The recently unveiled National Response Plan (NRP) is the latest result of Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD)-5 on the Management of Domestic Incidents and is being heralded as historic because for the first time all federal agencies will be using the same response plan when coordinating responses to major incidents of terrorism and natural or man-made disasters. This is, in fact, helpful, as there were a number of federal response plans in circulation, some of which will stay in circulation. The purpose of the NRP is to bring these various emergency plans under a common rubric that replaces some plans and integrates others. The purpose of this plan is to have well-coordinated and well-aligned structures, capabilities and resources in place that can feed into a unified, all-discipline, and all hazards approach for domestic incident management. This is important because the NRP is a true attempt to fill in the seams that occur when agencies respond to incidents in their own manner that can lead to important issues falling through the cracks and difficulties in both technical and personnel cooperation. It also gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to oversee the bringing together of these federal agencies and to coordinate a cooperative response. Despite this unification and standardization, however, individual agencies will still oversee their specialty areas.

Certainly the September 11 terrorist attacks exposed major problems with the US federal, state, and local emergency response system in terms of difficulties with cooperation, inter-operability, standardization and delineation of responsibilities. The National Response Plan is aimed at fixing these problems. The NRP also builds on and acts in concert with the National Incident Management System (NIMS), introduced in March 2004 to provide a doctrinal framework for incident management at all jurisdictional levels to establish standardized training, organization, and communication procedures that clearly identifies authority and leadership responsibilities. Of course, having yet another plan to follow can be difficult to implement. The good news is that even though the plan is 426-pages long, it is certainly scaleable: only the necessary parts of particular bureaucracies are activated. This sort of unified national plan is the ideal, but in practicality, with disparate agencies and cultures, it may be a difficult process to adjust to. It will be interesting to see how smoothly integrating this plan will be. It is also important that the plan very clearly states how the federal authorities coordinate not just with each other but with state and local authorities. In addition, the NRP lays down the primary responsibility to manage incidents with the local authorities, and incidents are to be handled at the lowest possible organizational and jurisdictional level or when the incident goes beyond local and state capabilities.