Leveraging GIS tools in defense and response at the U.S. Air Force Academy
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The mission of the United States Air Force Academy is to "inspire and { develop outstanding young men and women to become Air Force officers with knowledge, character and discipline; motivated to lead the world's greatest aerospace-force in service to the nation." As both a university and a military academy, the faculty faces a unique challenge to not only develop cadets educationally, but prepare all of its graduates to be successful leaders in the nation's Air Force. The primary method the Academy uses for ensuring its graduates are prepared to overcome the challenges they will face as officers is embodied in the core curriculum. In the Air Force Academy's core curriculum, all 4400 cadets are required to take a minimum of 132 credit hours of courses in the humanities, math, science and engineering fields. One of these courses is Civil Engineering 210, "Air Base Design and Performance." Looking deeper, this class is divided into three blocks: 1) Environmental 2) Infrastructure and 3) Contingency Response. In both the second and third blocks, cadets participate in capstone projects that employ concepts they learned in the classroom including community planning, functional relationship analysis, Air Installation Compatibility Use Zones (AICUZ), contingency operations, bare base beddown, Air Base Ground Defense (ABGD), Base Damage Assessment Teams (BDAT), Minimum Operating Strip (MOS) planning, Alternate Launch and Recovery Surface (ALRS) planning, and Base Recovery After Attack (BRAAT) just to name a few. This paper will discuss the operational Air Force Geographical Information System (GIS) software interfaces that have been tailored to use in conveying the classroom objectives to educate and train cadets in Civil Engineering 210 to ensure Air Force Academy graduates are officers with the knowledge to "lead the world's greatest aerospace-force in service to the nation.".
