Alabama Wing Emergency Services School

[husker]

Alabama wing has announced a new cycle of ground operations training on http://WESS.alwg.us. The training is open to anyone per the activity announcement (http://wess.alwg.us/documents/2011-2012%20WESS.pdf) and interested cadets and senior members are encouraged to participate.

This is our 14th year of training.  The program was started as the original test bed for the ES curriculum project, and has since grown to be one of the largest Wing based ground team training programs in CAP.  Last year, students from Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennesee and Georgia participated. 

[JC004]

Could I get the materials for this?  Some people have e-mailed me attachments but I want to collect more if I can.  I've got several things so far but no controller stuff, so I am particularly interested in that as well as scenarios, planning materials, etc.

http://captalk.net/index.php?topic=13700.0

[husker]

JC, what do you mean specifically regarding "controller" information? I'll try to get you whatever we have that would be beneficial to you.

[N Harmon]

A "controller" is a member of the exercise team who directs the feeding of information into exercise players. For example, a controller might manage how/when to give NTAP data to the planning section (ie. X minutes after they request it). Or they might inject clues when an exercise has stalled out (ie. Reports of an ELT being heard near Burlington).

Controllers can also act as simulators (ie. role play a person who CAP wishes to interview). And they can also be exercise evaluators, assessing how well the players performed.

Unfortunately there is not a lot of good information out there on how to design and run a CAP exercise. Much of what I know has come from FEMA IS-139 and participating in designing/running exercises.

[arajca]

In my non-CAP experience, there are three groups in an exercise:
Players - these are the people doing their normal duties in exercise.
Controllers - these folks control the pace and timing of the exercise. They provide the injects and simulate field forces if needed.
Observers - these folks watch the exercise and serve as evaluators.

The biggest problem CAP has is that the players are also the controllers at the same time. Typically, there is no separation of duties.

[JC004]

What they said.  I can't get much locally for this because PAWG (and perhaps many other wings - IDK for sure, but that's irrelevant) has traditionally, as long as I can remember, almost always done exercises where the mission base staff just do the controller job.  Unfortunately, this isn't the best method because then the mission base staff don't get effective training because they know where the objectives are, and are expending their energy on running the exercise.  I first learned about controllers from outside organizations that run exercises based on standards.  Then I took the FEMA courses.

There isn't much out there on CAP exercises and that's what I'm trying to address here.  I wish to put resources online for units to adopt and run better exercise programs.  A full program with tabletops, functional exercises, full scale exercises - the whole deal.  Standards-based and effective - that's the objective.