In numerous incidents we have had on the SF Peninsula, incidents that have made the national news, sergeants do better than folks with bars and stars, every fucking time.Thank you for explicitly pointing that out. That is a huge difference. In a certain local jurisdiction, the chief of our largest FD isn't even maintaining his SCBA certification any more. I know the dude - it's not laziness. It's a conscious acknowledgement of the fact that going into structure fires is Not His Job. By design, that lack of certification removes the temptation for him and his senior staff and staples them to the command post.
No argument here. That agency I hold up as an ideal also benefits from a fairly large annual infusion of grant funding due to some specific programs in their region, so they have capacity that is somewhat in excess of the national average.
(Don't get me started on capacity limits in my own discipline. The majority of rural counties don't even have a single full-time EM practitioner on the payroll, and we have nothing in the way of formal, enforced professional standards.)
It's heartening that y'all actually did the training and had the conversations. In my previous jurisdiction, metro PD wouldn't even come out for Rescue Task Force workups. The crowd was Fire/EMS, school district PD, and local university PDs. Metro's take on RTF was, "we've done our training internally, call us and we'll deploy the Bearcat and handle it for you." Completely incapable of comprehending the need for pre-incident joint training, planning, or coordination. *headdesk*
I do love challenging assumptions when I design exercises, though. I've worked real-world major examples of command staff being unavailable. Had one severe weather incident where my only PD contact was the third shift patrol supervisor - the next three levels of his chain of command were all away at a conference. Had another incident that started about half an hour after a smaller department's top leadership was in a rollover accident requiring extrication. So I can and will justify an inject that begins with, "sir, you are out of play due to emergency appendix surgery, please take this evaluator worksheet and watch your people play through this one." A chief or executive's reaction to that tells me a lot about his character and how well he's mentored his subordinate leaders.
Yyyyyuuup. No one is too big to fail. And even if that 1% is technically within the jurisdiction's capabilities, all the other calls for service don't stop. Those may be "routine" but some of 'em are still going to be life and death.