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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."
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