Month: June 2013

R3 welcomes Ken Martin

We are excited to welcome aboard Ken Martin to the R3 family.  He retired from the United States Navy after twenty-three years of service and was piped ashore during a retirement ceremony held at the Navy Diving and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC) in Panama City, Florida.  See a retirement photo at this link.  Ken began his service as a Navy Diver at Trident Refit Facility Bangor, WA.  He served onboard USS Simon Lake in La Madalena, Italy and at Naval Operational Medicine Institute, Pensacola, FL.  He was commissioned in 2000 through the Enlisted Commissioning Program after graduating from the University of Washington and subsequently joined the Special Operations Officer Community.

Post commissioning, Ken continued to serve in a variety of areas including Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Navy Diving, Surface Warfare, and Mine Warfare.  He is well versed in Irregular Warfare, Counter Insurgency, Counter IED / Anti-Terrorism, Security Force Assistance, and NATO / Coalition partnership. He completed two combat deployments to Iraq working directly with coalition and Iraqi forces where he earned two Bronze Stars.  Specifically, his Platoon was assigned to train the Iraqi Bomb Disposal Forces.

In the area of training and education, Ken served as Executive Officer (Acting) at the Center for EOD and Diving (CEODD).  He coordinated the establishment of a PEP instructor position at Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center with an exchange Master Diver position in Cartagena, Spain.  Ken also headed the initiative to revamp the EOD Officer warfare qualification and associated standards; creating an EOD Officer Qualification as well as a Department Head level qualification.

Ken’s formal education includes a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Washington and a Master’s degree in Operational and Information Science from the Naval Postgraduate School in the Special Operations for Low Intensity Conflict Department.

 

R3 awarded ATF contract

ATFR3 Strategic Support Group, Inc., a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), is proud to support the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms in the design, administration, and execution of exercise Raven’s Challenge. This annual, Joint Program Office sponsored counter terrorism exercise enables military Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) units and federal, state, and municipal public safety bomb squads to jointly exercise command and control, tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP),  and evaluate new equipment. Raven’s Challenge participants include military EOD units and civilian public safety bomb squads from the Pacific Northwest region to include Washington, Oregon, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The exercise is hosted by the 741st Ordnance Battalion (EOD), Washington National Guard.  In addition to enabling Department of Defense Support to Civil Authorities (DSCA) interoperability, Raven’s Challenge is specifically designed to allow military EOD units and public safety bomb squad teams to learn and benefit from other’s expertise and experiences and exercise joint incident response.

 

R3 attends NATO C-IED conference

NATO C-IEDR3’s Neil Marshall attended the NATO 2013 C-IED Conference, organized by the Allied Command of Transformation (ACT) and hosted by Spain.  The conference took place at the premises of the Allied Force Command Madrid HQ, Spain, from 04-06 June 2013, with the support of the C-IED Centre of Excellence.  The target audience for this conference is senior and working level staff officers and government civilians directly involved in National or NATO Counter-IED activities, development, policy or training.  The conference included NATO, Partnership for Peace (PfP), ISAF Troop Contributing Nations (TCNs) and non-NATO organizations involved in C-IED capability development. The theme of this year’s conference was “Institutionalising C-IED (Defeat the Device (DtD), Attack the Network (AtN), Protect the Force (PtF)) at the operational and strategic levels”. The aim is to identify and capture for institutionalisation the lessons learned, roles, responsibilities and capabilities required for C-IED success at the operational and strategic levels. During the conference three themes were addressed: Understanding Transnational Threat Networks, Institutionalising C-IED capabilities at the Operational and Strategic Levels, and Policy and Doctrine necessary to ensure C-IED success in future operations.

R3 provides program of record and institutionalization effort support to Naval EOD Technology Division’s Technical Support Detachment which is interconnected with these NATO EOD and C-IED Centers of Excellence.