HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. -- In July 2015, a man shot and killed five military personnel during a dual-location attack in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Three civilians here are executing part of the response to this attack by improving the Air Force’s Emergency Mass Notification Systems.
Because the Chattanooga attacks occurred only minutes apart with the gunman targeting less-heavily protected military sites, existing notification systems were not fast enough to inform area military personnel of the immediate threat. By improving the speed of notifications, personnel at the second location might have been able to initiate measures to deal with an active shooter.
“I have a daughter here at the CDC,” said Cassandra Carlson, EMNS program manager here, referring to on-base childcare centers. “We had a scare this summer, and in that case, I wanted to know immediately what the status was. That information very quickly becomes the most important thing, and we want to get it out as fast as possible.”
Following the shooting, then-Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter instructed the services to review their security standards. The Air Force’s objectives include increasing the speed and penetration of its emergency notification systems operating on desktops, email, text messages and registered mobile devices.
As soon as someone informs the command post of an incident, a two-minute clock starts. The Secretary of the Air Force tasked Carlson’s team to find a system that would notify first responders of an incident before that two-minute clock expires. Currently, that can take up to eight minutes.
Carlson’s team created a contract that would meet a tiered notification requirement that includes first responders, active duty, base employees, guard, reserve and – for the first time – dependents. If first responders are notified in two minutes, a base-wide notification will go out in ten minutes. Air Force-wide notification can happen in less than an hour.
“The timeline of this contract is very quick,” said Carlson, who worked the program with Silva and one other program officer. “We were on the fast track and wrote all of our documents, put out the requirements and awarded the contract in 15 months. It’s a national security system, and it’s a quick reaction capability, so we are passionate about getting this done because it’s part of how we protect our fellow Airmen.”
The Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence and Networks Directorate here announced American Systems Corporation of Chantilly, Virginia, won the $68 million contract award Dec. 21, 2017. Following meetings and some necessary planning, the contractor will begin migrating EMNS onto the cloud in September and finish in three months, according to projections.
“We’re going to be using Amazon Web Services for this project, through the prime contractor,” said Greg Silva, EMNS program office lead engineer. “We’re going to have one, unified approach to get into the system. That reduces maintenance and takes us down from hundreds of individual EMNS contracts to one, and we manage it. It should be more reliable, easier to use and cheaper.”
Another advantage of moving the service onto the cloud is that it can be scaled up or down to accommodate more or fewer facilities. That can be useful if the goal is to increase the number of facilities the system accommodates in case of incidents like the Chattanooga attack, which struck an obscure strip mall and a small reserve center, rather than major military installations.