Incident Command for Company Officers: What ICS 100 Does Not Teach You

You took ICS 100. You probably took ICS 200 and maybe even 300. You can recite the five major functional areas of the Incident Command System. You know what unified command means. You can draw an organizational chart with divisions and groups and branches. And none of that prepared you for the first time you pulled up to a working structure fire and had to establish command while your crew was masking up, dispatch was talking over the radio, a neighbor was screaming at you that someone was still inside, and you had about forty-five seconds to make decisions that would shape the entire outcome of that incident.

ICS 100 teaches you the system. It does not teach you how to use it under pressure. That gap between knowing the framework and actually running command on a real incident is where company officers either rise to the moment or get buried by it. This is about closing that gap.

The Problem with Classroom Command

The Incident Command System is one of the most important developments in modern emergency services. It provides a common structure, common terminology, and a scalable organizational framework that allows agencies from different jurisdictions to work together effectively. That matters. That is valuable. But ICS courses teach you about the system the way a driver's education class teaches you about a car. You learn the parts, the rules, and the theory. Then somebody hands you the keys during a thunderstorm on a highway and you realize that knowing where the turn signal is does not mean you know how to merge.

ICS 100 was designed as an introductory awareness course. It was never intended to prepare a company officer for tactical command at a structure fire. The problem is that many departments treat it as if it does. An officer completes ICS 100, maybe takes a weekend incident command class, and then gets promoted to a position where they are expected to manage complex, rapidly evolving emergencies. The result is officers who understand the organizational chart but freeze when they have to actually fill it in during a real incident.

The National Fire Academy at usfa.fema.gov/training/nfa/ offers advanced ICS courses and command-focused programs that go well beyond the introductory level. Their curriculum includes courses specifically designed for company officers and chief officers who need to apply incident command in real operational environments. If you are serious about developing your command skills, their programs are worth looking into.

What Company Officers Actually Need

When you arrive first on scene as a company officer, you are not just establishing command for the sake of the organizational chart. You are making a rapid risk assessment, developing an initial action plan, assigning resources, setting up communications, and beginning tactical operations, often all within the first two or three minutes. ICS 100 does not cover any of that in a practical sense.

Here is what you actually need to know.

Initial Size-Up and Decision Making

Your size-up drives everything. Before you key the mic to give your arrival report, you need to process a massive amount of information in a very short time. What do you have? What is the occupancy type? What is the construction type? Where is the fire? How much of the building is involved? Are there signs of victims? What are the exposures? What resources do you have on scene and what is coming?

ICS 100 teaches you that the Incident Commander is responsible for overall management. It does not teach you how to process a size-up in thirty seconds and translate it into an action plan that your crews can execute. That skill comes from practice, repetition, and studying how fires behave in different building types.

The best company officers I have worked with run mental size-ups constantly. They drive through their district and look at buildings. They think about where they would position the engine, where they would throw the first line, where the search priorities would be, and what would make them go defensive. They do this hundreds of times before they ever pull up to a real working fire, so when it happens for real, the decision-making process is already wired in.

Radio Communications Under Stress

ICS gives you common terminology. That is helpful. But knowing to say "Division A" instead of "the front of the building" does not prepare you for managing radio traffic when three units are trying to talk at once, dispatch is giving you updates, and you need to get a critical message through to your interior crew.

Effective command communications require discipline, brevity, and structure. Your initial arrival report needs to paint a picture in about fifteen seconds. Something like: "Engine 7 on scene, two-story ordinary construction residential, heavy smoke showing from the second floor side Alpha and Bravo, Engine 7 is establishing Main Street Command, Engine 7's crew will be advancing a line to the second floor for fire attack." That one transmission tells everyone what you have, what you are doing, and who is in charge.

After that, every communication should follow a pattern: who you are calling, who you are, what you need or what you are reporting. Keep it short. If you are rambling on the radio, you are taking up airtime that someone else might need for a mayday or an urgent message. Practice your radio communications during training. Record yourself and listen back. You will be surprised how much filler and unnecessary information creeps in when you are not paying attention.

Tactical Worksheets and Tracking

ICS teaches you about resource tracking in a broad sense. What it does not emphasize enough for the company officer level is the importance of knowing where every person is on your fireground at every moment. When you are running command at a structure fire, you need to know who went in, where they went, how long they have been in, and what their air supply situation looks like.

A tactical worksheet is your best friend. It does not have to be fancy. A simple preprinted form or even a whiteboard on the side of your rig where you can note which units are assigned to which divisions, when they made entry, and when you need to check on them. The point is to have a system that keeps you from losing track of people. Because on a chaotic fireground, it is shockingly easy to lose track of a crew, and that is how firefighters die.

Transferring Command

ICS 100 teaches the concept of command transfer. It covers the steps: briefing the incoming commander, transferring authority, and notifying all units. What it does not teach is the judgment call of when to transfer and when to hold command.

As a company officer, if you arrive first on a working fire, you have a decision to make. Do you take a working assignment with your crew and pass command to the next arriving unit? Or do you remain in a command position and let someone else take the nozzle? There is no single right answer. It depends on the situation, your staffing, your department's protocols, and what the fire is doing.

In departments with four-person crews, it is common for the first-arriving officer to go interior with the crew and operate in what we call a fast attack or investigation mode, then transfer command to the next arriving officer or chief. In departments with three-person or two-person crews, the officer might need to stay outside in a command role from the start because there is nobody else to do it.

The key is that whatever you decide, you communicate it clearly. Everyone on the fireground needs to know who is in charge and where they are. Ambiguity in command kills people.

Managing the Transition from Offensive to Defensive

This is one of the most critical command decisions a company officer will ever make, and ICS 100 does not address it at all. When conditions deteriorate inside a structure, someone has to make the call to pull everyone out and go defensive. That person might be you.

The decision to go defensive requires reading multiple indicators: fire conditions getting worse despite suppression efforts, structural compromise, reports from interior crews that they cannot make progress, collapse indicators, or a change in smoke conditions that suggests flashover is imminent. You have to process all of that information, often from incomplete or conflicting reports, and make a call that puts firefighter safety first.

When you make that call, it has to be immediate, clear, and absolute. Emergency traffic on the radio, all units withdraw, a personnel accountability report to make sure everyone is out. This is not a gradual transition. This is a hard stop. Everyone out, set up master streams, and go defensive.

The officers who struggle with this are the ones who keep hoping conditions will improve. They keep crews inside too long because they do not want to "give up" on the building. That mentality has gotten firefighters killed. The building can be replaced. Your crew cannot.

Building Your Command Skills

Here is the honest truth about incident command: you cannot learn it from a course alone. You have to practice it. You have to run scenarios. You have to stand in front of other officers and make decisions under time pressure and then get feedback on those decisions.

Tabletop exercises are one of the best tools available. Get a group of officers together, put up photos of real structures, give them scenario information, and have them make command decisions in real time. Then debrief. What did you see? What did you miss? Why did you make that decision? What would you do differently?

Simulation-based training has come a long way too. You can now practice size-ups, arrival reports, and tactical decision-making through digital platforms that put you in realistic scenarios without needing to light anything on fire. This kind of deliberate practice builds the pattern recognition that allows experienced officers to make good decisions quickly, because they have seen similar situations before, even if those situations were simulated.

Listen to radio traffic from real incidents. Many departments post audio from working fires online. Listen to how experienced commanders manage their incidents. Pay attention to their tone, their brevity, their decision-making. You will hear the difference between a commander who is in control and one who is overwhelmed.

Read after-action reports from significant incidents, especially the ones that went wrong. NIOSH line-of-duty-death reports are sobering reading, but they are packed with lessons about command failures that led to firefighter deaths. Learn from those failures so you do not repeat them.

The Bottom Line

ICS 100 gives you the vocabulary. Real command ability comes from deliberate practice, honest self-assessment, and the humility to know that every incident teaches you something if you are paying attention. The best incident commanders I have worked with are not the ones who memorized the ICS organizational chart. They are the ones who practiced making decisions under pressure, learned from their mistakes, and never stopped studying the craft.

If you want to sharpen your command skills with realistic scenarios and decision-making practice, First Due Co. was built for exactly that. Our training tools put you in the seat and make you think. Check us out at firstdueco.com and start building the command skills that no classroom can teach you alone.