Still working these thoughts out in my mind, but particularly liked this one I whipped off extemporaneousnessly here
http://ironfiremen.com/2012/10/01/how-to-kill-a-fire-department/
Well, the good news is I've seen organizations rise. I've seen some fall. I've seen a few that still haven't gotten up. I'm not sure I've seen any go full circle from being fallen to risen to fallen...but give me another couple decades.
The bad news is I suspect hat you're describing, in part, is the conflict between an "industrial" and an "agrarian" approach to the world -- and that's a much bigger issue in our world today then just the fire service.
To an industrialist, units are units. You want to drive everything down to the simplest unit, to create systems that allow you to approach problems like algebra -- given the same operations the sum of x, y, and z will always equal the same thing. ISO 9001, Six Sigma. People aren't here to deeply understand what is going on but to follow set procedures. One of the logical conclusions are corporations too big to fail, because after all what is needed is just tweaking the rules a bit, to understand what still needs to be documented and systemized so someone else can step in, read the manual, and continue running the organization.
Wendell Berry will argue that an agrarian approach is oriented to observing nature, to using technology but using it with deep wisdom to building better farms, better communities -- things that last for a long time. Another farm writer, Gene Logsdon, will call it pastoral and point out that the the bible draws a difference between farmers (who are starting down the path of industrial temptation) and shepherds tending their flock. This is built on working to deeply understand your local situation, to figure out how to benefit from it economically and socially, and leave it better in the end. Joel Salatin won't get as philosophical but entertainingly shakes his head, in the book, "Folks, this ain't normal" at the conflicts between a regulatory system stuck in an industrial mindset and a farmer firmly planted in an agrarian world of his own. They will all draw a sharp contrast between their vision of a farmer, and the unfortunate many who are called farmers today but seem to be more industrial serfs trapped in a financial and industrial fiefdom.
An industrial mindset is that of "our instructors are just as good as yours" -- it's a unit and one is good as any other (after all, you both have rockers above your shoulder patches indicating you've been trained to NFPA 1041). Industrial is we know all we can know (until we find out we don't -- is there really a big difference the Charleston Sofa fire and the BP well blow out in the Gulf?) about something to make good decisions. To an industrial mindset, it's just a matter of applying or perhaps adjusting procedures -- eventually everything must have most consistently reproducable and lowest cost solution; for their regulators it becomes just keep on layering more rules until you force folks into that one - and only one - possible "best" solution.
Agrarian people are also replaceable -- one day you will retire, one day you will die. Did you leave your farm more productive then when the day you first went searching for chicken eggs? Did you leave your community, your organization a better one? Pastoral, if that's the better word, doesn't know all that there is -- they live a life full of doubt (a shepherd always wonders if a wolf is watching), full of always wondering how could things be done just a little bit better. In the community, are they building up friendships and lifting up neighbors? The decline of fraternal organizations like Grange, Elks, Masons is not unrelated to the decline of volunteer fire departments or the increasing difficulties in recruiting and retaining career firefighters. After all, you need not seek friendship to fill your spare time -- a unit is a unit, one television program is as good as a website is as good as going to a meeting to fill that time. Is the job of firefighting a calling (pastoral) or paycheck (industrial)?
A farmer -- in the agrarian mindset -- starts off collecting eggs as soon as he is old enough to walk and not drop too many, and moves on up to bucking haybales, turning a wrench, and penciling out the plans of what to plant and how much profit can be expected, all the while observing the world around him...and counseling his kids as they move up the chain and take over the management of the farm to help them avoid the worst mistakes; all the while wondering if only he had time to try that, or had done this different could he improve on the results? Contrast that to the fire chief who smuggly thinks he can manage scientifically simply because he's been given a prescriptive set of ideas from classes and standards and his limited personal knowledge hasn't yet been tested to it's limits -- and seeing he's achieved an artificial reality in the form of checking goals off a list, decides it's time to move on to a new town and a new set of goals to apply the same formula to.
I still haven't fleshed out this idea entirely, but the more I type over the last couple weeks on the subject the more convinced I'm becoming that this fundamental conflict between industrial and pastoral approaches is at the heart of much of the troubles we have today, and that's not limited to the fire service.
