Imagine a 9.0-magnitude undersea megathrust earthquake, one of the five largest ever recorded, followed by a 128-foot tsunami that traveled up to six miles inland, followed by a level 7 nuclear accident, in one 24-hour period. On March 11, 2011, that is precisely what happened on the northern shore of Japan's Honshu Island, leaving an estimated 4.4 million people without electricity and 1.4 million without water.
In response, U.S. forces in the Pacific immediately began to organize. U.S. Pacific Command activated elements of Joint Task Force (JTF) 519 to augment staff from U.S. Forces Japan (USFJ) forming the Joint Support Force (JSF) headquarters at Yokota Air Base, located west of Tokyo, and 175 miles south of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Within hours of the event, PACOM ordered the launch of Operation Tomodachi to provide humanitarian assistance/disaster relief (HA/DR), foreign consequence management (FCM), and military assistance with the voluntary authorized departure of U.S. military family members in the affected area.
Navy information professionals from across the Pacific answered the call, including IPs from U.S. Pacific Fleet, 7th Fleet, Task Force 76, Task Force 70, Naval Forces Japan, and Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station Far East, by forming a core team that led the way in providing assistance to Japan.
The sheer magnitude and scope of the crisis brought together a host of challenges not typically seen in operations U.S. forces responded to in the past. The joint force was faced with unique communications challenges from the start, specifically in transmission, communications control, information management, interoperability and joint and bilateral information sharing.
Infrastructure
Major portions of the Global Information Grid were disrupted due to damage from the earthquake. Defense Information Systems Agency Pacific, along with DISA Japan Field Office, rapidly identified and reported damage and did an absolutely incredible job of restoring critical bandwidth in record time. Within two days, DISA restored most of the terrestrial connectivity via alternate routing, contracting new services, and repairing fiber-optic cables. Without this core infrastructure, the operation would have never gotten off the ground.
Rapid Growth
U.S. Forces Japan headquarters, at Yokota Air Base, became the nucleus for U.S. operations. Prior to the disasters, USFJ had a staff of 180 personnel, but within days personnel began to converge to support operations, including military and civilian personnel from every service; personnel from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)/U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance; Nuclear Regulatory Commission; USAID's Disaster Assistance Response Team; Department of Energy; and various other government and non-governmental organizations.
Within two weeks of the disasters, nearly 800 personnel were working from USFJ headquarters. The rapid growth created numerous network infrastructure challenges. The first few days after the disaster were spent transitioning more than 300 SIPRNET and Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange System-Japan (CENTRIXS-JPN) clients to the unclassified NIPRNET; expanding the infrastructure to accommodate an increase in users; setting up hundreds of accounts; and working out office space requirements. U.S. Forces Japan J6's command, control, communications and computer (C4) systems branch added more than 500 workstations to its NIPRNET domain in less than two weeks.
Despite massive and swift growth, USFJ maintained a forward-leaning information assurance posture by using operational risk management and daily resource requirement board meetings to assess the IT needs of the command and the most prudent method of satisfying the requirements. The key to the speed of this activity is that USFJ's J6 is the Designated Accrediting Authori