U.S. engaging in 5-year 'game-play' exercise for terror attacks, major disasters
By Jerome R. Corsi
President Bush at NORTHCOM command center
Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and USNORTHCOM, the United States Northern Command, invited WND staff reporter Jerome R. Corsi to visit Peterson Air Force base to observe Day Three of the NORAD-USNORTHCOM exercise Vigilant Shield 2008.
Corsi was the first outside news reporter allowed inside the Joint Interagency Coordination Group, or JIACG, to observe command center operations during a real-time national training exercise.
This article is the second of a five-part, exclusive WND series, based on an interview at the NORAD/USNORTHCOM headquarters with Eugene G. Pino, a member of the Senior Executive Service, who serves as director of Joint Training and Exercise at NORAD-USNORTHCOM.
Under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security, NORAD-USNORTHCOM has begun planning comprehensive, multi-year exercises aimed at involving every U.S. state in game-playing designed to simulate national emergencies.
The emergencies planned in the exercise scenarios range from natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, to terrorist attacks and health emergencies, as envisioned in a possible avian flu epidemic or pandemic influenza.
The exercises are designed to involve a wide spectrum of federal, state and local agencies that share a common interagency command center with the NORAD-USNORTHCOM headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo.
"The most important thing to fully understand about our current Vigilant Shield exercise is that this is the maturation of a national exercise program," Eugene G. Pino, director of Joint Training and Exercise at NORAD-USNORTHCOM, explained to WND.
Pino serves as a chief architect in the national exercise program, responsible for developing a comprehensive plan to coordinate the response of the U.S. military into an emergency plan designed to be driven by civilian government authorities, first at the state and local level, then at the national level should the threat overwhelm local resources.
As WND reported yesterday, NORAD-USNORTHCOM conducted in October a national exercise involving the simulated detonation of Radiological Dispersal Devices, or "dirty bombs," exploding almost simultaneously in Guam, Arizona and Oregon.
The exercise code-named Vigilant Shield 08, or VS08, was also designated TOPOFF4, in reference to the many top federal, state and local officials the exercise was designed to train.
Pino was careful to make sure WND understood that the current VS08/TOPOFF4 exercise was part of a larger plan.
"Our goal," Pino explained, "is to develop working partnerships between federal and interagency departments, working together to design an exercise that exercises the entire national architecture, from federal to state to local and multi-national."
WND reported yesterday that over 40 federal agencies have permanent staff assigned as "resident agency" managers in the Interagency Coordination Group, or ICG, structure that operates the JIACG, or Joint Interagency Coordination Group.
The JIACG is the key operational component of the national exercise that meets daily in a combined command center, linked to the outside federal, state and local exercise participants by teleconference and computer.
Canada, UK, Australia join in
Pino noted that along with the countless observers – mostly in Washington, D.C. – there are several other nations participating in the exercise, including Canada, the UK and Australia.
The three countries, he explained, are physical partners playing in the exercise, with their own exercises linked to VS08/TOPOFF4.
"So, what you have is a mosaic of exercise objectives and exercise teams brought together into one synchronized, over-arching, large scale exercise," he said.
Maturation
Pino told WND planning for the current exercise started 14 months ago. Each year since USNORTHCOM was created in 2002, the command has run Vigilant Shield exercises in the fall and exercises code-named Ardent Sentry in the spring.
"The national exercise program in the Department of Defense has undergone a maturation process," Pino emphasized.
"In the past, those exercises were completely built, designed, controlled, executed and played by DOD personnel," he continued. "Sometimes, we would have other agencies and departments, either providing us subject matter experts, but not full participation. Every other department and agency conducted their own isolated stovepiped exercises."
The goal of NORAD-USNORTHCOM has evolved to transform its Department of Defense-managed exercises into full interagency participation, such that the Vigilant Shield and Ardent Sentry exercises now involve military planning coordinated through the lead efforts of the Department of Homeland Security.
"We started working on this particular construct of a national exercise program about three years ago, in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security specifically," Pino said.
Pino explained President Bush reviewed an implementation plan for the execution of a national exercise program in April, approved the concept, and then the Department of Homeland Security was given the lead for executing the national exercise program.
"The Department of Homeland Security created an implementation plan for the national exercise program that was released in July," he continued. "This is our first national exercise under that construct.
With this change, interagency planning and cooperation was intended to replace the department-by-department emergency preparedness planning that was the norm before USNORTHCOM was created in 2002.
Pino explained: "So, rather than having stovepipe exercises without full integration and synchronization conducted by separate agencies, our goal now is to replicate a natural effort to deal with either a natural or man-made disaster within a national exercise program that starts to synchronize these disparate enterprises into one, focused exercise program. "The various participating agencies are integrated from the very first step of planning the exercise," Pino said. "Where in the past we might have brought in another department, maybe a week before the exercise was going to kick off, now we coordinate through the Department of Homeland Security, and interagency cooperation is a central feature of the national exercise program."
Focused energy
Pino stressed interagency cooperation and coordination brought an added value to the national exercises.
"By the mere fact that all these agencies are integrated partners in the full development of the exercise, they are vested in the exercise, and they understand the objectives of the exercise," he argued. "Now we are able to focus all that energy into training our people together as to how we would operate in a real world environment.
"It is very difficult for departments and agencies that are working daily in protecting the nation and are fully focused on their individual requirements and their responsibilities to drop everything that they are currently doing when they find out about an exercise that's taking place in the next few months," Pino explained.
The solution was to develop a multi-year exercise plan announced well in advance to the many agencies expected to participate.
"The development of a five-year schedule where everybody knows this exercise is going to take place on this date, in this period of time, in '08, '09, 2010, 2011 and 2012 is powerful," Pino argued. "This way everybody can plan accordingly and build their budgets to support it. The key element of the national exercise program is the mandate for a five-year schedule.
"We are also following a tiered approach to exercises, so we are focusing our energies on the proper levels of how missions are executed," Pino continued. "This particular exercise by design and by name is 'Top Officials Exercise,' which means something. VS08/TOPOFF4 is a Tier 1 national level exercise designed to engage our top government officials, because they require training, too – including the White House, department heads, cabinet secretaries, under secretaries and assistant secretaries."
While President Bush did not participate personally in VS08/TOPOFF4, an "exercise president" was designated to receive briefings and make decisions.
Pino also explained that the five-year cycle of national exercises was planned to cover a full spectrum of challenges the U.S. could face, ranging from natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, to terrorist events, such as 9/11.
"There is a linkage and should be a linkage between what we have identified are strategic, operational and tactical threats to our nation, and then build plans to operate against those threats and then create the scenarios to exercise against," Pino stressed.
"The White House Homeland Security Council, working with the president, identified 15 national planning scenarios that would require plans to be built against them," he said. "Our goal then was to focus our national exercise program against those 15 scenarios."
Gaming a 'dirty bomb'
Pino explained in more detail the thinking behind the current scenario of VS08/TOPOFF4, involving Radiological Dispersal Devices being used in multiple sites throughout the nation.
"The RDD used in the exercised was scripted to involve CCM-137, the radioactive material used," Pino said. "We chose this, because CCM-137 is readily available. CCM-137 is used in hospital equipment, for example. What we are gaming right now is CCM-137 that terrorists have stolen and weaponized with high explosives, such that a blast effect will cause casualties from the blast, but then also there will be fallout challenges from radioactivity. That, in essence, is what we mean by a 'dirty bomb.'"
Pino explained that the current RDD scenario of VS08/TOPOFF4 has been designated as National Planning Scenario No. 11.
"We will exercise all 15 of these national planning scenarios in the construct of the national exercise program over a period of years," he explained. "A perfect example is that last May, we conducted a national exercise as a precursor to this one, where we exercised against national planning scenario No. 1; that is, a nuclear detonation in a major metropolitan city."
From May 10-18 in Ardent Sentry 07, USNORTHCOM, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, exercised the detonation of an improvised nuclear device in Indiana.
USNORTHCOM's Joint Task Force Civil Support deployed in the exercise more than 2,000 active-duty military personnel and some 1,000 National Guard personnel to Camp Atterbury and the Muscatatuchk Urban Training Area, simulating an attack on Indianapolis.
Pino explained that each year at least one exercise will be designated a national level event, in which multiple state and local jurisdictions will be involved.
"That one national level event will be coupled with four 'Top Official Seminars' per year," Pino explained. "In the Top Official Seminars, we will take those national planning scenarios and discuss them in a seminar format with the principals and department heads in a table-top discussion environment.
"The issues that surface from those seminars will then be fed into the planning process for the national level exercise we will conduct," he continued. "It's a learning process in which we say, 'Okay, we talked about this as a potential challenge. We worked on what we believe is a proper answer to that challenge. Now we exercised it to validate that it, in effect, did accomplish the effect that we were after.'"
Pino also explained that the national exercise program is constructed to coincide with the four-year cycle of a presidential administration.
"So, in the first year of a president's administration," Pino explained, "we will have a ramped-up training program for the new administration on all the duties they are going to have in their homeland security and homeland defense responsibilities."
Pino laid out how the exercise cycle would work in conjunction with a presidential term.
"So, in the first year of a president's administration, like in 2009, the scenario will be one of the terrorist-related national planning scenarios. Then in 2010, the second year of this upcoming presidential administration, the exercise will be a natural disaster, perhaps a major hurricane or a major earthquake, affecting multiple jurisdictions."
He continued: "The third year will be an overseas Department of Defense-centric or humanitarian assistance to another nation state during a large-scale natural disaster, or a counter-insurgency-type operation, because we need to work national security too; this is a national exercise program.
"Then in the fourth year of a new administration," he concluded, "we will have domestic terrorist events as the foundation of that exercise."
Pino further specified that in each specific national exercise, different training objectives are identified.
"As I mentioned," he continued, "the planning for this exercise started 14 months ago. We identified certain exercise objectives we wanted to focus upon. Because this is a strategic national Top Officials exercise, our focus is working linkages and relationships and information-sharing between a strategic theater commander, a combatant commander – in this case NORAD-USNORTHCOM – and the national political leadership in Washington."
Therefore, Pino, explained, VS08/TOPOFF4 "has placed very little focus downward to operational forces on the ground or tactical units on the ground."
"We never intended to move very many actual forces around in this exercise," he said. "But, we designed the exercise to involve three venues – one in a U.S. territory that allows us to work those challenges of working a territory, the other two venues in Oregon and Arizona."
Pino also explained how the exercises were designed to involve FEMA regions nationwide.
"We have 10 FEMA regions throughout the nation," he explained. "A particular FEMA region is assigned the responsibility for a certain number of states, to provide disaster response and support. But FEMA Region 9, in this particular case, also has the responsibility for our territories in the Pacific. Oregon is FEMA Region 10, out of Seattle, and Arizona is FEMA Region 9, out of Oakland."
"Our goal," he concluded, "is to exercise the full scope of national planning exercises – ranging from natural disasters, to terrorist events, to health emergencies such as epidemic flu, such that each FEMA region and all the states have the opportunity to work through emergency exercises within the planned exercise cycle."
Master-control cell
The master-control cell of the national planning exercise is in the Department of Homeland Security in Virginia," Pino pointed out.
"USNORTHCOM has representatives there in Virginia in that master-control cell," he said. "Then you have the venues in Guam, Oregon and Arizona, with on-site control groups that are linked by satellite to the master-control cell. The day-to-day game-playing takes place in the JIASC interagency environment where information is processed and decisions are made."
The objective of the exercise, Pino said, is to "drive the action forward by providing the injects on real world systems."
"Inside the white cell, we have representation from every element of NORTHCOM," he said. "You'll notice there's an intelligence seat, a public affairs seat; there an operations seat, there's an inter-agency seat.
The chief controller from the War Fighting Center, Steve Zakaluk, is Pino's chief manager.
Zakaluk, Pino said, built every aspect of the exercise for NORTHCOM, working in partnership with the War Fighting Center.
"We react to what the players are doing to create the next day's and next two-day's environment to make sure we are moving in the right direction," Pino said.
He explained how the exercises are designed to benefit from lessons learned as the exercise is gamed.
"The most important piece of exercising is to observe your performance," Peno stressed. "What tasks need to be accomplished to satisfy the requirements of the plan? Then, what are the standards you are measuring yourself against?
"We bring together a significant number of subject matter experts from throughout the Department of Defense to work with us to observe our performance during the exercise," he continued, "to identify accomplishments and challenges."
"These experts then report back to me with all their observations," he explained. "Then what I will do is take every single one of these observations, and I build a 'lesson-identified' on that observation. From there, we put in place a corrective action program to fix that issue, and then we will revalidate it on a future exercise."
Observer-trainers then, he said, are working with each of the staff elements to identify the value of standards and conditions of the tasks that are supposed to be performed.
"Then we have analysts and subject matter experts in specific domains like intelligence, operations, planning, interagency synchronization, etc.," he continued, describing an interactive feedback loop at the heart of systems and operations planning science.
"They observe our performance and report back to me on their observations," Pino explained, "and then the analysts give us a perspective on their analysis of particular trends that are going on. Then we take that information from these guys, and we feed it into that 'lessons-learned' corrective-actions program for the next planned exercise."
Built into the national exercise program, therefore, is a "corrective-action program," Pino stressed.
"We identify a challenge, an issue, something that didn't go right, and it is fed into the Homeland Security Council," said Pino. From there, the Homeland Security Council assigns a department among the interagency partners designated to fix the problem and reports back to the Homeland Security Council."
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