FEATURE ARTICLE

December 2006

Service teams seek more cooperation to save lives

By Harold Kennedy

With U.S. forces heavily engaged in combat, peacekeeping and disaster-relief missions around the world, military search-and-rescue units are trying to figure out how to work more closely together while saving lives.

Although the Air Force has primary responsibility for combat search and rescue, all of the services have units that conduct life-saving missions. To be successful, they frequently have to cooperate with each other — and after 9/11 and a series of natural disasters at home — with state and local first-responders.

The problem is that all of these organizations operate differently, said Air Force Reserve Col. Steve Kirkpatrick, commander of the 920 Rescue Wing at Patrick Air Force Base, Fla.

“The Air Force has one way of doing things; the Army has another,” he told a recent conference in Arlington, Va. The same is true of the Navy, Marines, Coast Guard and civilian emergency services. “We have to work on a standard game plan.”

Search-and-rescuers from all of the services and some civilian agencies gathered at the conference, sponsored by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement, to discuss common problems and possible solutions. High on their list of imperatives was improving their ability to conduct joint operations amid the often-frantic circumstances of life-saving missions.

Kirkpatrick cited two major, back-to-back events when multi-organizational cooperation was critical. The first occurred in June 2005 while the 920th was deployed to Afghanistan. “A Navy SEAL (sea, air and land) reconnaissance team was surprised and overwhelmed by a larger enemy force, and an MH-47 helicopter sent to rescue them was shot down,” he recalled. All 16 on board the chopper —- SEALs and Army special operations aviators — were killed. The entire recon team was missing.

What followed, Kirkpatrick said, was possibly the largest combat search-and-rescue operation since the end of the Vietnam War. HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters searched the mountainous terrain for bodies and possible survivors, coordinating their efforts with coalition forces on the ground. Meanwhile, A-10 Warthog close-air support aircraft and AC-130 gun ships strafed enemy positions “to keep their heads down,” he said.

The rescuers recovered all of the dead, including those from the helicopter and the recon team, but it wasn’t easy. “The mountains had really big peaks, 15,000 to 20,000 feet high,” Kirkpatrick said. “It was almost impossible for the HH-60s to work at that height.”

Some of the slopes were so steep that the helicopters couldn’t land, so pararescuemen had to rappel down to recover some of the bodies. Meanwhile, one member of the recon team had survived, with protection from local Afghans.

“The PJs had to be creative to get that guy out,” Kirkpatrick explained. “He had been shot in the back and was near death, but they were able to revive him and get him to a safe location.”

One lesson from the episode, Kirkpatrick said, is that in complex missions, it is important to conduct at least minimal planning beforehand, no matter how tight time is. “Face-to-face coordination is priceless,” he noted.

Once rescuers have a mission plan, however, they should remain flexible to react to changing circumstances, Kirkpatrick emphasized. “Sometimes you have to do things on the fly.”

That became particularly clear, he said, in the response to Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast just two and a half weeks after the 920th had returned from Afghanistan.

“The operation involved practically the whole wing,” Kirkpatrick said. When the helicopters left Patrick, “quite frankly they didn’t know where they were going to go.” They were ordered, first, to Jackson, Miss., but when they got there they found no fuel, no means of communications and no further orders.

Eventually, the choppers found fuel at a Coast Guard facility in Mobile, Ala., and flew on to New Orleans, where “everything was pure chaos,” Kirkpatrick said. “There was no air traffic control and not a lot of command and control. You do what you have to do.

“There were fires everywhere, and lots of people on roofs waving flashlights. We were literally putting wheels on rooftops to get them out.” The busy helicopters had to find a safe location to drop evacuees quickly so they could return for others. A popular choice at least initially was an intersection of Interstate 10. New Orleans International Airport served “very well” as a makeshift triage and critical-care center, Kirkpatrick said. “They were using luggage carts to move casualties.”

The 920th’s helicopters — replenished by KC-135 refueling aircraft flying in from Jackson — were in the air almost constantly. “After two weeks of that, the crews were wasted, but they managed to save 1,043 lives,” he said.

When military units are operating in U.S. urban areas, they need to do a better job communicating with local emergency services, said Lee Benson, senior pilot in the Los Angeles County, Calif., Fire Department.

“We had an incident when the U.S. Marines were training in the L.A. area,” he said. “They hadn’t told anybody they were there, and they had a very serious accident. A couple died and several more were injured.

“We were tasked to go in and pick them up,” Benson said, “Our urban search-and-rescue folks rappelled down to get them out. That could have gone better if we could have talked to each other.”

Terry Ascherin, a consultant with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, agreed. “Although there is so much great technology out there, communications is still a problem,” he said. It would help if more emergency services — military and civilian — negotiated memorandums of understanding with other organizations before action occurs, he said. “I don’t know why there aren’t more of those,” he added.

In 2001, U.S. allies in Europe began to realize the need to develop their own ability to conduct combat search-and-rescue missions, said Belgian army Maj. Marc Raets, joint personnel recovery staff officer for the European Air Group.

The EAG, headquartered in High Wycombe, UK, is a seven-nation organization created to improve cooperation between their air forces. Members include the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain.

Since the end of World War II, Western European nations, expecting to go to war in alliance with the United States, have relied upon U.S. forces to perform combat search-and-rescue missions for them. “When a European pilot goes down on the battlefield, the U.S. picks him up,” Raets said. Europeans, however, are not satisfied with that arrangement.

“If several pilots go down, we know there is a priority list, and European pilots will be at the bottom of the list,” he said.

Also, he asked: “What happens if the United States is not on the battlefield?” The 25-member European Union, which does not include the United States, has been working to improve its ability to conduct military operations when this nation chooses not to be involved.

With such factors in mind, the EAG has been working to enable Europeans to take on their own combat search-and-rescue, “but we’re not there yet,” Raets said.

Many helicopters now flown by EAG countries aren’t capable of combat search and rescue, Raets said. “They are old and poorly equipped,” he said. “They’re not armored, and they have no weapons. In the future, we will have these things, but we don’t now.”

EAG is working to standardize hardware, training, and command-and-control structures among its members. It has been conducting a training program since 2002. But progress is being complicated because of operational disagreements, Raets said.

“Not all European military services are allowed to do the same things,” he said. “They have national caveats that say, ‘No, I can’t do that,’ or “I have to call my government first.”

EAG also has had difficulty standing up a purely European combat search-and-rescue organization. The European Union “is very young and not fully operational,” Raets said.

For that reason, EAG has been working primarily with NATO, which has been led militarily by the United States since the early days of the Cold War, Raets said. NATO has a panel studying European combat search-and-rescue issues, and soon it will take over EAG’s training program.

Please email your comments to HKennedy@ndia.org

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