, but making sure that we're giving equal training to both sides is very important.
Bill Godfrey:
And I think it also is necessary to point out that fire and EMS has tactics training that they need to do as well. You know, rescue task force operations does require some tactical components. It should require some tactical components. It should be exercised and fire and EMS should be familiar with some of the basics of operating in a tactical environment. But doesn't it seem like we spend a whole lot more time doing tactics training? Pete, you mentioned, you know, training in a silo. We pick a skillset and we say we're, like room entries or room clearing or rescue task force is forming up and moving, or a rescue task force coming into a casualty collection point. It seems like we spend an awful lot of time in that task silo rather than balancing it. Am I off there or you guys see the same thing?
Pete Kelting:
No, I think we see the same thing when you talk about just sheer volume of people for percentage of task, right? So, you know, first contact team's on scene, it involves tactics, it's moving down range. So you have a vast amount of officers that you need to get tactical training to, including all the way up through, you know, senior leadership. But then, which is, you know, very consuming, very time oriented, very, you know, training dollars management, things like that. And when you're dealing with not only your own agency, but multi-jurisdictional training, getting all that done in one thing, that's a huge undertaking just for tactics training. So we spend a lot of time trying to push that forward. But then you look at, you know, we think that senior leadership, you know, senior supervisors or senior officers or supervisors are gonna be in the incident management training. It's a little bit smaller sect of the, you know, law enforcement community. And we kind of push that aside sometimes. So we don't incorporate the two of them together, but we definitely end up spending a whole lot more time training on tactics.
Kami Maertz:
And it's what we know. So from the time of the basic academy, right, that is what we are training is tactics. So you're training how to get in those rooms, how to get safely up to a location. All of those things are in basic training. So it's what we know, it's what we're really comfortable with. Incident management is something that we do in law enforcement side, but it's more represented on the fire rescue side, right? When you think of incident management, at least from a law enforcement, we're thinking Fire rescue already has it down. They can do that. And so it's something that's fairly new for us in the concepts. And I think you're completely right a lot for lower level in law enforcement. We think it's gonna be our supervisors doing it anyways. And that's kind of been the concept. Everything, once the, you know, top levels get in, they're gonna manage everything. And you can't do that in an active shooter, unfortunately. It'll allow it to get to an uncontrollable state if you allow, or if you don't put incident management in really early.
Bill Godfrey:
It's really an interesting question. You know, you mentioned that's what we know, that's what we're comfortable with. And I think there's some truth to that. I also think, you know, the reality is, is that incident management training is not exactly sexy or exciting, but tactical training has a certain element of excitement to it as you do. And I think that's a component of it. But I think the other factor is, is that there's a large percentage of the law enforcement population that is either uncomfortable with incident command or just doesn't see it as adding value to law enforcement operations. And so they don't really want to engage in it and they don't want to participate in that training.
And on the fire and EMS side, you also have a very large group of people that don't want to participate and do incident management training for a different reason because they think they know it all and you know, they've got it all down and I don't need to spend my time there. How do we break through those false sentiments and get people to realize that it is important to practice this and to train on it? And if you don't train on it in context, you're leaving yourself vulnerable for a bad outcome.
Kami Maertz:
I think that is really where you show the wins. When you show how, especially when you're in that tactical position, that if you manage it effectively, it is going to be, you know, everything's coming very quickly at you, but once you get to a manageable level, suddenly it kind of goes back down, right? And you see that lull and everything kind of works out. And I think once you put people into that position and they can see if they can effectively do incident management skills, that they can actually gain control of the incident. But it's taking somebody and doing training and telling them like, Hey, it's, everybody wants to run through the door, but we have to have somebody with a conscious effort to say, it's gonna be me who's going to start managing this? But show them the win, show them why it's effective, show them how it works and why it is to their benefit to be in that position and why it's such a valuable position, right? It's important for the person to go through and find the bad guy and save the lives. But that's a part of saving lives too, is the management.
Pete Kelting:
Yeah. And I think, Bill, you look at, you know, tactics is important for everybody. And normally the criticism is, is that, you know, senior leadership has lost sense of tactics.
Bill Godfrey:
They don't show up to training for tactics.
Pete Kelting:
They don't show up for training tactic or anything.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah.
Pete Kelting:
And then, you know, like you said, you mentioned a lot of, you know, new folks at the agency and they're like, I'm not ready for that yet. I'm just the road guy and I don't know if I can manage that. I think an agency that's progressive and recognizes that it's important to keep everybody in there current with the entire process. So it's not like a this first then that, it's not like tactics first, then management. It's everything together. The line officer needs to know, you know, incident management techniques because when they're in their tactical situation, they can lean forward into what makes the incident management successful. And in our current status in agencies, it's not too long before, you know, nowadays they're promoted into supervisory ranks or leadership ranks a lot sooner than they used to when, you know, all of us sitting at the table were. So it's to have current understanding of tactics and management together is so important for progressive agency.
Bill Godfrey:
And I think that's a perfect segue. You know, when I opened this session, I said, you know, are we missing opportunities to get a bigger bang for the buck, and I think we are. And so let's talk a little bit about that. How do we make modifications to the tactics training that's going on all the time to have it include the incident management components that would be related to that specific tactical skill?
Kami Maertz:
I think that is...
Bill Godfrey:
With some examples.
Kami Maertz:
So I think you could do it on much lower scale. Okay. And so I think that one of the biggest things that I think that we as agencies think that if we're gonna do an active shooter training, that that's the only time that we can use incident management. It has to be this full scale event and it's gonna be a big undertaking. But really you can use it in smaller scale, but when you're doing those incident management skills, when you're starting to incorporate people from lower levels, right? Where might just be a street patrol guy that comes in and starts learning those tactical skills, maybe even incident command. 'cause everyone needs to know what everyone else's roles are and what everyone's lanes are to be able to understand the entire process.
But it's on those lower level trainings that you can start implementing that. 'cause you're still gonna have the people contact teams or whatever it is going down range. They're gonna be doing their mission, they're gonna be doing their job. But you have to have people circle back around and be in those tactical positions and make it to where it's not just maybe one person doing it all the time, but it's everybody. Just like we put everybody through room clearing, we should put everybody through tactical and everybody through command so that everybody's equally trained.
Bill Godfrey:
But aren't we missing an opportunity, let's use your example of room clearing. If we're doing room clearing scenarios, shouldn't we do that room clearing scenario in the context of having somebody in the tactical position?
Kami Maertz:
Yes.
Bill Godfrey:
So as they're clearing the room, hitting their benchmarks, they're having to radio out to the tactical position, give 'em the updates on what we're doing. Because that rarely happens now. But isn't that a missed opportunity?
Pete Kelting:
Yeah, absolutely. I think I mentioned in earlier podcast is, you know, when you're doing your tactical training and you're throwing in a little bit of scenario training with it, if you have a good working relationship with your fire and EMS folks, you know, you can get a battalion chief or a couple battalion chiefs and your supervisors on duty and fill those tactical and triage spots as a part of your tactical training. And so now your folks going through tactical training sees what it is needed to make their job successful and then the folks get a chance to do the tactical and triage area and use that training to, you know, manage what the scenario is asking for. So micro training in a sense, you know, training little parts of our process at different other times of training in your agency.
For example, staging has an agency ever figured, you know, you're bringing a hundred officers to do tactical training, practice staging all those hundred officers come in to do the tactical training, set up the little staging training component of parking them, registering them and sending them to their particular areas that are tactical training. And you've just practiced staging in that sense while accomplishing tactical training.
Kami Maertz:
Yep. And the communication piece of all of it. And that's really important for incident management. One of the biggest failures commonly is communication. So when you're doing that, when you're having the contact teams go down, you're having staging, you're having tactical set up in small scale, you're learning that communication piece. Learning that communication. What am I supposed to say for contact teams? What am I supposed to be relaying back to tactical to get what I need. And from tactical, how do I get those resources from staging down range so that they can be effective down range? And that communication piece is something I think when we're training just for tactical, we're training just for incident management, if we're not doing those components together to get that overlap, that we're missing that communication piece. 'cause you don't need it if you're just training incident management, if you're just training tactical, the communication piece is not as vital. But when you're having both of those entities run parallel together, that's when you're seeing that you need that communication piece.
Bill Godfrey:
And I think the same is true on the fire and EMS side, for instance, when you're doing rescue task force training, you should, by very definition as part of that training, have law enforcement involved with you. So the the first thing I would say is if you are a fire and EMS agency and you're doing RTF training and you don't have cops with you participating in the training, then I would really question what are you doing? Well, what's the value there? Because that's an opportunity for not only relationships to be built, but also just as important for the law enforcement officers to be able to spend a few minutes talking with fire and EMS about what their expectations are for tactical movements as they move around the scene and do their jobs and do their work to learn that part of it.
And then likewise, just on that same thing, if you're doing rescue task force drills, you should have triage and tactical stood up so that the law enforcement officers on the rescue task force team are talking to tactical on their radio, and the medical personnel on the rescue task force team are of course talking to triage group supervisor on the radio and kind of communicating and doing those updates. And you can do some fairly simple low cost, low impact drills, some small scale drills in the fire station, in the bay where you're working rescue task force operations. It doesn't need to be a huge thing. You don't need to be on the fire training ground to be able to do some of these basics. You need a couple of cops and a couple of radio channels and voila, you've got multi-company training and can get this thing done. Why aren't we doing it that way? Why does that miss the mark so often? Do you think?
Pete Kelting:
Yeah, there's a couple variables that might, you know, have an impact on that. But it's, you know, building relationships with your fire EMS personnel early, right? We're we're all
Bill Godfrey:
And vice versa.
Pete Kelting:
And vice versa, right? We're all kind of, you know, looking to save a dollar and you know, not bringing in people for overtime for training. It is just matter of fact a communicating early and saying, "Hey we would like to accomplish this. Do you have a couple bcs that can come help us with this portion of the training for an hour or so?"" We missed a mark if we don't try to preplan that and preset that up. That's the physical side of it for, you know, doing tactical stuff, room clearing and so forth. But the incident management side of it can be accomplished the same way with your relationship with your fire departments using our counterstrike kit, right? We have a board, the counterstrike board at roll call, either at the law enforcement side or on the fire side. If we plan together, we can push people and we get coverage on the street and we can push people in there to run through quick scenarios between law and fire together on the counterstrike board also.
Kami Maertz:
And I think that gives the opportunity for us to understand each other's roles. So sometimes in law enforcement, I know that we think that we know what fire rescue does. Fire rescue thinks that they know what we do, but when you're actually having 'em next to each other and they're going to look at the same scenario, completely different. But it's having them next to each other to realize how that person is going to need, what is the fire rescue guy going to need from your law enforcement component and what is your law enforcement component not thinking about that that rescue guy's gonna need. But having those conversations and when you see it in training happen and they're like, I never even thought that you would, that that would be important.
Triaging patients, right? Just determining who needs to go to the hospital first is something law enforcement might be like, he's hurt really bad and this guy doesn't seem to be hurt as bad, but a fire rescue guy's gonna tell you exactly this is going to be saveable or whatever it is. This needs to be treated first. This is an injury that's potentially can have, we can have him here for a little bit longer. But those triaging things that law enforcement's not gonna know, but fire rescue are. But having those entities together and working together and training, even if it is at a counterstrike board, which is really great training, right? 'cause you're not as focused on the tactics. There's some element to it, but it's having those conversations of what decisions would be made without the added pressure of being in these larger scale incidents.
Bill Godfrey:
It's a really interesting reality in, and I'd say I think I see this more commonly in mid to large size organizations, that training is this big animal that requires a lot of training or I'm sorry, a lot of pre-planning and a lot of scheduling, a lot of permissions and people have to be pulled off the road and taken out of service. And the reality is, you can knock out a great rescue task force drill in under 15 minutes and you know, you can get a law, even one law enforcement officer still helps build that experience. But you get one or two law enforcement officers that drop by the fire station, you throw your stuff down 10, 15 minutes and you go make this thing happen. I feel like sometimes we overcomplicate this at the leadership level instead of just getting the line people to take ownership and initiative and get it done with the way that it fits in their schedule. Maybe maybe their district is busy in the morning but slow in the evening. Maybe it's slow, midday, whatever your case. I just feel like sometimes we over complicate it at the leadership level. Do you guys see that as well in some of the organizations that you're watching?
Pete Kelting:
Yeah, I mean I think we're both gonna answer the same thing. Yes. And you know, there's a lot of variables that impact that from, you know, calls for service both on the law enforcement side and you know, fire side at the time of shift change or you know, midnight shift was always a good opportunity to try to do some training for law enforcement. You know, get our guys together at slower and all that. But where are the fire guys at the time They're sleeping, they're in the firehouse. So I'm not saying that sarcastically, but you can't wake 'em up to do it in the middle of the night, right?
Bill Godfrey:
You can, but it doesn't...
Pete Kelting:
It doesn't go well.
Kami Maertz:
They're not gonna wanna help you, right?
Pete Kelting:
During the daytime, you know, then you got a lot of busyness going on. So, you know, the answer to your question is yes, we overcomplicate it, but sometimes we just have to ask quick short questions, you know, of our relationships. You know, Mia is a supervisor and a law enforcement agency that has a good relationship with a battalion chief that's working. Say, Hey, what do you think about next Thursday? We just, I get two of my guys, you get two of your guys. We're gonna throw the counterstrike board out and let's hit a scenario real quick and train the brain on decision making just to assemble RTFs or decision making just to set up CCPs or decision making, just to set up ambulance exchange points. 10, 15 minutes all we want,
Bill Godfrey:
You know, it might be important to share with our law enforcement brothers and sisters out there, fire departments actually have an annual requirement for doing nighttime training and a lot of fire departments don't get that done for all kinds of reasons. It just doesn't happen. So the idea of being able to do a quick RTF drill or even a support some contact team training where you're also having an officer down scenario or something like that, I think can be great opportunities and to do 'em in the evening does have value to the fire department. Now obviously two in the morning,
Kami Maertz:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
That probably isn't very popular, but, you know, nine, 10 o'clock at night, they gotta do nighttime training annually. And so it is a requirement for everybody in the organization. It's not like station one can go do it and the entire department is now, okay, we've checked nighttime training. They all have to do it. I don't know. It's an interesting problem to think through, but it just, I don't really understand why we keep doing the training in silos. We pick a task and we do it in silos instead of pulling the pieces together so it's more effective.
Kami Maertz:
I think we kind of focus on when we can't do training together, right? If fire rescue says, well we're not available then law enforcement says, I don't know, we're only available then. Instead of saying when can we? When do we look at the big picture and say if fire rescue has to, if they, like in our area, they train, they train during their work hours. So it might be something that they have to come and go. They come, they do training with us for a little bit and then they go to calls and that's okay and that's acceptable. But we're still getting training in.
But we don't say, well since you only train on your work days and you can't be here for a full eight hours and it's just not gonna work for us, you have to do it when you can. Get together and say from leadership perspective, well when can you, can you come to roll call? Can you come to roll call and give you, like you said, 15 minutes. Their guys can come by, roll call and you know, we'll have donuts for you, you know, or whatever it is. Or we come to you to your station and we can do roll call at your station, right? But we're taking the time to say, Hey, we can actually make our roll call. We'll come to your station and do it. Can you give us 15 minutes in the morning or 15 minutes at the evening at the beginning of the shift? They'll probably do it and worst case scenario they go have to go to a call and you can't do it, try it the next day. But you have to focus on when you can and stop focusing on when you can't, when it doesn't, when the calendar doesn't look like it'll line up, make those small trainings.
Pete Kelting:
I think if you get commitment from both sides, you embrace what your mission and goal is together, you wanna be successful, realize that it can happen in your jurisdiction. Even if it hasn't yet. Plan early. Plan trainings in the beginning of your budget maybe. So, you know, some of these things cost overtime dollars to do some of this type of training. Don't wait till the end of the year and then all of a sudden cancel it 'cause you don't have enough money and then it just rolls over to it where it never gets done. So look at the things early, embrace it and, and move forward with it.
Bill Godfrey:
I agree with all of that. And I think leadership ought to take a hard look at empowering their individual companies. You know, in the fire department, a station would be, you know, you got an engine company, often a rescue company, sometimes a ladder company, but empower them as a station or as individual units to go get that done, you know, with wherever, however, get it done, but get it done jointly.
Kami Maertz:
Yes.
Bill Godfrey:
And sign off on it. And maybe a little more open communication about some of the challenges that our different schedules create. You know, most fire departments are working 24 on, 48 off as you mentioned. We do the training on duty. We don't typically bring people back for overtime for training, for obvious reasons. Law enforcement tries to do the training on duty. But sometimes that can be problematic unless it's, you know, short and sweet in and out. You can usually rotate people through. But that may mean that the same people, the same law enforcement officer or the same engine company may have to do the same drill 2, 3, 4 times.
Pete Kelting:
Okay.
Bill Godfrey:
And?
Kami Maertz:
Yeah.
Pete Kelting:
Repetition's good.
Bill Godfrey:
And your point is?
Kami Maertz:
It's beneficial. Exactly.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, exactly. Well, any final thoughts on this one? Things that, you know, suggestions that you've seen done to kind of get the training at the ground level a little less complicated and a little more effective? Any
Kami Maertz:
I think the biggest thing is understanding, right? So we're started off initially for the tactics versus the incident management is realizing that those work together on any scale they work together. And also integrating with your fire rescue. That's gonna be a big part of that incident management is bringing in that other entity to be able to be function effectively on an actual scene. But you have to make it happen. You have to be willing to and push for it to happen.
Pete Kelting:
I'm gonna kind of start at the end and work back at the beginning with this statement. We look at press briefings and jurisdictions where police chiefs, sheriffs get up and they go, we didn't expect it happening in our jurisdiction, but it has. And so roll that back and you look at the opportunities. Don't get stuck on - this takes a full scale exercise to do this. Don't just get stuck on tactics. You've gotta bring them together. Find the time to bring these micro trainings in, the counterstrike boards, you know, the quick roll call briefings. Embrace it now 'cause you don't want to be that chief or sheriff that stands up and says, I wish we would've done a little bit more in, in this sense.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. Completely agreed.
Well, thank you for spending some time to talk about this topic. If you've got some questions about this, please shoot 'em over to us. You can either email 'em to us at info i n f o @c3pathways.com or put 'em in the comments if you're watching us on YouTube channel. If your organization has some specific challenges that you'd like to discuss with us, please feel free to give us a call. Thank you to our producer, Karla Torres. And until next time, stay safe.