Fort Bragg’s PsyOps Soldiers Train for Civilian Emergencies
CAMP BUTNER — In a disaster, there are numerous organizations prepared to help with food, water or medical aid.
But a group of soldiers from Fort Bragg’s psychological operations community is offering skills few others have.
The soldiers promise to inform, even in situations where communities have effectively been cut off from the rest of the world.
Earlier this month, the 3rd Military Information Support Battalion showed those skills to officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency as the two groups devised how best to use the soldiers should the need arise.
The battalion is part of the 4th Military Information Support Group, also based at Fort Bragg.
In an exercise built around a mock earthquake, the soldiers operated for nearly a week out of Camp Butner, a North Carolina National Guard training post northeast of Durham.
There, the soldiers practiced sharing life-saving information, said their commander, Lt. Col. Christopher L. Schilling.
In a scenario where communications networks were severely damaged, his soldiers showed how they would reach the most isolated populations using their tools — from leaflets that can be dropped from the sky or distributed on the ground, to loudspeakers and technology that allows the soldiers to create their own television and radio broadcasts and send mass notifications to cell phones.
While those are skills the unit often uses overseas, officials said the soldiers were training differently from how they typically deploy.
For one, they were unarmed as they traveled the training area. But the biggest difference was in how the messages were crafted.
Instead of an agenda driven by combat or allied forces, the soldiers in a domestic scenario would be “strictly in an informing role,” said Capt. Angel Ruiz, the assistant battalion operations officer.
Ruiz helped plan the exercise, which was centered around a federal law that allows active-duty troops to be deployed domestically as a Civil Authority Information Support Element, or CAISE.
The CAISE mission is not new to the 3rd battalion and other, similar units, but it has seen little practice in recent years.
“This is not a traditional role for us,” Ruiz said. “It’s not something
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