No-notice exercises

[RiverAux]

North Carolina Wing recently did something that I have advocated for locally for some time -- no notice practice missions.  http://www.ncwg.cap.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=article.display&articleID=324

We've done some occasional no-notice tests of our alerting system, but never an actual mission.  These were fairly small-scale, which is probably appropriate for this sort of test. 

I've wondered if the main reason we don't do them more often is that we're somewhat worried about what the results would show about our readiness. 

[manfredvonrichthofen]

I have been thinking of the same thing. One of my thoughts was to schedule a training exercise for a Saturday and perform a phone alert Friday evening. During the phone alert we would tell them to report for the exercise in two hours, those that report will get pizza for dinner and a good movie followed up with some night training if they want and then spending the night at the armory.

I understand being afraid of doing this because it could prove that your unit is not ready, but at least you would know that you are not ready, and you could figure out how to fix it.

[JeffDG]

The problem is that a no-notice exercise does not tell us what is available to respond in the event of a real scenario.

For example, in the event of a real disaster, I'm available 24/7 to respond.  I have arrangements with my employer and family for "real".  I am NOT available 24/7 for exercises however.

So, that leaves two possible outcomes:  1)  You tell people it's an exercise and get pitiful turnout because people have other things to do, or 2) You don't tell people it's an exercise, and you suffer huge attrition after people realize that you've lied to them and jeopardized their actual jobs and interrupted family plans.

What we've taken to doing is "cold-call" exercises.  People know it's coming on a particular day, but not when.  We then work from the alert through the exercise, which IMHO, provides a more realistic measure of actual readiness.

[RiverAux]

I have been thinking of the same thing. One of my thoughts was to schedule a training exercise for a Saturday and perform a phone alert Friday evening. During the phone alert we would tell them to report for the exercise in two hours, those that report will get pizza for dinner and a good movie followed up with some night training if they want and then spending the night at the armory.

Now, I actually wouldn't do it that way because people may make major changes in their plans in order to respond only to find out that it wasn't necessary.  That will get people mad.  That sort of alert test could be done by just asking them if they could make it if there was an honest-to-goodness mission need right then. 

But, calling them on Friday night or Saturday morning and telling them that there is a practice exercise starting in a few hours would be all right. 

[RADIOMAN015]

North Carolina Wing recently did something that I have advocated for locally for some time -- no notice practice missions.  http://www.ncwg.cap.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=article.display&articleID=324

We've done some occasional no-notice tests of our alerting system, but never an actual mission.  These were fairly small-scale, which is probably appropriate for this sort of test. 

I've wondered if the main reason we don't do them more often is that we're somewhat worried about what the results would show about our readiness.

Well it looks like they got the plane up in the air in basically one hour after the alert was transmitted.  I think most wings have a goal of getting the aircraft up within an hour or two of the alert time.   HOWEVER, if we have a practice alert/response do we specifically tell the folks responding to the alert that it is only a test?  I'd be mad as hell if you paged me to respond and then when I was up in the air or manning the radio at mission base and you then told me it was just a response test.

I don't think these no notice exercises prove very much.  We are volunteer force, and people can choose at will whether they want to respond or not and sometimes have commitments that can't be cancelled.  Also in many areas of our wing the time of day (e.g. morning commute & evening commute) would significantly affect response time to some airports that CAP aircraft are based at and the particular responding crew members geographic location in relation to the airport.

About 2 years ago, we had a period of time having difficulty getting IC's and actually used out of wing IC's for awhile that was more of a problem for the alerting officer than getting both air & ground teams to respond.

Our state is also fortunate in that the State Police has an air wing with five helicopters dispersed to three facilities throughout the state so they could easily take these quick missions since there's always one crew on hot alert at one of the facilities, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.   So for us it probably isn't that critical in the end, since those helicopters have better sensors (for night time missions) for finding crashes & victims than we every will (and it was rumored that they were also buying DF equipment for the helos) .   Also the helos can stream real time video down to fixed as well as fast response mobile C3 vehicles dispersed throughout the state.

So it's likely that our missions will be primarily recon type photos in the aftermath of natural type disasters.
I don't think they will need a 2 hours response time with that mission .
RM

[Eclipse]

No-notice exercises are exactly what is needed to find out who will really come.

To an employer they should be treated as a real-world, and in the states with job protection, if the orders are written properly,
they would be protected.

Every wing should have at least one a year, and anyone who wants to be on the "A" list, had better either call or have a really-good excuse.

Easing into it is fine - perhaps start with non-notice call downs where people don't know it is an exercise until they respond, from there move to normal notice, but no idea where you will go, what you will do, then go to short notice and finally no-notice.

[EMT-83]

Personally, I don't think it proves anything.

Your self-employed and retired folks will be there; many of us won't. My employer is very supportive, but leaving work without notice for a drill is a non-starter.

[Eclipse]

That was partially my point - why would he know it is a drill?

You're activated, "here's the orders...," "I'll be back in two days...".  I would never suggest this happen more than once a year,
and of course it is easier for all involved when you can point to the TV and say "I'm going there.", but activated is activated.

Also, no one said it had to be during the week.  No reason you can't put out the no-notice alert on Friday evening for a weekend
mission.

[JeffDG]

To an employer they should be treated as a real-world, and in the states with job protection, if the orders are written properly,
they would be protected.

It's not the same, and under no circumstances should CAP be using job protection laws for exercises.

Many of us have excellent relationships with our employers.  If CAP were to start pulling stunts like this, that relationship would be toast, and if you ask me to choose between my employer who permits me to pay my bills and put food on my family's table, and CAP who is lying to me by doing such exercises, the choice is incredibly easy.

[JeffDG]

Also, no one said it had to be during the week.  No reason you can't put out the no-notice alert on Friday evening for a weekend
mission.

OK, that's all well and good until you pull a stunt like that when I have plans with the family for the weekend.  For the real thing, I'm quite willing to eat a pre-booked airline or hotel cost to help out, but if I go and do that because some jackass decides he wants to pull my chain and do a "readyness" test...well, it'll only happen once.

[wuzafuzz]

I understand the concept of no-notice exercises but I don't believe it is a good fit for a volunteer organization.

Some of those job protection laws don't require employers to pay CAP members who leave work to do CAP things.  Further, some of those laws require the existence of an actual emergency in addition to "orders."  I would be bent out of shape if I unwittingly burned a vacation day for a surprise exercise.

In my wing I see no reason to run a no-notice exercise.  We've already established a track record with real missions.  There is no reason to poke our members with a stick to see how they react.  If you never have real missions you probably don't have a compelling need to see how quickly you can respond.

[a2capt]

You could have those plane tickets for a Tuesday afternoon, that same chain would be potentially pulled then, too.

No difference.

[RADIOMAN015]

No-notice exercises are exactly what is needed to find out who will really come.

To an employer they should be treated as a real-world, and in the states with job protection, if the orders are written properly,
they would be protected.

Every wing should have at least one a year, and anyone who wants to be on the "A" list, had better either call or have a really-good excuse.

Easing into it is fine - perhaps start with non-notice call downs where people don't know it is an exercise until they respond, from there move to normal notice, but no idea where you will go, what you will do, then go to short notice and finally no-notice.

I don't think it is a very good idea to lie to one's employer about an emergency CAP mission that is only a practice test.  Most of these tests can be conducted via telephone/text pages and the individual can indicate their availability by calling back the control point/alert officer and advise their estimated time of arrival to their response location.  As an example I provide ES communications from our squadron hq for part of the state and from work I can be there in about 40 minutes.  From home about 10 minutes.

RM
         

[Eclipse]

Also, no one said it had to be during the week.  No reason you can't put out the no-notice alert on Friday evening for a weekend
mission.

OK, that's all well and good until you pull a stunt like that when I have plans with the family for the weekend.  For the real thing, I'm quite willing to eat a pre-booked airline or hotel cost to help out, but if I go and do that because some jackass decides he wants to pull my chain and do a "readyness" test...well, it'll only happen once.

Obviously no one would be eating plane tickets or cancelling a vacation or business trip for an exercise or an actual.  The perception that you are so important you'd need to is skewed at best, though it is an example of why we need more people.   If you can't go, you can't go, but continuing to semi-prove that we can be semi-successful with 6+ months of planning and advance notice doesn't show any readiness at all. 

Why do people have a tendency to immediately go for the worst-case scenario instead of at least trying to think through beyond how it affects them, personally?

So no-notice is not reasonable for volunteers, I can see that, so how about semi-notice?  In other words you know the dates, so you can take off, but yo don't know the where or what.  That way stuff is "kinda-staged", people can arrange work, and there is still some semblence of surprise and requirement to think on your feet.

The answer, frankly, is that the majority of members will only go to missions within easy driving distance of their homes, reimbursed or not.  Maybe not the majority here, because most of us here are hyper-engaged already, but look around at your wings and see how many members are really willing to pickup and go for a 2-3+ days.  We all know the answer.

As to the comments about "lying to your boss, and not getting paid", no one said to lie to anyone, activation is activation, and
whether you get paid or not isn't going to change based on actual vs. training.  None of the states I am aware of guarantee pay to CAP or the military, it is simply a guarantee of your job.

The alternative is to carry on as we have - months of planing and we still have issues with people showing up, and more issues with
people being more than day-players.  Worse when there is a good game on or the weather is nice for golf or personal flying.  During these situations we're told repeatedly that "I'd show up in a real-world..." despite the fact that A: They don't, and B: We don't want once-a-year members showing up for the real-worlds and bumping into each other.

[ol'fido]

We tend to mount SAREXs, especially the AF evaluated missions with all the wing aircraft and as many vehicles and people as possible. We do this to ensure maximum training bang for our bucks, to put on an impressive show, and to make sure that everyone's on the same sheet of music. We have detailed OPLANs and Warning Orders and all that.

However, when we have real world call outs we usually get a fraction of those resources responding and the planning is done on the fly. It's late at night and the carefully planned and supplied response is a distant memory.

One thing we can do is to have regularly scheduled exercises. Too many times we plan our SAREX's around other events. "Oh, we can't have an exercise that weekend. That's the weekend of the wing drill team competition." So the SAREX get's moved around and finally canceled because of too many conflicting events. Hold these even if they conflict and you will probably get an idea of the resources you'll have for a real world mission.

Another thing we can do is have regular phone alerts. Everyone gets called, texted, and e mailed just like it's the real deal but all they do is respond electronically. This will get everyone a good picture of the kind of response they can expect on real world missions.

[RADIOMAN015]

Also, no one said it had to be during the week.  No reason you can't put out the no-notice alert on Friday evening for a weekend
mission.

The answer, frankly, is that the majority of members will only go to missions within easy driving distance of their homes, reimbursed or not.  Maybe not the majority here, because most of us here are hyper-engaged already, but look around at your wings and see how many members are really willing to pickup and go for a 2-3+ days.  We all know the answer.

Showing me a regulation that says a member once signed into a mission has to stay for the entire mission.  A volunteer can decide how long they can stay at a mission and let the IC or branch director know, IF they have any limitations.  Otherwise there will be even less availability of personnel.

Since CAP is a community based programs with squadrons in a specific geographic areas, it's really the wings' (and/or if groups' authorized) responsibility to ensure they have adequately trained mission support,  ground teams, & aircrews (less of an issue they can just fly there) in every part of the wing.  Frankly it isn't my fault if mission base (as an example) is 2 hours away and they want you to show up at 0800 hrs local.  I sleep till 0600 and will leave my home at 0715, so I'll be there at 0915 hrs local, welcome to the real world of Civil Air Patrol.   BTW with a two hour drive time to return home it is likely that the maximum amount of time I would be willing to stay at mission base would be 1715 hrs local.  That will get me home at 1915 hrs local, the maximum safe duty day of 12 hours.  Remember that because wing couldn't plan/train enough people they built in that 4 hours of travel time for me IF the mission base was 10 minutes from my home (at my normal mission base duty station) I would be available the full 12 hours at mission base and maybe even longer (e.g. 2345 hrs local), because it would be limited drive time to home and I would be less worried about getting too tired while driving home. 

IF the wing needed me for another day, I might consider staying overnight if they paid for a comfortable hotel room, I am not interested in sleeping on the floor of mission base or in some tent.
     
IF I remember correctly in the ES section one can put in their available time and what they want to do for ES.   BTW I also don't want to go past midnight on any mission, and really don't want to be called before 0600 hrs local.  That's listed in my profile, that's what the planners need to use.  Again travel time from/to home reduces the available time at the mission base.

My guess is that many others feel the same way.  I am not going to kill myself driving home or get sick from lack of sleep because of a lack of planning or should I say the amount of members with all that ES bling of qualifications that NEVER seem to be available for anything until it becomes time for them to renew their qualifications.

That's the way I see it in CAP ES.
RM       

[Eclipse]

^ Far too many of our members walk around with a hat on that says "you're lucky I showed up at all", and then complain
when we are not taken seriously by other agencies.  It's further amusing when the assumption is that your sleep is "important" but
others should get up early so there's a mission base for you to stroll into after your morning spa.

Citing regs is beside the point here, that attitude is the reason we are not taken seriously in some areas of the country by other agencies.  You can't run a professional-level organization with people who believe they can come and go as they please and leave the
heavy lifting for "the other guy", and because of the inability to plan response strength, many wings choose to simply disengage in the first place.

Your bolding of "Civil" just indicates how little you understand the issue.  This is not a "civil vs. military" discussion.  The ARC which is a civil organization, has less tolerance than CAP by a long shot for people who think they can just wander in whenever they feel like it.  Their professionalized staff have as high or higher expectations of training and performance that CAP, and if you commit and son't show, or put in a 1/2-effort, they don't invite you back.

[JeffDG]

So no-notice is not reasonable for volunteers, I can see that, so how about semi-notice?  In other words you know the dates, so you can take off, but yo don't know the where or what.  That way stuff is "kinda-staged", people can arrange work, and there is still some semblence of surprise and requirement to think on your feet.

We've started down  this road with the "cold start" missions.  Instead of having a bunch of people standing around the ICP at the start of the mission, we've started not telling people where the ICP will be, or what time, until a call-blast goes out.  I think the next phase of this evolution will be to not release the exercise scenario to the mission staff until the same time.

For Ardent Sentry, we know our initial taskings for when the call comes, but we will be planning on-the-fly for the follow-on taskings.  I think that's a decent model for real-world.  We have certain missions that we do semi-regularly.  We should practice those, but throw new things into the mix.

[wuzafuzz]

So no-notice is not reasonable for volunteers, I can see that, so how about semi-notice?  In other words you know the dates, so you can take off, but yo don't know the where or what.  That way stuff is "kinda-staged", people can arrange work, and there is still some semblence of surprise and requirement to think on your feet.

Perfect.  People know it's an exercise in advance and make arrangements as necessary.  They have no idea what will happen.  When the call goes out EVERYONE starts from scratch.  Everything from finding an IC and staff, activating communications, standing up an ICP if indicated, and so on.

Every SAREX I've ever participated in was planned months in advance with plenty of time to identify and activate resources.  Every real mission I've been on was run out of someone's house with no MRO's, no MSA's, no flightline marshallers, no CUL, etc.  Nothing more than an IC and an aircrew or ground team.  For those reasons I do see value in seeing whether we can stand up a real mission base with proper staffing; just in case a Steve Fossett type of mission pops up.  Just don't bait and switch our volunteers with a fake REDCAP.

Some people have suggested we are always secondary or tertiary resources so we can take our time responding.  True in many cases, but not all.  We do need to respond quickly sometimes.  Distress ELT's and missing hikers are two examples.  In those instances we fail dramatically if we create unnecessary delay while someone's life may be slipping away.  We are among the first responders for those incidents.  That's not a wannabe fantasy, it is provable fact demonstrated repeatedly over the years.

[Larry Mangum]

My 2 cents,

1. I have seen it where the mission is run out of an IC's home, mine included as well as standing up a full mission base. The difference, was that every SAREX was run utilizing as a minimum an IC, AOBD, GBD, CUL if it was at the group level. If it was at the wing level, we filled all of the slots, and no one except a few knew what the scenario entailed.  Planning had to do their part, ops theirs and so on. So we trained as we fought as the parlance goes.

2. As an IC in real world missions, I have never insisted someone stay from the time the mission starts until it ends. That just is not realistic, and before you start, I see us as "unpaid professional", and that we quit being just "volunteers" once we signed up and agreed to follow the rules of the organization. But let's be real, we should never ask any member to put their job or family on the line to complete a mission. A wing should have enough trained and qualified personnel to allow members to rotate in and out of the mission as their availability permits. I do ask that they either commit to a complete operational period or be forthright with how much time they have available, so I can ensure they are utilized correctly.

3. Full "No Notice" exercises do not really work, in our environment, but no notice exercising of the alert system does, and can be just as effective, if it is done correctly.  When done right, you can get a good feel for who will respond and who will not.