Monday, August 01, 2005

Terror Drills



Peter Power, managing director of Visor Consultants explains live on ITV News how they were running a terror exercise the morning of 7-7. "The most peculiar thing was we based our scenario on the simultanious attacks on the Underground and Mainline station. So we had to suddenly switch an exercise from fictional, to real."

More details and video available at PrisonPlanet.com

Now there is another terror exercise being planed for August.

NORTHCOM Exercise to focus on nuclear terror scenario
FORT MONROE, Va. -- Here’s the scenario…A seafaring vessel transporting a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead makes its way into a port off the coast of Charleston, S.C. Terrorists aboard the ship attempt to smuggle the warhead off the ship to detonate it. Is this really a possibility?

Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS) here is planning its next exercise on the premise that this crisis is indeed plausible.

Sudden Response 05 will take place this August on Fort Monroe and will be carried out as an internal command post exercise. The exercise is intended to train the JTF-CS staff to plan and execute Consequence Management operations in support of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IV’s response to a nuclear detonation.

Some of this year’s objectives for SR05 are to refine nuclear incident Concept of Operations, produce a CM Operation Order, refine command post set-up procedures and maintain situational awareness of multiple CM incidents.

The Sudden Response exercise has been held at Quantico, Va., in the past, but has been moved to Fort Monroe to maximize command post training time. The senior leadership felt that it was more important to accomplish training instead of losing up to a day and a half in travel time, said Paul Deflueri, J7 Lead Exercise Planner. “This will allow us to still meet our training objectives,” he said.

Some external participants may work with JTF-CS during the exercise.

“We’re trying to get representatives from FEMA Region IV as well as representatives from South Carolina Emergency Management Division and active duty soldiers from the (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive) Consequence Management Response Force to play the role of task force units,” Defluri said.

“Each time we do one of these internal exercises, we try to make it more robust and try to add in fidelity,” Defluri said. “That’s what we’re trying to do for SR05: create a good scenario and be able to replicate the effects as best we can. That way we can give the command a really good CM exercise.”

NORTHCOM's headquarters is located at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

"(The plan) realigns and streamlines U.S. military structure to better address 21st century threats. For the first time, commanders' areas of operations cover the entire Earth."

- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld