Photo By Senior Airman Ruben Garibay | Chris Bailey (left), 377th Air Base Wing Inspector General Inspections and Exercises...... read more read more
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KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. — Kirtland recently conducted a three-day Initial Response Force exercise during the first week of October.
According to Col. Michael Power, 377th Air Base Wing commander, the purpose of an IRF exercise is to ensure an Air Force installation is prepared to respond to a potential nuclear incident should one occur in the Southwest region of the United States. The key goal is to ensure that individuals that work together on a regular basis get the time to practice and improve their capabilities to work alongside other agencies off the installation to keep Airmen, Guardians, civilians, and the Air Force mission safe.
“While we hope the day never comes that we would have an incident, we want to make sure we practice it in real time, doing it the way we would do it by our regulations and checklists and with the guidance in place making sure that if that day ever comes, we wouldn’t be taking it on for the first time,” Power said. “It allows us to practice it in a clearer environment, where we can build the relationships and walk through it like we would do it in a real-world situation.”
This IRF was practiced as a tabletop exercise in a group setting that allowed the scenario to be paused as needed and discussed to allow different teams to provide their inputs for specific parts of the scenario.
This also allowed other members to immediately respond with inputs and provide suggestions for improving processes.
“Tabletop exercises really allow us to take our time. It gives us more flexibility and allows us to get responses to the scenarios that we require to effectively respond to the incident,” said Power.
Chief Master Sgt. Antonio Cooper, 377th Air Base Wing command chief, believes IRF’s are important because it allows Airmen to be more prepared to respond to national security incidents and that it’s important for them to understand their role in the response.
“Airmen need to be prepared well before an actual event occurs,” stated Cooper. “So hopefully they will have a lot of lessons learned from our IRF.”
Since this was Cooper’s first IRF at Kirtland he found it very educational on the operations side and the impact of the different roles that each section has during an incident response.
“This particular exercise wasn’t hands on, but we were able to see the second and third order of effects and can see each section and how they get after the IRF, and it helped us learn a lot,” said Cooper.
Power says the wing plans to run two IRFs per year, one being a tabletop exercise, like the one they recently completed, and a normal base wide IRF where the participants actually practice the response as it would happen during a real work incident.
| Date Taken: | 10.05.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 10.26.2023 15:19 |
| Story ID: | 456611 |
| Location: | KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, NEW MEXICO, US |
| Web Views: | 12 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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