By: Bill Sexton AAA9PC/N1IN
Posted: 18 NOV 04
When the Army sends its reserve communications units out for an annual test of combat readiness, there's one very significant contingent that serves best by staying home. The members don no battle dress, carry no weapons, and for the most part provide their own radio transmitters and other gear. But short of an actual terrorist attack, it's their busiest season as key participants in America's Homeland Security.
These are the members of the Army Military Affiliate Radio System, an organization of trained and ready civilian amateur radio operators whose mission is keeping government agencies linked when natural disaster or sabotage disrupts commercial phone and digital systems. The fact that they're domiciled in virtually every corner of America but ready to communicate with each other at any time is what makes them so valuable.
An exercise like the one in June 2004 is serious business--its mission, in the words of the overall Operations Order, "to train the United States Army Reserve and National Guard Signal units for war."
For the 32 major uniformed units involved in "Grecian Firebolt 2004," as the month-long drill was code-named, the immediate job was to establish high quality, secure voice and data communications networks for military use across the country under wartime conditions.
For the civilian volunteers in MARS, the mission was reporting simulated terrorist attacks, then establishing emergency radio networks linking localities with state and regional gateway stations. At the overall GF-04 headquarters at Fort George G. Meade MD, Chief Army MARS Robert Sutton and aides established a portable MARS field station to feed the MARS operators' reports into the Signal Corps system.
By the end of four weeks' continuous operation, MARS headquarters counted 2,224 simulated emergency messages handled by 673 participating members in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, 93 of the members operating on emergency power. "We handled more messages in one day than in an entire week the previous year," said Army MARS Chief Sutton.
The advance script called for the MARS portion of the drill to get underway with coordinated terrorist attacks on power transmission facilities around Buffalo NY on June 13. However, by June 10 members were already reporting scattered (fictitious) incidents in Tennessee, West Virginia and downstate New York. Eastern Area Coordinator Robert Hollister followed these up with an area-wide alert notification on the 11th.
Simulated the incidents may have been, but in addition to testing communications readiness these diverse scenarios served a second strategic purpose: practically every conceivable kind of potential terrorist target was identified. In several hundred communities, such unthinkable events as 9/11 would no longer be unimaginable.
Within two days of GF-04's activation, John Scoggin, the volunteer operations chief for the Army MARS Eastern Area, had his Emergency Communications Unit deployed from Delaware to Ft Meade and manned by volunteers from nearby states. At that point, all communications switched to radio; telephone and e-mail were deemed out of order. Western Area Coordinator James Banks coordinated information flow through Ft Huachuca, the normal MARS hq.
At Ft. Meade, Scoggin and his volunteers, along with Chief Sutton and Eastern Area Coordinator Hollister accomplished a new first for modern MARS. They donned military uniforms to facilitate movement within the restricted base (but wore special patches identifying themselves as civilians). In all, 13 volunteers from Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania mustered for the Ft Meade operation. That was "a high point from all views" for Hollister, who said the packet link between the Emergency Communications Unit and MARS eastern gateway station at Ft Detrick MD "worked extremely well, with over one thousand messages handled over that one circuit."
Day by day the GF-04 focus moved westward until the drill terminated with incendiary wildfires scripted in New Mexico, explosions across Arizona and multiple terrorist attacks in the Northwest.
For the first time, the amateurs in MARS put into field operation a relatively young military technology called Automatic Link Establishment, which uses computer-driven transceivers to speed digital files over long distance. Eleven specially trained operators in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts participated in the first operational ALE net to relay simulated emergency traffic around potential choke points in the regular MARS messaging system. Working with operations chief Scoggin, New York MARS volunteer Carlos Santiago of Naples NY, an ALE specialist, coordinated the operation.
Another new element in this year's GF exercise was the heightened level of participation by members of the parallel MARS organizations of the Air Force and Navy-Marine Corps. Although AF MARS is known for providing phone patch connections to aircraft and the Navy-MC for its radio links to ship at sea, all three organizations have joined in emphasizing Homeland Security since Sept. 11, 2001.
In Ohio, Navy-Marine Corps MARS operated a concurrent net in support of the Army MARS exercise. New England's three-service VHF network was the primary channel collecting traffic from six states.
"Operations such as these show that working together in a joint effort, MARS can continue to support and assist in any disaster situation," Western Area Coordinator Banks commented in his After Action Report.
Of primary significance in 2004, according to MARS Chief Sutton, was integration of the MARS forward headquarters, which deployed to Ft Meade from Ft Huachuca AZ, into the overall exercise command.
"MARS is a communication network that is up and running 24-7," he told an interviewer at Ft Meade. "Before 9/11, there was no emphasis on working with the military. There appeared to be no need for high frequency radio because of all the modern communications technologies. Leadership just didn't see this as a tool in their toolbox and felt that satellite was the way to go. 9/11 opened their eyes because they realized that a contingency was needed in an emergency."
(Bill Sexton is national public awareness coordinator of Army MARS. .This column was first published in the October 2004 issue of WorldRadio magazine.)