Active shooter drill chaos on an Air Force base

[LittleLebowski]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/19/us/ai...BORpRfN91ymFjs

On an August morning at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the medical treatment facility was holding a mass casualty drill. Personnel acting as the injured streamed in.
Across the base, unbeknownst to the medical staff, a second active shooter drill was taking place, with a second set of people pretending to be injured.
Then a real injured person came on the scene: someone who worked at the medical facility hurt their ankle jogging on base, and called another employee screaming and crying.

[GuanoLoco]

Only .gov could engineer a goat fuck of such massive proportions.

[Hawker800]

This book shows that the USAF has learned very little.

[jetfire]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/19/us/ai...BORpRfN91ymFjs

Back when this first happened in August I guessed that what kicked the fuckup off in grand scale was someone who didn't know that an exercise was going on calling BDOC and reporting an active shooter.

Turns out I was right. The thing is that when that call comes in, even if base SF knows that there are exercises going on, they absolutely have to treat it like its real world, which automatically triggers a civilian LE response as well. Combine that with someone calling 911 from a cell phone and reporting an active shooter and you end up with a total clusterfuck.

[Trigger]

Yeah, this is mostly a communication problem. Let me guess, there are multiple wings at WPAFB, and the exercises people in one wing (which owns the Med Group) did not talk with the other wing which owns the SF and the BDOC and active shooter exercises.

Sounds like an excellent opportunity to fire the chief of exercises (the IG or the IGI when I did it) and start over again. For the encouragement of others.

[ranger]

Please tell me that this was a civilian or at least non-DOD - "someone who worked at the medical facility hurt their ankle jogging on base, and called another employee screaming and crying."

[Sensei]

Some of them had problems communicating with the incident commander -- Sherman said that would be the base fire chief on duty -- because the Air Force and local police systems didn't work together. Some never checked in with the incident commander, the Air Force said. Some who did had trouble identifying the chief on the radio.

Yep...

[Drang]

Some of them had problems communicating with the incident commander -- Sherman said that would be the base fire chief on duty -- because the Air Force and local police systems didn't work together. Some never checked in with the incident commander, the Air Force said. Some who did had trouble identifying the chief on the radio.

Yep...

TBH, I would be concerned about an exercise where nothing like that happened, it would make me wonder if everything was so rehearsed it hd no value as a drill at all.

Mind you, it sure sounds like this may have been their first time at the rodeo.

[Lon]

There were lots of issues that day. Was quite a mess. Kept waiting for our team to get called, but we didn’t. Some poor AF SF kid ended up breaching a door by using his firearm. Think that was the only shot that day.

[txdpd]

Sometimes it's best lesson is learning from someone else's screw ups.

It sounds like things really didn't go off the rails until shots were fired. There's a case to be made for giving lowly patrol types breaching equipment. In a real event, teams that were looking for the shooter, could be diverted to the sound of gunfire and lead to good guys looking good guys.