Perfect place for the training.
Via Army Times:
As the Army and top leaders look to a potential urban fight in dense, dangerous and confusing terrain, their National Guard counterparts are working the complexities of urban response right now.
Recently, troops with the 46th Military Police Command of the Michigan National Guard began a three-year effort to respond to a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack in Detroit. When they fill that role, soldiers in that unit fall under the command of the active Army, specifically U.S. Army North.
The first stage of the exercise ran for three days, from Aug. 21-23, with a “tabletop exercise” and terrain walk through for leaders and planners to identify who would do what as the Guard units fit into the intricate ways in which many groups coordinate disaster response in urban settings.
A key role of Task Force 46 and elements of the MP command is decontaminating those exposed to toxic elements in the CBRN environment. Local agencies, from city to state government and emergency response units, lead their respective areas, but Army assets can hit certain needs at a large scale.
“As you go, the intent is to fill larger gaps rather than take over,” said Robert Naething, deputy to the commanding general of U.S. Army North, which oversees such Army responses inside the United States.
Task Force 46’s key mission is mass decontamination and urban search and rescue, said Maj. Gen. Michael Stone, commanding general of the 46th MP Command and the task force.
While state and local emergency responders do have some capabilities to decontaminate, they’re somewhat limited to a few hundred people at a time.
A mass emergency CBRN event could produce tens of thousands of casualties, Stone said.
There have been similar training exercises with New York City and units at nearby Fort Hamilton, but the Detroit exercise is of a new type of planning between Army Forces Command and the Guard.
It was born, in part, out of the Army’s renewed focus on dense urban terrains, or urban environments.
It’s about going beyond initial responses and stabilization to adding in local experts, academic researchers and the cyber community, among others, to better flesh out all the varieties of situations units face in the urban terrain, Stone said.