My First Mission & CIF

My First Mission

We've been in New Jersey for a couple days and it looks like my section has just gotten funding for a mission to wire up the operations work area.

For 4 days I've tried to work with the Department Of Information Management (DIOM) to hook us up with NIPR access (NIPR is a non-secure military network). On NIPR, personal PC's aren't allowed to draw a connection so we have to get authorized military/government machines for use.

DIOM is like the IT department for military installations. My contact there sent me to two people who could give us this asset and I have had no luck with them as those people are never in their offices.

Oh and in order to use NIPR, each user has to turn in a request sheet with proof of security clearance, and a certificate of Information Assurance Training (IA Training).

IA Training is basically a way of saying you know enough not to do completely silly things to give unclassified users access to a military network. In other words, this is a lot of paperwork for something that's vital. We have now reached a time crunch.

As of tonight, we still have not received NIPR or authorized machines for internet access.

This isn't much of a problem since there is a Morale, Welfare, and Recreation (MWR) day room that is located inside our billets.

Long story short. Since we can't access the military net, my boss basically told the installation we were going to "borrow" access from the MWR room.

This MWR room has wireless and 100 Mbps lines provided to soldiers for free. It's really great.

Now for my mission.

We have to drill through about 4 cinder blocks and run cat-5 from the MWR room into another room about 20 meters down the hall. The line also has to run into an adjacent room.

My soldiers are really excited about this mission. It doesn't seem like much but, if we can pull this off, then that means we've proven ourselves on a toy task.

So this is a street cred oriented task.

I'll post photos and more about what we did later.

Oh, this MWR point we're uhm...borrowing...from was populated with soldiers on laptops within 12 hours of our showing up on cite. Of course, yours truely was one of the first. Not sure if that's a good thing but, when there's a will...

Clothing Issuing Facility (CIF)

Today we also received our inital issue of gear. So now I have my battle rattle. I also got my body armor issue. It's pretty sweet. I'll post photos when I get some time together!

Oh and on the matter of photos... I have offically posted my monthly quota of photos into flickr. The photos I've posted for this month are from my trip to Jordan last summer. Hope you enjoy!

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