CAMP FOGARTY, R.I. – A five-day planning course helps Soldiers, Airmen and interagency partners learn to build relationships and develop integrated plans that enable military and civilian organizations to respond as one, helping prepare an entire state to respond before the first Soldier or Airman ever moves.

The National Guard Joint Planners Course, held in early August in Rhode Island, results in better coordination and a National Guard that is more ready to defend the state and country through increased insight and access to available resources.

“The class points out that the Army can't do it alone, the Air Force can't do it alone, we've got to do this as a whole team,” said Lt. Col. Robert Geary, Homeland Defense Civil Support Plans Officer, National Guard Bureau.

The course was developed to address a gap in training for Soldiers and Airmen assigned to planning positions at the Joint Force Headquarters level. While service members receive doctrinal planning experience throughout their careers, Geary said there was a need for a course to teach them how to plan at the state level.

“They don't really teach you the art of integration, the art of collaboration, the art of working at a joint headquarters staff, working across A staffs, G staffs and J staffs,” Geary said.

At the company or battalion level, planners are primarily concerned with the personnel, equipment and resources available to their organization. At the state level, that scope expands beyond the military.

Students learn how emergency management, federal agencies and public and private-sector organizations contribute to a state’s ability to respond. Power, water, communications and cyber infrastructure can all become critical to emergency response and the military’s ability to project forces.

“Sometimes our state and our private and public partners don't realize how critical the things that they provide to us [are] to be able to fight and wage the nation's wars,” Geary said.

Understanding those dependencies allows planners to identify vulnerabilities and consider the effects a disruption could have across the state and beyond.

Geary shared how a wildfire in Colorado came within 100 feet of a financial institution’s server farm, which was responsible for roughly a quarter of global economic activity.

“No one other than the financial institution and some other folks in the great state of Colorado knew how important that thing was,” Geary said. “It [the fire] didn't even have to get to a hundred feet had they [planners] known what they should have known.”

Geary compared a state to a living organism, where different systems depend on one another to function. State and local governments, private businesses, public utilities, federal agencies and the military may have different responsibilities, but a disruption to one can affect the others.

“We're all connected,” Geary said. “It's the understanding of that ecosystem that makes us so much stronger and so much better.”

As threats facing the United States continue to evolve, the Joint Planners Course challenges planners to consider how adversaries could disrupt operations at home while National Guard forces are simultaneously called upon to support federal missions abroad.

“On your worst day, if you had to throw on all of the switches and prioritize resources and balance the need between DSCA [Defense Support of Civil Authorities] response and getting people out the door [deployed], we ask state officials how they are going to operate if fifty or seventy-five percent of the Guard is gone supporting federal missions,” Geary said.

The course asks planners to examine their existing plans with that possibility in mind and identify other organizations capable of filling those gaps. Some states are examining greater use of state defense forces, Civil Air Patrol and volunteer organizations to develop capabilities before they are needed.

Modern threats also do not have to begin with a conventional attack. Cyberattacks, disruptions to communications and threats to critical infrastructure can affect a state’s ability to respond and impact military operations.

By bringing military, government and civilian organizations together before a crisis, planners can better understand what their state needs, what resources are available and where vulnerabilities exist.

“It's always great when your assumptions are less and you're dealing more with facts, you can develop a better plan,” Geary said. “We make a lot of assumptions when we don't have all the right people in the right room.”

For team Rhode Island, the objective is to have those conversations now so that, on the state’s worst day, the people responsible for responding already know how to work together and are ready to act – true to the National Guard’s enduring promise of “Always Ready, Always There.”