Journal of American Independent Studies of Comprehensive Emergency Management

=== Assumptions ===
In starting this Journal of American Independent Studies of Comprehensive Emergency Management, there are some assumptions that should be considered in reflecting the context in which those studies take place.
Comprehensive Emergency Management (CEM) is intended to be truly comprehensive. CEM is an all-hazards approach to crisis management that is intended to represent a "best practices" approach to safely protecting the lives of emergency responders and ordinary people, protecting their property, and insuring the continuing service and utility, to all of those people, of the state's economic, cultural, and political infrastructure, generally in that order of priority.
In the United States of America, CEM leads to the incorporation of the all-hazard unified emergency organization of responders under the Incident Command System (ICS) pursuant to the authority of Homeland Security Presidential Directives 5 and 8 (HSPD-5, HSPD-8), which define situations governed under Presidential proclamations of states of disaster and the National Incident Management System (NIMS) for responding to disasters of national importance as part of the National Response Plan (NRP). The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has created the Emergency Management Institute (EMI) for the continuing education of the public on CEM; EMI's Independent Study Program has on-line courses available to United States citizens, granting certificates to persons who complete the final examinations for those on-line courses.
For the purposes of this Journal, it is recognized the individuals who have completed the FEMA EMI Professional Development Series, consisting of the seven Independent Study (IS) courses as described on the FEMA EMI Professional Development Series course list web page, are members of the initial class of peers for reviewing articles submitted for publication, provided that the members of the class add a link to their user account information to the list of peer reviewers on the Journal's main page below. Other persons who have completed the FEMA EMI IS-100 and IS-200 courses on the Incident Command System, or the IS-340 course on Hazardous Materials Prevention, or any IS or NIMS/National Fire Academy courses at or above the 100 level, are eligible to be part of the class of Journal article peer reviewers. United States citizens as individuals in any recognized field of academic or vocational interest are encouraged to participate as described above, and any United States citizen who has an interest in knowing how CEM influences the political decision-making processes in her or his community is encouraged to study for and complete the IS-100 and IS-200 on-line final examinations to become a contributing reviewer of this Journal.
Any person who is not a United States citizen but is a certified student of EMI, NIMS, the National Fire Academy , or any comparable program is welcomed and encouraged to participate as a contributing reviewer; this Journal may contain information on enrolling in those programs at cost to those students. Further, it is the intent of this Journal to provide future comparable coursework to elevate any person of desire to the level of a certified student in a comparable program.
The context for the creation of the United States Department of Homeland Security has been the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001. HSPD-5 and HSPD-8 are part of the President's response to potential hazards that may cause disasters of national importance after September 11, 2001, providing the legal authority to apply CEM through ICS in situations governed under the NRP. While ordinary citizens are not considered part of ICS, these Americans have the responsibility of preparing on their own for disasters, and as FEMA EMI IS courses provide useful information to those people who have been exposed to that on-line information, it is theirs and ours to use to our best advantage. Any outside knowledge of the full range of academic and vocational disciplines that can be brought in for the purpose of improving our implementation of CEM in our personal disaster preparedness is welcomed and encouraged through the participation of contributors, editors, reviewers, and users of this Journal.
While all are encouraged to participate, there are certain disciplines that have a focus which may be most beneficial to integrating general knowledge and wisdom into a comprehensive study of Comprehensive Emergency Management. It may be argued that if Comprehensive Emergency Management is reducible to a first-order theory, then the theory of living systems may be a contextual meta-theory for describing and completely containing a theoretical first-order CEM, and that the theoretical first-order CEM is computable. Furthermore, the computability of the first-order CEM, along with the reducibility to a regular language of all ICS communications in implementing CEM in living systems, implies that CEM ICS emergency response scenarios are realizable as computer simulations and that such simulations may be made responsive as regular language recognizers with implementable artificial intelligence (AI). Realized automated CEM ICS simulators and AI communicators may have usefulness in training first responders and ordinary citizens for all-hazard disaster preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation, and to the degree that the Armed Forces implement Future Combat Systems (Brigade Combat Team) automation systems, the automation of CEM as computable ICS interfaces promotes the seamless integration of FCS (BCT) components in future ICS deployments of full-range/full-spectrum all-hazard integrated response capabilities. The promise of full-range/full-spectrum all-hazard integrated response capability across the entire United States population is an ideal with respect to the "best practice" approach to Comprehensive Emergency Management, where the implemention level of ICS CEM AI acts as a variable force multplier for integrated FCS (BCT) resources in a unified ICS structure for the NRP.
To summarize, it is both important and significant in this Journal to logically analyze and formalize the analysis of Comprehensive Emergency Management for the purposes of (1) creating a credible, citable resource on CEM independent studies, (2) incorporating all academic and vocational disciplines as they may realte to CEM, (3) creating computerized learning scenarios, (4) integrating interfaced FCS (BCT) components in the CEM approach to disaster preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation, and (5) promoting the ideal of full-range/full-spectrum all-hazard integrated response capabilities across the entire United States population is a "best practice" approach to Comprehensive Emergency Management.
Journal assumptions based on the eventual availability of FCS (BCT) components as ICS responder resources must be long-term, as short-term availability of such resources is pre-empted by non-domestic deployment tasking as long as there are those demands for high-tempo overseas force requirements in Iraq and where military necessity dictates national strategic and logistical concerns. With respect to these concerns, homeland security must be recognized as a lesser short-term role for any immediate FCS (BCT) deployment and responsive engagement in concert with ICS CEM. Of course, domestic political considerations may raise the priority and probability of FCS (BCT) components as resources in a unified command scenario as part of ICS CEM under the NRP.
=== Current Peer Reviewers ===
*:JCGonzales, IS-100, National Fire Academy ICS-100 Incident Command System for First Responders, IS-200, Professional Development Series, IS-340, IS-700, IS-800.A
*:REMaes, IS-139
*:GeraldMcMillen, Professional Development Series, IS-700, IS-800