The fire service often has been characterized as paramilitary, ever since the “corps of vigils,” Rome's original fire brigade, was a unit of the Roman army. It's no wonder that we tend to think of firefighting as similar to military combat.

That may be both good and bad for us. For while we use many military terms in our profession, there are significant differences between going into combat and fighting a fire. The most obvious similarity, however, is that people die in both.

Perhaps it's time to go back to the military and ask some key questions about how our methods of operation match each other. For example, in the military you seldom find combat individuals, i.e. those carrying a rifle or firing weapons, who are over the age of 40. With the exception of staff NCOS and maybe senior members of those companies, the vast majority sent into combat are youthful, lithe, flexible and in good shape.

Can we honestly say that about the fire service? I have been to a tremendous number of recruit academies and can attest that we tend to hire people who meet these criteria on appointment. But how long do they stay that way, and are they in that condition when they reach the end of their potential useful life as a combat firefighter?

There's a reason why active combat is limited to the young. There's a tremendous need for the discharge of energy, as well as a directness and endurance that tend to erode over time. When the fire service talks about its combat fire force in comparison to the military, we need to recognize that we have clearly not established the physical aspect of firefighting as something that needs to be maintained up to and including the day a person walks off the fireground. We have, consciously or unconsciously, condoned the fact that as individuals achieve more tenure in the fire service, they are not held as physically accountable as they were the day they came on the job.

Another important difference is that in the military there are enlisted people and there are officers. Officers don't come from the enlisted ranks. Generally speaking, most officers come from an institution of some kind that provides them with a broad-based education before they become officer candidates. In the fire service delivery system, however, we tend to believe that everybody starts at the bottom, including the organizational equivalent of the general: the fire chief.

I tend to believe that the military model doesn't work as well in civilian life for the very simple reason that there isn't the same categorization of classes between officers and enlisted personnel as there is in the military. Nonetheless, there might be a lesson or two we could learn from this idea of treating officers as different from everybody else. One way to achieve that goal is to educate people to the highest possible level before promoting them to officers.

I can almost hear the cries in fire stations nationwide: “Education means nothing without experience!” I would counter that what makes experience truly relevant is when it relates back to a person's knowledge base. In other words, if people know more and more before they experience more and more, they tend to learn more from those experiences. Therefore, it may not be an entirely bad idea for us to consider that no one should become an officer without an adequate education.

Now consider this whole idea of putting your life on the line. When military officers lay out an objective, they look the troops in the eyes and tell them that there's a strong possibility some of them aren't coming back. In his book About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, Col. David H. Hackworth, one of the most decorated military officers of the Vietnam War, clearly articulated the idea that an officer who doesn't plan or prepare for the Nth degree of safety is going to lose people.

When we send firefighters forward to do difficult jobs on the fireground, they need to know that they could die. That may sound a bit harsh, maybe even outright dramatic, but the truth is firefighters do die fighting fire. And one of the reasons they suffer that tragic loss is because they clearly don't understand that the enemy is trying to kill them, too.

I often have compared how some people approach the fireground to a story in Hackworth's book. He witnessed a training exercise one day in which individuals walked up a hill waving their weapons and firing blanks as if it were a game. When those same individuals entered actual combat, many were slaughtered because they exhibited the same behavior they had learned in the training program — to treat war as if it were a game. I have seen that same mindset on the fireground. This is not a game. It is deadly business. If we allow firefighters to treat training experiences trivially, then you can expect that they won't respond appropriately under fire.

I have witnessed individuals, who knew exactly what they were supposed to do, do something entirely different because someone has allowed them to get away with it during training. The best example I can give of this phenomenon is standing up in a super-heated atmosphere. I know of at least two cases in which individuals who found themselves in a confrontational situation during a fire immediately stood up and placed themselves in absolute jeopardy. They fully compromised everything they had been told about staying low and moving out of the way.

After examination, it was determined that they stood up because that is exactly what they were allowed to do during training fires in which only smoke bombs were used. Hackworth says practice doesn't make perfect, rather that practice makes permanent. If we are going to keep our people safe, we have to treat every scenario as if it were real. There should be no “wooden guns” or artificial aspects to our training environment.

Perhaps the last comparison between the fire service and the military is how each approaches the battle. Incident command systems were not invented by the fire service. If you look carefully at the process that led to the creation of ICS, you will find that it has strong ties to the military. The people who planned the invasion of Europe had a very similar model, Sir Eyre Massey-Shaw, founder of London's fire brigade, spoke of an incident command system back in the 1880s. The fire service sometimes acts as if we had invented ICS recently as a result of major catastrophic fires. The truth is that it was created by others a long time ago, and we only recently figured out that it would work for us.

The lesson here is to pay close attention to how the military has evolved its management of the battleground. If we truly are concerned about the span of control, chain of command and other principles of organizational structure on the fireground of the future, we should be copying the military model using ICS as more than a mere management model.

We need to consider more sophisticated components such as technology, data collection and intelligence. For example, on the scene of the largest fires we generally do a fabulous job of putting together that incident command system. What we do not have is the technology transfer in the fire service that the military has been using to become smarter and smarter in coping with the battlefield.

Although we call ourselves paramilitary, we still don't have quite the order and discipline of the U.S. armed forces. Of course, the military could learn from the fire service. A lesson that I would like to see the military adopt is that of prevention as opposed to reaction. Our military might has grown over the last 250 years because it has faced some of the world's most malevolent administrations. Likewise, the fire service has developed a tremendous amount of combat capability because we faced the harsh reality that fire is just as much an unrelenting enemy of society.

So the military metaphor may have its place in the fire service. We should continue to adopt those things from the men and women of the military so that the men and women of the fire service can perform their jobs more adequately, more safely and more effectively in the future.

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A 40-year veteran of the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.