Introduction: The U.S. Third Fleet uses APAN to plan and execute crisis response training.
Exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) is the world's largest multinational maritime exercise, conducted biennially on even years in Hawaii. Since 1971, the U.S. Third Fleet has led the planning of this exercise designed to increase international cooperation around the Asia-Pacific area. In 2012, RIMPAC organizers added a week-long humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) training event to provide the training audience a chance to learn more about each other's capabilities and interoperability, and to be able to put those learned practices into play for real-world response to disaster situations.
Challenges: Enable trainers to plan and execute international crisis simulations using the same tools that would be used in real crisis events.
With more than 2,000 people participating in the fictitious response effort titled “Operation Restore Chianti,” including military coalition partners from four countries and 23 Hawaiian medical facilities, exercise planners wanted to provide a collaborative environment that could be used during training and also used if a real event occurred. Tools needed to be flexible to accommodate changing requirements throughout the planning process and provide consistency over repeated biannual events.
Solutions: An APAN training community called “Operation Restore Chianti” was built for execution of the new HA/DR exercise (HADREX). Just as it would be used in a real-world crisis response event, APAN was used for information exchange between U.S. military, coalition partners, and civilian participants.
During HADREX execution, a blog was used by the exercise control group to disseminate instant updates to all participants regarding simulated scenarios. Training audience members could subscribe to this blog via email or RSS and receive the most recent updates as soon as they were posted. Similar to what occurs in a real disaster, organizations and militaries participating in the operation could upload daily situation reports so all participants could benefit from shared information reducing the duplication of efforts.
The exercise incorporated crowd sourced crisis mapping components to simulate the mass influx of social media messages that are produced during a disaster. Volunteers produced and validated over 2,000 incident reports that were funneled into APAN's map feeds. Additional information layers from outside sources like the Hawaii Association of Hospitals and the Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) were also added to the map to provide situational awareness and realism to various disaster scenarios.
Results: Increasing the speed of execution and reliability, APAN enables RIMPAC planners to build on experiences year after year.
By incorporating APAN into the exercise, disaster responders and coalition militaries were able to train on the same tool that would be used in a real-world event. RIMPAC 2014 will use APAN as it incorporates the HADREX fully into the exercise and continues to train responders in using APAN for improved collaboration.