 USJFCOM
readies for Noble Resolve 08
U.S.
Joint Forces Command and U.S. Northern Command recently
began planning for Noble Resolve 08, a series of events
designed to enhance homeland defense measures and military
support during natural or man-made disasters.
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By Robert Pursell
USJFCOM Public Affairs
(SUFFOLK, Va. - Jan. 16, 2008) - U.S. Joint Forces Command
(USJFCOM) and U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) recently began
planning for Noble Resolve 08, a series of events designed
to enhance homeland defense measures and military support
during natural or man-made disasters.
Noble
Resolve, sponsored by USJFCOM but in support of NORTHCOM,
is an experimentation campaign supporting NORTHCOM's efforts
to develop solutions and capabilities for the U.S. to better
defend the homeland and improve response to a crisis.
Rear
Adm. Dan Davenport, director of the Joint
Concept Development and Experimentation Directorate (J9), explained USJFCOM's
role in the event.
"Our particular role for this event is that we design
and conduct the experiment," he said. "We will
provide the distributed experimentation environment, we generate
a scenario and we distribute it out to all of the participants
so we don't have to bring everyone to Suffolk, Va. for the
experiment."
Noble Resolve will use intricate computer-based models and
long distance virtual connections to provide the environment
for participants to make decisions and work together as they
would in case of a real crisis. By using the models, no troops
or emergency personnel will actually have to deploy or respond
to events, saving money and time.
"We can let them actually see the scenario and provide
their responses and execute their procedures in their own
locations, fusion centers, and operating centers," said
Davenport.
"We will also coordinate the participation. We'll synthesize
the results and then we're responsible to ensure those results
and the things that we've learned, concepts and capabilities,
are transitioned properly so that the operators, whether
they're state, federal, local and DoD, are able to gain from
what we've learned," said Davenport.
USJFCOM and NORTHCOM will partner with other combatant commands,
to include U.S. Pacific Command. Major participation will
also come from the Department of Homeland Security, the National
Guard Bureau and National Guard organizations from several
states.
Experimentation scenarios will involve the commonwealth
of Virginia, Oregon, Texas and Indiana; as well as Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) organizations in those
regional areas.
Davenport explained the scenarios will focus on information
sharing, maritime domain awareness (MDA), natural disasters,
mass population movement, and weapons of mass destruction.
"The major efforts that we're focused on are maritime
domain awareness. We're also looking at improving our detection,
identification, and tracking of weapons of mass destruction.
[We'll look at] mass population movement from a national
disaster or other challenge and the long-term sustainment
of a reaction for us for a chemical, biological, radiological,
nuclear or explosive event," he said.
Air
Force Col. Gene Taylor, the USJFCOM Noble Resolve lead,
explained each of the scenarios.
"The piece about population movement with FEMA will
be a microcosm spurred by natural disaster to allow them
to look at how they would deal with large population movement," he
said. "There will be an earthquake in order to stimulate
our FEMA region 3 partners in Indiana and some of the associated
responders to a defense support civil authorities' role.
"We'll
have some simultaneous scenarios going on to include an
MDA- type threat to both the east and west coast
to simulate particular fusion centers there to drive the
information sharing that we want to measure at the end of
year event."
Davenport said during a national crisis, the biggest challenge
is sharing information and coordinating procedures amongst
all of the civil authorities. The two Noble Resolve experiments
in 2007 built a foundation and established many of the partnerships
and information-sharing and coordination procedures that
need to be in place in order to prepare for future crisis.
Noble Resolve 08 will benefit from this foundation.
"We were successful in establishing many of those partnerships,
establishing some of those procedures, evaluating some tools
that can be put into place and evaluating some of the command
and control structures between the state, federal, local
and DoD organizations," he said." Much of that
work will carry into the future efforts and so there are
similarities in the themes from last year to what we're doing
this year, but we're advancing those capabilities and those
experiments for this year."
This year, instead of having two main experimentation events
like last year, there will be a number of workshops and limited
objective experiments throughout the year focused on specific
objectives and research questions. These will culminate into
one major event in late July.
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