ESC aids Guard unit engaged in California wildfire fight

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • 66th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
HANSCOM AFB, Mass. --  With flames raging throughout large swaths of northern California, the state's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has called on several Air National Guard units for help. One of those, the 149th Combat Communications Squadron, in turn, recently reached out to the Electronic Systems Center here for some much-needed assistance. 

The unit, based out of the North Highlands Air National Guard Station near Sacramento, was asked to establish remote communication capability to support the firefighting and relief effort. The communications operation, once fully established, would dramatically enhance the command and control capabilities of units working to combat the blazes. 

"They needed to set up a remote telecommunications switch that would allow them to connect with the main switch back on the fixed base," said Joe Morrissey a MITRE systems engineer who works with ESC's 753rd Electronic Systems Group. "That wasn't a real problem, but they needed to then be able to connect, through that main switch, to a commercial hub to establish commercial phone service, as well as to the Defense Information Services Agency, to establish Defense Switching Network, or DSN, service."
That, Mr. Morrissey said, did prove challenging, so the Guard unit sent an SOS to the personnel at Hanscom who had provided the remote equipment, the Theater Deployable Communication program office. 

"After hours and over weekend time, our people talked them through the processes to get everything working the way they needed it to," said Janet Maddox, the TDC program manager. 

The ESC team did all of this without spending time or money for a cross-country trip. 

"It's a little bit difficult because you can't see exactly what they're seeing," said John Mulrey, the program office engineer who took the initial call on July 3. Nevertheless, ESC and MITRE personnel, who stayed in almost constant contact with the Guard unit members, managed to solve the configuration issues within four or five hours, although they went on to provide additional network support for about two weeks. 

"Now all the participants have much better overall situational awareness," Mr. Morrissey said. "Information can flow easily flow back and forth, and real-time decisions can be made." 

This means, among many other things, that Guard units operating at fire sites can reach back to the state's adjutant general when, for instance, more assistance is needed. It also means that civil authorities can quickly contact the Red Cross and other organizations to discuss their needs and progress. 

The TDC program office at Hanscom has been providing deployable theater communication tools throughout the Air Force, to nearly 120 sites worldwide, since 1997. The equipment supports operations in remote and austere locations, where bases must be built from scratch, as well as field operations for humanitarian, homeland defense and special operations. 

"We're basically the Ma Bell in a deployed environment," Mr. Morrissey said.