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www.welchreport.com/bnews2.cfm

September 7, 2002

U.S. Military To Practice Operations Against American Citizens

By Timothy R. Gaffney Dayton Daily News
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE | While America pauses to reflect next week
on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base will be training for the next emergency.

Base units will be drilled on deployment skills such as emergency medical
treatment, land navigation and radio communications. At the same time, a
readiness exercise dubbed Thornpatch 02-3 will test the Aeronautical Systems
Center's ability to "surge" weapon systems through the acquisition mill to
meet wartime needs.

Unit readiness training started Wednesday and will run through Sept. 13,
officials said. Exercise Thornpatch is scheduled for Sept. 9-13.

The exercises "a fitting way to recognize the people who were lost during
the terrorist attacks last September, the military members who have died and
those still in harm's way today, fighting terrorism," said Col. Cynthia
Segersten, inspector general for the Aeronautical Systems Center, the base's
host unit. "We owe it to them and to their families to be capable and
ready."

On the heels of the base activities will come a major Marine Corps urban
warfare exercise in Dayton on undisclosed dates this month.

In that exercise, dubbed TRUEX XLIII (for Training in an Urban Environment
Exercise), several hundred soldiers from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit
will fire machine-gun blanks and maneuver helicopters in several Dayton
neighborhoods during a two-week period.

Several city residents objected to the upcoming training exercise at
Wednesday's city commission meeting.

City Manager Jim Dinneen said he spoke with the commander of the
expeditionary unit at the request of Commissioner Dean Lovelace to see if
the city could block the exercise from taking place. "He made it clear we
can't reject this," Dinneen said.

Helen Duell, a resident of the Southern Dayton View neighborhood, said the
exercises will bring simulated warfare into neighborhoods that already see
too much gunplay and crime violence.

"I have lived through several years of real gunfire and helicopter searches
overhead and those sights and sounds are frightening," she said.

Contrasted with that display, Wright-Patterson's training should not be
noticeable beyond the base perimeter, spokeswoman Susan Murphy said. Base
employees and visitors might experience "short delays" at entrance gates,
she said.

Murphy said the close timing of the Air Force and Marine exercises is a
coincidence.

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