BATTLE CREEK (WKZO-AM) — Battle Creek’s newest employer may also be its most secretive.
It’s so top security that the Air National Guard wouldn’t permit us to shoot pictures or record sound inside the building, and they didn’t allow taking any shots of the outside of the building either.
It really doesn’t even have a name. It’s the facility that will be used by the Air National Guard to remotely control pilotless planes flying over the world’s war zones and hot spots.
They may be flying missions for the U.S. Air Force, NATO, our allies or the intelligence services, and they have direct high priority and classified connections to all of them. It’s called a SCIF or Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, and it’s the backbone of the operation.
Sen. Gary Peters and U.S. Rep. Fred Upton were both on hand for the ribbon snipping this weekend, even though the facility won’t be ready for full operations until sometime early next year.
It will create 74 full time jobs, but all of them will be filled by military personnel. They are requiring that even though they may never actually get off the ground, that all of their RPA operators will be fully certified pilots. They say anyone without actual experience in the air just doesn’t have the “situational awareness” it requires to fly the MQ-9 with opitimal effectiveness.
The building itself is filled with briefing rooms, conference tables, intelligence centers and computers at every station. It has redundant back-up systems for providing power in case of an emergency and facilities for cooking, relaxing and its built for comfort because the crews that will be manning the facilities will be working long shifts 24 hours a day.
The building already existed at the ANG Base in Battle Creek and has been repurposed for this mission. Most of the work stations and the control centers that will be used by the RPA pilots have not yet been installed.
The renovations will cost $6.4 million, and they say because they have been able to take a look at all the similar centers like it around the country and learn from their experiences, they say it will be the best designed and most efficient when it’s completed.
They don’t use the word “drone” to describe the MQ-9 Reaper, which can do both combat and surveillance missions at medium-altitudes and for up to 20 hours at a time.
They call it a remotely piloted aircraft or RPA. It can carry multiple missiles, each with their own unique abilities.
Needless to say it’s the current state of the art, and high demand weapons system for fighting the war on terrorism. It has survivability and even if one fails or is shot down, no allied lives are lost.
It also creates another layer of survivability for the Air National Guard Base itself, which has been threatened with closure by BRAC and the Pentagon.
“Relevancy” was a word that came up several times during the comments made by both Peters and Upton and by the Air National Guard brass during comments prior to the ribbon cutting.
They hope that this mission, the approval of a cutting-edge Cybersecurity mission earlier this year, and winning a competition to base a multi-billion dollar anti-ballistic missile system at the Fort Custer complex will make it ‘relevant’ and secure the future of the facility, and the payroll it brings to the region, for at least the next few decades.
