Military Officer - December 2008 - (Page 55) Q&A of interest. I’ve visited 25 governors so far and have talked about the support they need that we might provide. I’ve spoken to every director of emergency management and every National Guard adjutant general in the country. We provide training for each state’s joint force headquarters in the most efficient ways to operate. We have a “Support to Civil Authorities” training course for lower-level leadership within the Guard. The GAO last January said NORTHCOM had plans for future emergencies but did not know how well planning had progressed in DHS and with other agencies, or what military needs individual states would have in an emergency. Is that still true? That was a fair assessment [in late 2007]. We had a lot of work to do. But there is now in place a National Response Framework, an overarching document that provides requirements, responsibility, and authority to conduct interagency planning for large-scale events. DHS sets that framework to respond to a variety of natural and man-made scenarios. To execute that, DHS, with help from DoD, has created an integrated planning system to address 15 national planning scenarios, such as a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon and a catastrophic earthquake. We plan for these with FEMA, DHS, and all players. The response framework and the planning system didn’t exist when [the] GAO wrote those comments. That does not mean all plans are completed yet, but I know where we are in planning for each of those scenarios. GAO also said NORTHCOM has difficulty monitoring readiness of units it would have to rely on. Again, when that was written, the National Guard still was implementing a system called the Defense PHOTOS: ABOVE, SGT. 1ST CLASS GAIL BRAYMEN, USA; TOP, EDD NATIVIDAD G EN . V I CTO R “G ENE ” R E NUA RT J R. Soldiers prepare an AH-64 Apache Longbow at Fort Bliss, Texas, for an aerial reconnaissance flight over the southwest border of the U.S. Readiness Reporting System. Units in 20 states now are fully implemented in that. We started with hurricane-prone states. Now I can look at units, say, in Florida as a hurricane approaches and a red-yellowgreen chart tells me, by unit, where’s their equipment, what’s their training level, whether they are deployed on another mission. If the adjutant general says, “I have a problem and the EMAC can’t resolve it,” then I begin to look at how to bring additional capability to bear. There is controversy over your decision to relocate your headquarters from Cheyenne Mountain to Peterson Air Force Base. Are there concerns particularly about new vulnerabilities? It’s important to note that NORAD headquarters, which is really this discussion point, has never been in the mountain. The Cheyenne Mountain facility is where the operations center of, in the early days, about 125 people operated every day. More recently that number was about 30. That mountain facility was built to accommodate the NORAD warning function. In combining NORAD and NORTHCOM, we want warning, exe- Renuart, seated, reviews airborne communications capabilities aboard a C-130 aircraft at Peterson AFB, Colo. cution, and consequence management tied together in a seamless fashion. So we have consolidated all of those operational center functions in a single location at Peterson. We will maintain an ability to use the mountain should it be needed based on threat. Some have said, “Why move out of the mountain to go to a building?” The real determining factor for me was the operational synergy you create, and the additional security measures we have invested in to secure the building from threats. The operational benefits far exceed the very small risk that we choose to accept. We [CONTINUES ON PAGE 79] DECEMBER 2008 MILITARY OFFICER 55
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