Photo By Kevin Larson | Fort Stewart military police make entry into and protect role players at Fort...... read more read more
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With inert training guns at the ready and intent on protecting role-playing innocents, Fort Stewart Military Police burst through the doors of Diamond Elementary School March 29 during an evening active shooter exercise.
On March 30, a simulated hostage situation unfolded at Hunter Army Airfield, starting at the on-post childcare center and spilling over to the closed bowling alley.
Both scenarios were part of the installation’s integrated protection exercise and the brainchild of Stewart-Hunter’s emergency manager Beau Bradley.
Planning for the integrated protection exercise began several months ago and is part of training schedule that embraces the crawl, walk, run approach, Bradley said. Smaller exercises build to the full-scale exercises that certify the installation’s emergency preparedness.
“We have been planning this exercise for about four months,” he said. “We kicked off our initial planning phase in December.”
Stewart-Hunter Guardian, the installation’s full-scale exercise, was held early in December. It was external evaluated by emergency response subject-matter experts from Installation Management Command.
Bradley is charged with creating realistic exercises on the installation, ensuring the workforce is prepared for any crisis, including severe weather, manmade incidents, and more.
“My requirements under the protection arena are to develop two major exercises a year,” Bradley said. “Then I also develop other types of exercises based on other incidents like hurricane season. We live in Southeast Georgia, so my battle rhythm events include hurricane preparedness exercises. I partner with our firefighters and we go around the garrison and we basically do fire drills. We are looking at the workforce to see if they are compliant. If they're grabbing their ID cards, if they're listening to the fire drills, everything like that. We have a very robust exercise program here and it's all designed to keep us sharp, to keep the workforce safe and, support the commander's goals.”
Fort Stewart Deputy to the Garrison Commander Steve Hood said the value of the integrated protection exercise is obvious, both as a stepping stone to future training events and in preparation for real-world response.
“We sincerely appreciate everyone who took the time to stay late this evening to participate in this extremely important training,” Hood said. “Today’s world events will never allow us to stop training for these type of scenarios. We’d like to think that something like a school shooting will never happen to us but the reality is that one day it might. When it does, training events like tonight will ensure we are prepared.”
Overwhelming the installation’s response capability is also part of the training syllabus, said Installation Management Command Provost Marshal and Protection Director Col. Jonathan H. Doyle. Doing so tests an installation’s partnerships.
“We know the exercises will overwhelm the resources the installation has so having mutual aid partnerships are critical,” Doyle said. “The ones around Stewart are phenomenal. It is important that we do these exercises regularly to test ourselves and improve so that we can take care of our people and installations and continue to strengthen our partnerships with the community leaders, off post emergency responders, hospitals, and the entirety of the communities around our installation.”
Bradley said both Liberty County and Savannah law enforcement participated in the integrated protection exercise.
“They are using our exercise to train their law enforcement professionals as well,” he said.
After the integrated protection exercise, more training for the installation is coming, Bradley said. Routine training includes monthly drills in the emergency operations center. The ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars don’t roll out to an incident site, but the value of the drills is validating the system, reporting, and communication.
“It is all just basically facilitated discussions,” he said. “We make sure that we are capturing all of our required reports, that we prepare the best common operating picture for the commander and to also build a bench, give new people that are going to be working in the emergency operations center the opportunity to train and get the skill set in training instead of the very first time they're in an emergency operations center on a real-world event.”
The ongoing training for the Army Civilians is critical to providing services to the installation’s primary customer, the Soldiers and ensuring the power projection mission continues, Bradley said.
“We are the service provider to Soldiers,” he said. “We have a tremendous amount of civilian agencies that support the war fighter.”
-- Molly Cooke, Fort Stewart Public Affairs, contributed to this story
| Date Taken: | 03.31.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 03.31.2023 07:55 |
| Story ID: | 441634 |
| Location: | FORT STEWART, GA, US |
| Web Views: | 75 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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