Thank you for your hard work in planning and executing this year's Hampton Roads Full-Scale Exercise conducted from May 17 through May 19 in Hampton Roads. It was impressive to see local, state, and federal government work together on this vitally important exercise program to improve coordination, communication and enhance capabilities between entities during a disaster event.

I authored legislation to fund the Center for Asymmetric Warfare’s AWI exercises in Congress because these exercises are crucial to national preparedness in the global war on terrorism. The training, testing and experimentation opportunities provided to Los Angeles and Ventura counties and the sixty Federal, State, and Local agencies who took part in a recent exercise will help them to act as a cohesive group in the event of an actual incident. I strongly encourage agencies to participate in future exercises as well.

Since September 11th, Los Angeles has formed even closer partnerships with federal, state and local agencies to share intelligence and respond effectively to any incident. [Asymmetric Warfare Initiative 2004-South] put our front line police officers and firefighters, their commanders, and the civilian leaders of this city to the test, and provided us with a useful assessment on how we can further perfect our operations. It is important that our first responders in the City of Los Angeles continue to exercise critical incidents of a catastrophic nature, and Determined Promise created a scenario that dealt with the impacts of such an incident on the public and the environment at the Port.

I am pleased to have worked closely with representatives of the dozens of local, state and federal agencies that participated in the exercise. I also appreciate the close coordination and cooperation from the State of California’s Office of Emergency Services, California National Guard, and California Office of Homeland Security Exercise Program. I look forward to additional opportunities to collaborate with these agencies on future exercises in the future.

Readiness for responding to terrorist attacks is essential. The public safety community must train and exercise to respond to a range of disasters and emergencies that may occur at anytime, anywhere. Joint training among all Law Enforcement, Fire, and Emergency Service personnel from the local, county, state and federal agencies is a vital part of enhancing our capabilities. Participation in joint exercises such as the [Asymmetric Warfare Initiative 2004-South] exercise is a critical part of ensuring that each agency knows its role and is prepared to work together to protect the communities we serve.”

Local Involvement, technology opportunities, Risk Communications, and Executive Decision making were all part of the benefits of the [Asymmetric Warfare Initiative 2004-South] exercise and I was delighted to have been a part of the process of better preparing our community. Now it’s important that we sustain the lessons learned from our experiences. Obviously, the best way to identify our jurisdiction’s capabilities is during an actual event, however it is too late to make necessary adjustments to plans and procedures. By exercising, a community can test, evaluate, and continually improve their emergency management system. Exercises stress performance of both people and organizations and are a measure of the competence of an emergency management program. The purpose of any effective exercise is to test a communities' plan and its operational response capability. Finally, working with the Center for Asymmetric Warfare was a pleasure, as they provided a very professional team that were able to work with all elements of our very diverse community.

We had the opportunity of seeing some work they were doing with the Navy. We found that they had a great capability, a capability we could take advantage of. We could never duplicate that capability in any consultant or any other outside group.

Operation Golden Phoenix 2010 involved over 133 agencies and about 800 participants. It was really a large exercise that crossed many city lines and covered the entire county, extending even to adjacent counties. It involved a great deal of organizational skills to get that group of people together, to get them organized, and keep the exercise planning effort moving.

The CAW developed this exercise, oversaw its implementation, and is writing the after action report. Our experiences were so favorable, in terms of working with them. This was a very difficult project – it’s one of the largest exercises that public agencies in the area have put on… The CAW was very responsive to all of our inquiries and were dogmatic about ensuring that we responded to them in a timely manner. They developed incredibly strong injects that kept the exercise moving.

The exercise went seamlessly, from an organizational standpoint. There were certainly areas of improvement for usbut, in terms of what [CAW] had to do, the exercise really went seamlessly. It was quite a pleasure to work with them.

With regard to Operation Golden Phoenix 2010, the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Asymmetric Warfare did an outstanding job. This is the third time that I have worked with them on an exercise and, in regards to planning and execution of the exercise component itself, it was well organized and well conducted.

I have to say that I’ve never worked with a more professional group than the Naval Postgraduate School CAW. They did a fantastic job in coordinating and producing this large-scale exercise in a very short amount of time

I would like to extend my appreciation to the Naval Postgraduate School and the Center for Asymmetric Warfare. I thought the whole crew did an excellent job. Their expertise, their steadfastness, their dedication to duty, and the great work that they put in was a tremendous help to us. I don’t see how we could have down this, in the timeframe that we did it, without their expertise.

We in Los Angeles County and the Operational Area had a great deal of satisfaction working with them and I think a lot of good work in terms of interagency and multi-jurisdictional cooperation will come out of this.

From the city perspective, in Los Angeles, [Operation Golden Phoenix 2010] was a huge initiative – a very large complex exercise, involving multiple departments, all the way from our field response assets, to our EOC, and all the way up to our executive level. With the short amount of time that this exercise was given to meet the deadline, the Center for Asymmetric Warfare, I think, did a tremendous job.

I think, for a lot of us, the scope and complexity of this exercise needed leadership and oversight at a higher level than we’re used to dealing with. We are all training and exercise designers, so we do have that expertise. But when you’re revolving an exercise around the detonation of a 10-kiloton nuclear device, you reach a level of complexity and scope of integration that a lot of us have never encountered before. I think CAW being the center point of coordination was really instrumental in bringing us all together in a more collaborative environment.

I think being introduced to the [ICBRNE program] was an excellent way to tap into our input and integrate an exceptional capability into the EOCs. We’ve never seen this kind of technology before and that tech component was really great. Adding in the public information piece which we all know, at the local jurisdictional level and the operational level, is critical in getting safety alerts and warnings out to the public and in keeping them informed – we got a chance to actually do that through CAW’s exercise design.

This may sound really trite, but we could have not done it without them. They did a great job.

I want to ensure that [the CAW team] knows how appreciative AUVSI is for the hard work that went into making last year’s event a tremendous success. FF-TTX 2010 would not have happened without the NPS team assisting with coordination, facilitation, and all of the other details that your team seamlessly pulled together.

AUVSI has received excellent feedback from the event … and the report generated after the exercise has received terrific reviews. AUVSI could not be happier with the outcome of FF-TTX 2010, and none of this would have been possible without cooperation and support from the NPS team.

FF-TTX 2010 was a tremendous success and will be referenced frequently as unmanned systems are increasingly utilized by the public safety community. The support that you, the NPS team, and all of the attendees and participants provided to make this event a success is nothing short of amazing. Thank you for everything that you have done over the last year to ensure that FF-TTX 2010 was the best exercise it could be.