Photo By Karen Michel | Benjamin Whitehead (left), a technical analyst with the Defense Threat Reduction...... read more read more
PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii – The Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance hosted a workshop with personnel from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and United States Military Academy to discuss assessment and analysis tool collaboration May 19 – 21.
The Center for Excellence (CFE-DMHA) organized the workshop as the initial planning phase of developing a disaster management assessment tool as part of the Civil-Military Emergency Preparedness (CMEP) program, a global security cooperation program directed by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which CFE-DHMA will take responsibility of later this year.
“[United States European Command] asked CMEP and [CFE-DMHA] to conduct assessments of partner nations’ disaster preparedness,” said Monique Wheeler, assessment lead of the CMEP program. “Since DTRA is already conducting similar analysis on consequence management, it seemed only logical to pool our resources and brainpower to provide the most holistic picture possible to the geographic combatant commanders.”
DTRA’s assessment and analysis tool is part of the CBRN Preparedness Program, focusing on chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) consequence management capabilities.
“Our organizations have different missions, but the same objective,” said Laura Sears, chief of future operations, CBRN Preparedness Program. “By having the two agencies collaborate, we can develop a single assessment tool that can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of U.S. engagements with partner nations in a truly ‘all-hazard’ fashion.”
Faculty from the Center for Nation Reconstruction and Capacity Development, and the Department of Physics of the United States Military Academy, West Point, contributed systems methods, processes and tool development to the workshop, having used West Point cadets to develop the DTRA model over a year-long course of study.
While simultaneously developing a tool to direct future civilian and military engagements, Sears said that by using cadets the project is also “teaching young military officers and leadership about consequence management, CBRN and preparedness.”
Over the three-day workshop, the joint team was able to determine initial functional objectives, methodology and overall definitions for the CMEP tool in order to build upon the DTRA platform. The two models provide a small overlap in portions of the analysis, allowing each organization to collect data during engagements with partner nation militaries and government officials, which they can pass to one another.
Working together allows the teams “to be able to evaluate progress across the scope of hazards – manmade and natural disasters – to defend and track the progress of engagements,” said Lt. Col. Robert Prins, Ph.D., assistant professor of West Point’s nuclear engineering program. “With the tool we can quantitatively understand the qualitative nature of the work that we do.”
CFE-DMHA has plans to test the CMEP tool as early as fiscal year 2015.
| Date Taken: | 05.27.2014 |
| Date Posted: | 05.28.2014 17:52 |
| Story ID: | 131370 |
| Location: | PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII, US |
| Web Views: | 155 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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