The Nagin, Blanco, and Brown Training Center for Disaster Preparedness and Response

Been kickin' around a couple of ideas in my noggin.  I'd be interested in hearing what you have to say about them.

As we transition to from saving lives to cleaning up to focusing on what went wrong and how things can be better, one of the areas we'll focus on is the training in disaster preparedness and response that civilian leadership receives.  We're obviously going to spend much more money on training, which is a very good thing.

For analogous lessons, I've been trying to think about how the military reacted in the wake of Vietnam.  Most of America may not realize how the miltary transformed itself from a dispirited force to regain its place as the most powerful military the world has ever seen.  There were lots of factors, and more learned commentators than I can better explain them to you.  But one of the main factors was surely the revolution in military training that military leadership developed.  The Top Gun School in California was developed to improve the dog fighting skills of Navy pilots, as was the Red Flag Exercise at Nellis AFB for Air Force pilots.  The Army developed the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, CA for armored forces and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, LA for light infantry.  (Maybe some Marines out there can talk about how Marine training has improved.  I just can't speak to it.)  What do all of these training centers have in common?  Realistic training exercises with live OPFOR and brutally honest Observer/Controllers to review performance and lessons learned afterwards. 

While we're thinking about what to do with New Orleans, I think DHS should establish there the Nagin, Blanco, and Brown Training Center for Disaster Preparedness and Response.  DHS should bring civic leaders and emergency response officials there for realistic training.  How realistic?  After the daily training is done, let those off shift stay in a powerless dark smelly building as they listen to the gunfire next door at the new live fire range for National Guard and law enforcement.  It would look like a MOUT range (Military Operations in Urban Terrain), but would be geared a bit more to law enforcement and fire rescue, with some bad guys in the middle of a CQB range.

Who would be the observer controllers?  Good question.  It sure wouldn't be the feds at DHS.  If I were President (everybody shudders at once), I would ask Tommy Franks to recruit all his old retired Generals and Admirals and Command Sergeants Major friends to be observer controllers.  Add in some old firedogs and esteemed people in their various specialities.  THESE GUYS need to grade and report the performances of the local, state, and fed officials.  They all have training experience in complex organizations, and chaos, and operating therein.  Since the feds would be there for every training exercise, I would hope that their performance would improve the most.

In fact, I would ask these same Tommy Franks guys to perform audits of all cities' existing disaster plans.  Let's use the expertise we have.

Comments

[Klug]

This is absolutely brilliant; I think you should really, really try to sell this post to the rest of the blogosphere. This is an excellent 'lessons learned' idea.

[procrastinus]

Klug,

Thanks for the feedback. All readers are welcome to leave Klug-like feedback!

I will try to pass this around, but I'll need everyone's help. I hate to be a traffic whore, but if you see anything here that you like, please send it on to other bloggers.

V/R,
Procrastinus