With North Dakota leading the nation's surging COVID-19 outbreak, 60 medical personnel from the U.S. Air Force have been deployed to help relieve the state's hospital staffing crisis.

This tells me that ARNORTH, a large Army HQs in Ft Sam Houston, which is lead by a LTG combatant commander is monitoring the pandemic, planning and executing on behalf of the country and various states.

The Army Corps of Engineers looked at 600 sites for potential make shift hospitals should a need arise earlier this year.

You are correct, ARNORTH is monitoring the situation. The Army Reserves are also continuing to activate and mobilize Support Commands in support of DSCA Ops. My FIL is a senior DA Civ with USACE. He mentioned they already have contingency plans in place for mobile hospitals throughout the country if required.

It is refreshing to speak with someone who understands the process. 99.99 % of the people have no clue about the National Response Framework and its importance to DSCA, and the roles and responsibilities of various cabinets, NGOs, agencies, and entities. Service members who support DSCA may have a powerful financial capability in the fact that given the limitations of fiscal law, the process of buying good, supplies, services, or paying on contracts can be truncated to increase the turn around time.

I have a lot of confidence in ARNORTH as it has a robust staff that is use to making recommendations, planning, executing, and tracking many missions. I read the Hurricane Katrina AAR and one salient point was the military would provide support, but support was never defined. That mission has been given to ARNORTH to provide military support in disasters. I can say with my limited experience that the unit is very forward leaning in regards to disasters.

What is interesting is I mobilized around 20 NG soldiers for a federal mission using DTS. It was done late on a Friday afternoon and both of my DTS SGT's had left for the day. I was able to do this because I had worked on a creating a DTS Smart Book and spent a week dissecting DTS and learning how it works. I thought I should be technically proficient and give the Smart Book to service members to assist them. I gave the DTS Smart Book file to the army and got a coin. Coins are no big deal as I gave all of mine away.

Crap the title should say Nurses not Nurse, but I don't know how to fix that.

You can't edit a title after someone else has responded on the thread.

No big deal. Don't sweat it.

ArmyTanker said:

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I was able to do this because I had worked on a creating a DTS Smart Book and spent a week dissecting DTS and learning how it works. I thought I should be technically proficient and give the Smart Book to service members to assist them. I gave the DTS Smart Book file to the army and got a coin. Coins are no big deal as I gave all of mine away.

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Hats off to you for figuring out DTS.

Also, I've found that just biting the bullet and truly understanding something definitely pays dividends down the line. So many military programs are cobbled together over the years, and even the people that are supposed to be the program administrators don't know things about it. It is oddly satisfying when they tell you something incorrectly and you can be like "actually, according DODI XX.XXX, it's supposed to be like this."

Thanks for the kind words. I created the DTS Smart Book for two reasons. The first was for me to understand what my NCOs were doing as DTS administrators. The other reason is because I noticed in my unit that the soldiers and NCOs did not understand DTS and asked my NCOs to make the inputs. It was a rather large unit that went TDY often. 90% of their time was helping travelers and making inputs. This can be a laborious task as only the travelers knew the what, when, where, and how of their TDY trips.

I created the Smart Book and emailed it to everyone in the unit with instructions to use the Smart Book as a guide and we would be available for further assistance. Our work load went down tremendously and we became more efficient. This is the file I started and relinquished it to the army. I would not advocate using this guide as I heard DTS has changed since my retirement. I got a coin and someone else would slap their name on the guide. It was no big deal. You might even see my name on one of the pages. I know the frustrations of DTS. You can have a 95% solution but that 5% will kick your butt and you will want to throw the computer out the window. My intent was to make the army more efficient in regards to traveling.

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/8373835/dts-smart-book-common-access-card-cac

Army National Guard Spc. Joel Mendoza, a chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear specialist with the 1st Battalion (Airborne) of the 143rd Infantry Regiment, advises members of Joint Task Force 176 on proper wear of personal protective equipment in preparation for disinfecting the West Oaks Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Austin, Texas, May 12, 2020. (Staff Sgt. Michael Giles/Army National Guard)
EL PASO, Texas The Texas National Guard has sent a 36-member team to El Paso to assist morgues in the border region with the number of dead as a result of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.