BUTLERVILLE, Ind. - Even the response to a 10-kiloton nuclear device detonating in an American city starts in the 9-1-1 system.
In this nightmare nuclear scenario, the phone lines lead first to a dispatcher, then to a series of local, county and state civilian authorities, and then to the National Guard. Civilian agencies always are first on the scene; the National Guard is the nation's first military responder, supporting the governor and state emergency management agency.
Vigilant Guard an 11-day exercise in which the National Guard's 1,000-acre Muscatatuck Urban Training Center (MUTC) here stands in for Indianapolis after a nuclear bombing tests National Guard capabilities developed since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and since Hurricane Katrina exploded on Louisiana and Mississippi on Aug. 29, 2005.
The joint exercise uniting civilian authorities and troops from the National Guard, Reserve and active duty is hosted by the Indiana National Guard and ends May 18.
Vigilant Guard shows how local, state and federal agencies would come together like a mosaic of disaster response in a real calamity.
"The 9-1-1 call would generate a police officer, a firefighter or an emergency response person," LTG H Steven Blum, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, said during a visit here, speaking over the sound of a concrete drill as a National Guard Civil Support Team (CST) extracted the wounded and dead from a rubble pile.
"When the local first responder comes on the scene and they see what they're facing, the senior person becomes the incident commander," Blum said, sketching out the incident command system that is part of America's National Response Plan.
Repeatedly proven in Western wildfires where numerous agencies who may never have worked together before must quickly respond to a complex crisis spread over tens of thousands of rural and urban acres the incident command system gives responders a common operating plan, allowing trained people from disparate agencies to know in advance exactly how they fit in to the big picture in a catastrophe.
The civilian incident command system borrows heavily from military command and control models.
"The incident commander calls back to his or her higher command and tells them what they need," Blum explained. "They run that up quickly through the emergency response apparatus. If they can handle it at the local level, at the municipality, they do. If they can't, then they get county assistance. If the county can't, then they get state assistance. If they can't handle it there, we get interstate assistance through emergency mutual assistance compacts that have been prearranged.
"If that fails, then the governor has the option of calling the president and getting federal assistance civilian assistance in the form of money or equipment or manpower or expertise. If the military is deemed to be needed, the governor can call out the National Guard, and frequently does, early."
Blum was surrounded by Citizen-Soldiers and -Airmen working side-by-side with civilian responders in an exercise designed to stress participants and find the breaking points without compromising safety.
"One of our training objectives was to stress this to the point that the first responders needed help they were out of equipment, they were out of personnel," said Maj. Gen. R. Martin Umbarger, the adjutant general of the Indiana National Guard. "It caused them to go to the county, to the state. The governor activated the Guard. We were stressed to the point where we needed help from our sister states."
Illinois, Ohio and the National Guard Bureau pitched in.
"It was planned that way to stress us to the point where we would then go to Northern Command for assistance," Umbarger said.
 "This may well be the most demanding scenario our nation would face," said Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of Northern Command (NORTHCOM). "It's beyond the capacity of any single agency to respond to it on their own. That's what our nation does well it pulls together."
Most of the time 99.999 percent of the time since World War II disaster missions are accomplished below the federal level, the National Guard Bureau reported. Only 10 times since 1945 has a domestic response included a federalized National Guard and active duty troops.
The morning of Blum's May 12 visit toVigilant Guard, commanders identified areas for improvement in communications. "They had some successes, and they had some failures," Blum said. "They overcame the failures, and now it's pretty reliable. But it was a little rough in the first couple of hours, which is pretty realistic. Problems have been quickly worked around; we wouldn't have been able to work around them two years ago, so we would have broken much sooner."
While Vigilant Guard unfolds, National Guard Citizen-Soldiers and -Airmen are engaged in real-life missions in half the states and numerous foreign countries. Yet no one scheduled to attend Vigilant Guard had to cancel. Thousands of Guardmembers have been pulled into the exercise, including some on no notice. Those who did receive advance warning were required to respond in real time, with no advance set-up.
A Kiowa helicopter buzzed above the exercising Guardmembers, relaying film back to commanders. After a real nuclear detonation, an unmanned aerial vehicle might do the same job. The high-definition footage allows commanders to assess exactly what's happening, and it can be coupled with computer-generated terrain and building-interior models to plan how to tackle problems.
Some of the data for those models might come from a National Guard CIP-MAA detachment, Guardmembers who conduct Critical Infrastructure Protection Mission Assurance Assessments. Their mission: Ongoing all-hazard assessments of critical defense industrial infrastructure.
Concrete dust rose from a rubble pile as Soldiers labored to find victims located by search dogs and their civilian handlers. Guardmembers jogged by, guiding gurneys to field decontamination facilities. Medics evaluated and treated survivors.
"You wouldn't have seen any of this one day before 9-11," Blum said. The general turned to the CST team drilling in the concrete. "That capability didn't exist, to do urban search and rescue," he said. "The technical extraction did not exist."
He gestured to the decontamination tent that is part of a National Guard Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Enhanced Response Package (CERFP). "This capability didn't exist, to do advanced decontamination."
Beyond the conveyer-belt decontamination facility where Guardmembers encased in protective plastic suits could testify to the reality of Indiana's 80-degree temperatures, members of an Air National Guard Expeditionary Medical Support (EMEDS) team evaluated and treated casualties. "That capability didn't exist, to do the mass casualty treatment," Blum said. "The teamwork amongst the civilian first responders and the military first responders, interagency and government, did not exist. All of this is the post 9-11 environment and speaks very well that government and interagency and the military are working hand-in-hand for the benefit of the American people."
The resources the Guard has grown in the wake of two national disasters the terrorist attack and the storm have some intimidating acronyms (CIP-MAA, CERFP, CBRNE) and some awesome technology, but Blum said the recipe for the Guard's response after that terrible 9-1-1 call is simple:
"If you're going to command and control anything or coordinate anything or synchronize anything, you need superb communications. You need mobility you need trucks to bring people and equipment in and to bring people and things out. You need engineer equipment to clear roads and rubble and debris. You need general purpose aviation helicopters because they're the fastest way to get people in and out of an affected area. You certainly need medical equipment and supplies and you certainly need a security force to keep people that you don't want into the area out of the area and to control the people in the area so they don't do more harm to themselves and panic and become desperate."
Today, the 54 states and territories have Joint Forces Headquarters. Twelve CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and high yield Explosives) Enhanced Response Force Packages are being grown to 17. The National Guard has 55 Joint Operations Centers nationwide, six CIP-MAA detachments, 54 detachments of National Guard Reaction Forces and 54 Computer Emergency Response Teams. Joint Incident Site Communications Capability packages are being expanded from 39 to 72.
None not a single one of those assets existed on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Today, the National Guard is expanding 47 Weapons of Mass Destruction CSTs to 55; just 10 existed on Sept. 11, 2001.
"We're not exactly where I want to be," Blum said. "We're never going to be satisfied. Nor should we be. It's continual improvement. The only way you improve is to know what you need to improve."
Exercises such as Vigilant Guard are catalysts for continuous improvement, so that when someone makes that 9-1-1 call that leads to the National Guard they get the "always ready, always there" response they need.
"We're dramatically more ready than we were five years ago, when we had zero capability for this type of event," Blum said. "Now our capability is considerably better than zero: 47 CSTs, 17 chemical/biological response force packages is a considerable step in the right direction. Dramatically improved communications systems. Realistic training and exercising, beyond just tabletop exercises. Go look at these guys there's nothing simulated about the perspiration and the fatigue that they're feeling doing this."
An exercise on the scale of Vigilant Guard and two other joint training events occurring simultaneously Northern Edge, responding to terrorism in Alaska, and HURREX, responding to a hurricane in Rhode Island might only occur annually, but the National Guard and other federal, state and local agencies daily prepare for disaster.
Vigilant Guard forces participants to choose from a smorgasbord of capabilities and work around challenges. It provokes questions with real-life implications: Could the right equipment be quickly found in surrounding states? Is equipment correctly positioned around the country? Can about 100 aircraft capable of moving it be mustered quickly?
Commanders stress the team of teams to the breaking point. In the closing days, they replay the exercise sometimes literally, using images gathered by that Kiowa helicopter and other monitoring equipment to reinforce teaching points.
"We don't spend a lot of time on what we do well; we try to spend a lot of time on what we did not do well," Umbarger said.
"We don't need on the job training," said U.S. Rep. Baron Hill (D-Indiana). "We need to have these Soldiers and these first responders doing things right when a disaster does happen."
Other observers included civilian media and defense attaches representing National Guard State Partnership Program countries. For the defense attaches, Vigilant Guard was an opportunity to highlight the American model of military assistance to civilian authorities.
"The American people deserve the best response we can give them," Blum said. "The only way to do that is to have the best people you can find, train them to the most demanding standard you can and give them the best equipment you can find in the world and then you have a capability, hopefully, that can save you and your family when you need it."