Introduction: The U.S. Third Fleet uses APAN to plan and execute crisis response training.
Exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) is the world's largest multinational maritime exercise, conducted biennially on even years in Hawaii. Since 1971, the U.S. Third Fleet has led the planning of this exercise which has been designed to increase international cooperation around the Indo -Pacific area. RIMPAC’s exercise planners have used APAN.org to aide in disaster relief since 2012. RIMPAC organizers added disaster relief training events to provide participants a chance to learn more about each other's capabilities and interoperability, while being able to put those learned practices into play for real-world response to disaster situations.
Challenges: Enable trainers to plan and execute international crisis simulations using the same tools that would be used in real crisis events.
Since RIMPAC first began, each year there are more and more participants. In 2018, with more than 2,000 people participating in the fictitious disaster relief response which includes military coalition partners and local Hawaiian medical facilities, exercise planners want to provide a collaborative environment that can be used during training and also used if a real event occurred. Tools need to be flexible to accommodate changing requirements throughout the planning process and provide consistency over repeated biannual events.
Solutions: An APAN training community called “Operation Restore Griffon” was built for execution of the new HA/DR exercise (HADREX). Just as it would be used in a real-world crisis response event, APAN was used for information exchange between U.S. military, coalition partners, and civilian participants.
During HADREX execution, a blog is used by the exercise control group to disseminate instant updates to all participants regarding simulated scenarios. Training audience members will subscribe to this blog via email or RSS and receive the most recent updates as soon as they are posted. Similar to what occurs in a real disaster, organizations and militaries participating in the operation will upload daily situation reports so all participants will benefit from shared information reducing the duplicative efforts.
The exercise incorporates crowd sourced crisis mapping components to simulate the mass influx of social media messages that are produced during a disaster. Volunteers produce and validate over 2,000 incident reports that are funneled into APAN's map feeds. Additional information layers from outside sources like the Hawaii Association of Hospitals and the Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) will also be added to the map to provide situational awareness and realism to various disaster scenarios.
Results: Increasing the speed of execution and reliability, APAN enables RIMPAC planners to build on experiences year after year.
APAN assists RIMPAC planners to create ‘capable, adaptive, partners’ by providing disaster responders and coalition militaries are able to train using the same tools that would be used in a real-world events. RIMPAC 2018 incorporates the HADREX fully into the exercise and by incorporating training for first responders to use APAN for improved collaboration and communication. Because RIMPAC fosters multi-national cooperation, enhances interoperability, enables professional engagement, and achieves respective national objectives to build capable and adaptive coalition partners the use of APAN meets this objective.