Naval District Washington gears up for annual force protection exercise

WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES

01.26.2022

Story by Petty Officer 3rd Class Oliver Serna 

Naval District Washington

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- Naval installations within the National Capital Region are preparing to participate in the scheduled exercise Citadel Shield-Solid Curtain (CS/SC) 2022, which is set to take place Jan. 31 - Feb. 11.

CS/SC22 is an annual, two-part anti-terrorism and force protection (ATFP) exercise. The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate the Navy’s commitment to protecting life, equipment, and facilities. The exercise uses realistic scenarios to ensure U.S. Navy security forces maintain a high level of readiness to respond to changing and dynamic threats that exist in today’s world.

This year’s exercise will be focusing on challenging scenarios ranging from external attacks on facilities, insider threat scenarios, and non-traditional forms of attacks that are both kinetic and non-kinetic including cyber threats. In addition, Naval District Washington (NDW) will also focus heavily on their ability to use secondary and tertiary means of communications in precaution of any situation that would create a loss of the region’s primary means of communication.

According to NDW Training and Exercise Director Matthew Brown, NDW’s force protection personnel are prepared to handle any scenario that could unfold at any one of their installations. Testing their responses to a variety of threats and learning from their shortcomings will be very beneficial to the team.

“ NDW is constantly striving to improve our readiness,” said Brown. “And we do that by conducting exercises like CS-SC to evaluate and incorporate everything that we learn during the events into our future exercises and policy to continually improve our ability to protect not only our installations, but to protect and serve the most important resource we have at NDW…our people.”

Citadel Shield takes place the first week and is run by Commander, Navy Installations Command (CNIC). The second week, Solid Curtain, is run by Commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command (USFFC). During the two-week exercise, surrounding communities may notice increased security activities or traffic around bases.

“We do our best to minimize disruptions within local communities and to installation operations,” said Brown. “There will however, be times during the exercises when increased traffic around our gates may cause some delays to installation access. Local sailors and residents may see and hear training activities associated with the exercises at various times during the two weeks. We always encourage our families and the public to stay tuned about potential exercise impacts in the vicinity of our installations by following Public Affairs team notifications on Facebook and Twitter and to ask questions if they have any concerns.”
Personnel should register for the AtHoc wide area alert network if they have not already done so in order to be aware of force protection conditions and other emergency, environmental, or exercise related impacts on the area. Personnel should also familiarize themselves with their command or tenant command anti-terrorism plan to better know what to expect during the exercise.

For more AtHoc information visit: www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/ndw/about/waan.html

For more information on events happening in NDW, visit www.facebook.com/NavDistWash.

Get more information about the Navy from US Navy facebook or twitter.

For more news from Naval District Washington, visit www.navy.mil/local/ndw/.

• Date Taken: 01.26.2022
• Date Posted: 01.26.2022 09:36
• Story ID: 413429
• Location: WASHINGTON, DC, US
• Hometown: WASHINGTON, DC, US