Air Force ROTC, ALLIES enact crisis simulation

A massive cyclone has hit Karachi, Pakistan, devastating the coastal city. Oil fires are raging in the city's port and another storm will hit the region in two weeks.

Thankfully, this nightmare disaster scenario is not real, but rather was a crisis simulation that occurred on March 16 testing the abilities of Air Force Reserve Officers Training Core (ROTC) Detachment 365 and members of Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services (ALLIES).

Air Force ROTC Detachment 365 is based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and includes students from Tufts, MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, Gordon College, Salem State and Endicott College. ALLIES, which is under the Institute for Global Leadership's umbrella, is an organization dedicated to forging stronger ties between future civilian and military leaders.

The crisis simulation featured a panel of moderators: Fletcher Military Fellows United States Air Force (USAF) Lt. Col. Robert Bortree and USAF Lt. Col. Dan Tulley; Harvard Military Fellows USAF Lt. Col. Chase McCown and United States Army (USA) Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green; Army Senior Military Fellow at the MIT Center for Logistics and Transportation Marc Sukolsky; and USAF Col. Lawrence McLaughlin, who is also the Air Force ROTC Detachment 365 Commander.

The idea for a joint effort between ALLIES and Air Force ROTC took root when senior Nathan Elowe, an Air Force ROTC cadet, approached ALLIES about a joint simulation.

Air Force ROTC had done a crisis simulation in the past at Tufts in the fall of 2008 in which a hypothetical earthquake struck Taiwan.

"We wanted to do another natural disaster because the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti was so recent and fresh on everyone's minds," junior Chelsea Brown, one of the simulation planning committee's co-chairs and a member of ALLIES, said. "We kind of wanted to experiment with that ... because natural disasters call on U.S. military power to help with humanitarian intervention."

Brown added that the reason Pakistan was chosen was because the recent Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship symposium focused on South Asia.

"We had a lot of intellectual capital dealing with that," Brown said. "We thought it would be interesting to do an area of Pakistan that's not very well known: the coast … Pakistan seemed like the perfect option because it's such a volatile area and it seemed like there were a lot of different factors that come into play because of it."

At the start of the simulation, participants were briefed on the situation and told to quickly develop a response plan and timeline. They were also given a list of resources they could use, such as the hospital ship USNS Mercy. Air Force ROTC cadets represented NATO, while Tufts students represented various governmental organizations, including the United Nations, the United States Agency for International Development and the United States Embassy.

The six groups of participants consisted of both Air Force ROTC cadets and Tufts students, not all of whom were ALLIES members. They were given a little over an hour to plan a response timeline for the crisis, which is considered a realistic timeframe for a real disaster scenario.

"They were told to worry less about rebuilding and more about humanitarian relief efforts," freshman Katie Monson, one of the planners of the simulation and a member of ALLIES, said, adding that the hypothetical oncoming second cyclone necessitated this.

However, the situation did not stay stable during the planning period, Monson explained.

"We had three separate ‘injects,' is what we called them. The first: They were told that the oil port had been destroyed such that the Pakistani government was requesting help to stabilize the port so that the entire country could get energy resources. The second inject was that they were told the Karachi police were unreliable. The police were defecting to help their family members, so the U.S. military couldn't count on local support on the ground," Monson said.

The final inject was that each group had a member playing an undercover CIA operative pretending to be an economic advisor at the Karachi consulate.

"That person was given a briefing that requested they procure a helicopter and support system to evacuate a terror subject, and they were not allowed to tell anyone else in the scenario their actual role, nor were they allowed to explain why they were requesting those resources," Monson added.

The idea for undercover operatives was not Elowe's, but came from one of the ALLIES simulation writers. "That was kind of an experimental role … When I first saw it, I looked at it and thought ‘This could either really not work or provide a really good insight for students afterwards,'" Elowe said. He added that the success of the CIA operative role depended largely on whether or not the participants blew their covers, which was the case in several groups.

"One thing the colonel [Lawrence McLaughlin] mentioned in his debrief when he was giving some feedback was it really highlighted some of the things that happened in a real response like this," Elowe said. "Each group that comes to the table planning might have hidden agendas that they're not going to disclose to the whole group because whole group might not agree with what they're doing or prioritize in the same way.

"Normally in a [crisis simulation] like this, because each of the role players isn't coming from that organization directly, they just kind of read up about it and try and have that perspective," he added. "They don't explicitly have these hidden agendas. I think it was interesting adding in a hidden agenda and seeing how people dealt with it, and everybody learned from that."

After the planning period, the groups presented their disaster response plans, which involved everything from setting up airfields to deliver supplies, putting out oil fires in the city's port and evacuating U.S. citizens in the city.