It is starting again. My travel is getting out of hand. Over the next 2 months I will be on a rotating schedule of being home for a week and traveling for a week.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning I attended the Acts 29 church Planters Bootcamp in my hometown of St Louis. Then after the bootcamp I hopped on an airplane and flew to Philadelphia and drove across the river to New Jersey. I got to New Jersey on Wednesday evening and have been spending time at McGuire Air Force Base and Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Site. I have been observing and offering technical solutions as a consultant to an Air Force exercise called EAGLE FLAG and analyzing how they use geospatial informaton to help them plan where to locate operations. It has been an eye opening experience.
I come home on Sunday and then a week later I'll be off to Panama City, Florida to observe and do more consulting at another similar Air Force exercise called SILVER FLAG.
Then home for another week and finally off to Norfolk, Virginia for the Air Force's Installation Mapping and Visualization Council Meeting the first week in June. I am a council member and help steer the Air Force's Expeditionary GeoBase program. The program uses Geographic Information Systems and highly trained personnel to get a bigger bang for the buck for Air Force deployments.
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I heard an interview on the CBC yesterday with Romeo Dallaire. He was talking about (among other things) Canada's upcoming commitment to the Darfur region. When the interviewer asked if the money pledged was enough, he kind of laughed, and then said it was a good start.
He talked about how much things had changed since the tragedy of Rwanda. He talked about how now, it was possible to get nearly real-time satellite images of the movement of people, so it's possible to use even a small peace keeping force effectively.
I hope you get to have a role in making billion dollar technology help those who have nothing.
Thanks for the comment Erin. I am reluctant to write this because I don't want to sound like I am bragging, but I think the American military gets a bum rap many times, so I'll go ahead.
I am very happy with my role in the Air Force. I work for Air Mobility Command (we own all the cargo aircraft and air refueling aircraft), and have since I first joined the Air Force in 1982. Now I am retired and working in the same place as a civilian consultant trying to do exactly what you said. The Air Force isn't just pointy-nosed fighters shooting down other aircraft or destryong enemy locations. I flew C-130s and C-5s (both large cargo aircraft) and saw my job as saving lives, not killing people.
What was a major part of my life in Air Mobility Command was flying and planning humanitarian operations. It was flying 60 aircraft loads of blankets, coats, and wheat into Afghanistan between 9/11 and Christmas 2001 after we began to take on the Taliban. It was air dropping thousands of packages of Humanitarian Daily Rations (meals ready to eat out of a package) over Bosnia/Hercegovina and Kosovo. And it was flying 800 severely persecuted African Jews out of the Sudan in the middle of the night and taking them to their spiritual homeland of Israel for safety.
These are only a few of many missions I flew that no one ever put on the nightly news. It wasn't sexy enough. And that was fine with me.
Using Geospatial information allows us to do just as you said. We can reach many more people by just doing what we already do more effectively, whether it is peace keeping, humanitarian operations, or bedding down our own forces on the ground. I think I am very lucky to have a job where part of what I do is planning to help those who have nothing. Unfortunately, there are always others out there that are still in need.
I'm sorry if I came across as judgemental, Rick. I certainly didn't mean it that way.
I'm still shocked and grieved, I guess, that we (Canadians, UN, whomever) dropped Dallaire in to observe, but gave him no resources to stop the killing. Which obviously has nothing to do with you...
But I'm glad that my comment caused you to share what you did. We need to hear more about those missions. No, we need to be more involved in those issues ourselves... because then we would see for ourselves what role the US military was taking.
It is a very cool thing that you get to do this for a living :)
Blessings to you, brother, as you bring peace to others.
Erin, you didn't sound judgmental at all. I just wanted everyone to know that the military does a lot more than the media typically portrays on TV.
I agree with you when it comes to satellite images tracking the movement of people. I'm sure you saw the satellite images of the Tsunami. It really helps us pinpoint where to send relief if we can get real-time imagery of a devestated area or one where real-time information on the movement of people helps assure mission success. I sure wish we had real-time thermal imagery early in the War in Afghanistan at the time the American Pilot mistook the Canadian troops for Taliban. It could have stopped a very embarassing time for my country and saved several Canadian families an enormous amount of grief.
How was the Acts 29 bootcamp? Did Darren lead it?
D. Goodmanson
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