Guard helping patrol borders over holidays

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ARLINGTON, Va. – National Guard troops are on alert this season, in the name of homeland security, to help make sure that terrorists do not slip into the country and deliver any devastating holiday surprises.

In the Northeast, for example, Army Guard pilots in helicopters and Air Guard aviators in twin-engine airplanes are flying night patrols over a stretch of the U.S.-Canadian border while helping the U.S. Border Patrol detect, deter and monitor “special interest aliens” attempting to sneak across the border, perhaps with weapons of mass destruction, along eastern New York, Vermont and New Hampshire. It is called Operation Winter Freeze.

The intent is to keep illegal aliens bent on destruction from reaching such American cities as New York, Boston, Philadelphia or Washington.

In Alaska, National Guard members at Fort Greely are staffing a new missile defense system designed to knock out incoming enemy missiles aimed at virtually any part of North America.

This is the first holiday season that the Alaska National Guard’s ground-based, midcourse missile defense battalion is operating, said Alaska Guard spokesman Maj. Mike Haller.

This is also the first holiday season that the Alaska Air Guard is fully engaged in defending its turf against enemy airplanes. The Guard officially took over the Air Force’s Regional Air Operation Center at Elmendorf Air Force Base on Oct. 1. The new 176th Air Control Squadron, with support from the Canadian Forces, is conducting 24-hour air sovereignty and theater air control operations with the 11th Air Force.

Air Guard pilots are either flying jet fighters or standing ready to intercept unidentified aircraft that fly into the airspace of every major population area. The Air Guard does not announce when or where it is flying these combat air patrols for security reasons, but the planes are up there or ready to scramble up there in a hurry.

National Guard and civilian agencies it supports intend to make it very clear that this is not a good time of year for bad people to show up unannounced; nor is there any good time of year.

“We want to send a message to the special interest aliens,” said Mark Henry, deputy chief of the Border Patrol’s Swanton Sector that oversees the New York-New Hampshire northern border. The Border Patrol is the lead federal agency for Winter Freeze.

“We want them to think there is a strong certainty of arrest, prosecution and deportation if they try to come through the Swanton Sector,” Henry added.

Meanwhile, 32 National Guard civil support teams and a dozen new Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear or High Yield Explosive Enhanced Response Force Packages, CERFPs for short, are ready to roll out across the country in case they need to help civilian authorities and large numbers of people deal with weapons of mass destruction.

The 22-member civil support teams are primed to check out disaster sites for deadly agents that could harm other emergency responders. The CERFPs, each with approximately 100 members, have been formed during the past year to provide medical aid and decontaminate large numbers of victims. They will also be given the tools and the training to locate and extricate victims from the rubble of damaged buildings.

Guarding the homeland is serious business for National Guard Soldiers, even during what is thought of as a joyous time of year.

(Editor’s note: Master Sgt. Bob Haskell writes for the

National Guard Bureau.)