the challenge for interoperatability is beginning to be met, i would say, the challenge for interoperatability at the same time is about to get much greater. we as a nation are about to embark on the most ambitous, most challenging communications endeavor that we have ever attempted, which is the creating of purse net, the public safety broad band or 4g network. and with that brings the promise of new challenges for sure in interoperatability and new capabilities that we have never had before. in fact, no other country is as far along as we are, even though we're just starting. what we see is the opportunity there to interoperate in many different ways than just voice as we have in the past. the challenge for us in the future will be the challenge of connectivity where we can connect wide band or narrow band voice or data or video across different systems. again, all of this is based on using internet protocol. one of the things that we at our company does is provide a relay in an unmanned vehicle to fly in the vicinity of a ship like this and provide over the horizon communications. very high

one of the biggest ones was, here's a surprise for you, interoperatable communications. it always works out that way. the other was command control. how do we operate together at the field level. it's one thing to have all the executive staff working together, it's another thing to take our middle managers from all the organizations and throw them into a situation where they have to work together. because the way we work together on the civilian side and the way you work together on the military side is slightly different. but we're all very intelligent individuals out there and they know how to solve problems. again, it's our job to understand what the limitations are. it's our job to understand that what is given in terms of giving an asset an order and we may look at it and say, hey, things change, we need to go over there now. that may or may not be something our military counterparts can do. we have to understand that. we have to understand that in order to maximize the efficiency and efficacious of that resource. this year we did a command of control exercise and w

we've worked really hard to improve interoperatability communications with the city. if we were needing assistance from oakland police department and they needed to come into san francisco, we have a really good structure to be able to implement interoperatable communications over the radio. but with the military this is a whole new set of radio frequencies, radio technology, even before the planning we didn't know what they had. it took us several planning opportunities and meetings to flush through some of that information and one of the biggest take aways for us, as a city we're required to have a tactical interoperatable communications plan. it describes how you interoperate in an emergency or an event within the city as well as regional partners. we don't have that with military and i think that's one of the biggest take aways, we need to really flesh out a document so we have captured who our contacts are, what technology they are going to bring to the table and start that initial planning from the get-go. we also had some technical challenges with land mobile r

from the fire side i know there's a lot of things you are doing to work around the interoperatability issues with regard to communications between fire and dod and maybe if ray or anybody else wants to speak to that. >> our communications challenges still exist. we have excellent telecom communications, we have a layered effect of our radio systems. we have mobile command posts that we can exercise. so we're prepared for power outages, reduction of telecoms, we have a layered effect for our communications. but as everybody here said, we need help. if somebody here can help me get a navy or marine corps aircraft to talk to my guys on the ground tactically, i need that and i don't have that today. i use a command control helicopter, a civilian helicopter, to handle that and transfer that to an air to air victor frequency. but from a command control perspective, we're fairly robust. are we perfect, no, but we do have layered defenses against that. >> miss yeager, i don't know if you want to say anything from a national guard perspective. >> we have some mobile explorable platforms we can

exercise also allowed us the opportunity to intro daus a lot of technology to help with the interoperatability of the civil military exercise. one of the main goals that we had for this was to allow our military a crisis response adaptive force package and opportunity to allow their training and certification in providing the most appropriate military expeditionary force for that scenario. one of the things that we realize in the military when we do these exercises in a foreign humanitarian response, that a lot of our military capabilities are not just for overseas foreign disasters but it also allows the military to be trained and certified to respond to local domestic disaster situations as well. i had mentioned that we had 22 nations participating in rimpac and this slide is a representation of the military and civilian partners that we had participating in this event. and we had many, many international partners and we had a lot of domestic partners: medical and military editionary partners as well. okay, this is our command and control slide. we took a lot of care to get this right. we wa

10 partners, we do similar academics every year like they do so i think that helps generate interoperatability amongst the title 10 and title 32 assets within the state as well. >> well, i don't know about you all but i feel pretty comfortable going into this fire season. it sounds like we have a pretty integrated group not only within the military capability you but state and local capabilities and federal capabilities for this fire season. with that i'm going to go down the line. as we get to our military partners i'd ask if there's other technologies that you think that you have that you want to share about that may be helpful as we start to get into fire season. please share those with us. ray, if you'd like to start. >> sure, thank you. first off, thanks for being here, it's my first time being here and i think it's an outstanding venue to meet the cooperating agencies and talk about policies and ways we can improve our response to the public that we serve. we look at title 10, title 32 resources in all aspects, all risk venue, like i said, not only aircraft but we utilize ltax for our ag

start talking about air ops and moving air resources around, how do we ensure that we have that interoperatability that we discussed so much yesterday between the different components. >> can you hear me now? perfect. it all begins with preplanning and strategic planning ahead of time. how our agreements at a local level were born was out of the 2003 cedar fire. the cedar fire was about 280,000 acres. as an example, i have the dubious distinction of being one of the first chief officers at the scene of that incident. just to give you an idea, at peak the cedar fire was burning 30,000 acres an hour. so that's about 9 acres a second. so something probably as large as this ship in one second. so after post-cedar fire, we recognized the navy had assets and the marine had assetness region that we should capitalize on, so i was tasked by my chief to organize a local letter of agreement so that we could, with the objective, essentially, was to streamline access to dods assets in rapid fashion and by rapid i mean within hours. if we're dealing with the level of incident that i just described, the cedar fi

so i think we both shared the concept that interoperatability is the key. we need to continue to work to ensure that we have interoperatability with the federal, state and local governments and next year i think we'll take this exercise to another level. i'm not sure what that's going to be, but between now and then we will be working to ensure it's successful. >> i told my boss that based on all the planning we did, the training we did, the exercise specifically functional exercise specifically, we're far better prepared to respond than we were 6 months ago. i think we were prepared then but as a result of all those efforts we're that much more ready. three things i broke down in my aar, planning, the office of emergency management, there's something like 19 entities that participated in this exercise. that's an overwhelming amount of different agencies to bring together for one agency. we do a lot of training, we run a lot of drills, but it's not on that scale where we're working with 19 different people or entities. execution, extremely smooth. the integ

we are supporting that interoperatability.the administration working with the congress to share prescription drug data with pdmd to say that the rulemaking process is nearing completion and va authorized the health care providers to access the state pdmp when consistent with state laws. third, when used expired medication. since 2010, the drug enforcement administration has partnered with thousand of local law enforcement agencies and the drug free community coalitions to hold six national tackback days collective disposing of unused medication. lastly, the administration plan focus on improving law enforcement capabilities to reduce the diversion. the national meth meth and pharmaceutical initiative funded through our office of high intensity drug trafficking areas trained more than 2500 law enforcement and criminal justice professionals on pharmaceutical crime investigations and prosecutions. the federal law enforcement continues to partner with state and local agencies around the country to reduce the pill mill and prosecut

afghanistan comes to an end, we're going to have to continue to invest in the shared capabilities and interoperateabilityn-stakingly built by the sacrifice of our troops and i appreciate germany's interest in making sure that even after our troops are no involved in combat operations, that we can continue to see progress in afghanistan. and many of you noted that yesterday there was an announcement about the taliban opening an office for purpose of negotiations in qatar. i said yesterday, this is going to be a diffict process. the parties there have been fighting for a very long time, even before 9-11. and we don't expect that it will be easy, but we do think ultimately we're going to need to see afghan talking to afghans about how they can move forward and the cycle of violence so they can start rebuilding their country. we also discussed the challenges in the region, including syria. we are united to see a negotiated political settlement to that conflict. we want to see a syria that's unified, democratic and at peace. right now we need to see an end to the bloodshed and we have to sure that chemical we