ARROYO CANO, Dominican Republic -- Airmen from the 51st Combat Communications Squadron are proving that training is the key to success during a deployment to the Dominican Republic for NEW HORIZONS 2017.
When it comes to communication there is no room for mistakes or delays and thanks to the constant preparation by the Airmen of the 51st CBCS they have been able to keep communication capabilities strong for U.S. service members participating in NH17.
The first step to getting communications running was to set up a satellite system within seven hours. A drill practiced regularly by the combat comm team.
“We get the satellite system up and running, that provides the link for the network guys to run their computers,” said Tech. Sgt. Philippe LeBrun, the 51 CBCS radio frequency transmission systems NCO in charge. “Once we do get things up and running we start cleaning things up, start doing expansions and start doing customer service issues.”
According to Staff Sgt. Ryan Lesseski, a 51st CBCS cyber transport supervisor, a deployment to a bare base location such as the barracks used during NH17 lines up perfectly with their regular preparations.
“We provide the initial communications for a bare base setup,” said Lesseski. “We are constantly training to deploy for a situation like this. We are taught to setup communications from nothing.”
According to LeBrun and Lesseski, the team’s Airmen constantly train on the equipment and preventive maintenance to make sure they are ready to deploy, because if orders comes down quick they need to make sure their personnel and equipment are both ready at a moment’s notice.
“We trained a lot before we came here; we pretty much had our equipment ready and tested over and over and over before we got here so we wouldn’t really have any hiccups,” Lesseski explained. “Initial setup went great. We got things up way quicker than the timeline would normally ask of us.”