UC is an important element in multijurisdictional or multiagency domestic incident management. It provides guidelines to enable agencies with different legal, geographic, and functional responsibilities to coordinate, plan, and interact effectively. As a team effort, UC overcomes much of the inefficiency and duplication of effort that can occur when agencies from different functional and geographic jurisdictions, or agencies at different levels of government, operate without a common system or organizational framework. All agencies with jurisdictional authority or functional responsibility for any of all aspects of an incident and those able to provide specific resource support participate in the UC structure and contribute to the process of determining overall incident strategies; selecting objectives; ensuring that joint planning for tactical activities is accomplished in accordance with approved incident objectives; ensuring the integration of tactical operations; and approving, committing, and making optimum use of all assigned resources. The exact composition of the USC structure will depend on the location(s) of the incident (i.e., which geographical administrative jurisdictions are involved) and the type of incident (i.e., which functional agencies of the involved jurisdiction(x) are required). In the case of some multijurisdictional incidents, the designation of a single IC may be considered to promote greater unity of effort and efficiency. (DHS, NIMS, 2004, p. 14)