Who are you gonna CALL?
Staff delivers timely answers to combat troops
By Kelly Kennedy
Times staff writer
An Army major general in Iraq had a classified question about the insurgency early last month.
rather than pull his advisers away from their immediate mission, he e-mailed a request to the Center for Army Lessons Learned.
“We answered it in seven hours with 10 people digging for information,” said Craig Hayes, manager of CALL Request for Information.
“The general e-mailed back, ‘I have you loud and clear. Send all that you can,’ so I guess he appreciated it.”
contractors developed the Request for Information prototype six years ago to enable soldiers to get immediate information online, culled from sources outside and within CALL. With a few keystrokes, soldiers — regardless of rank — had access to 100 experts and a few hundred thousand documents.
As the U.S. prepared for war in 2002, staff members at CALL realized they needed more than a prototype. They needed to inform soldiers that the online resource was available, and that by logging on to CALL, they could learn a lot from Operation Desert Storm or Vietnam after-action reviews.
“We made the decision to go from passive dissemination to an active ‘Here’s what CALL has’ approach,” said William Kinsey, who created the Request for Information System. “It’s made a huge difference.”
Before the Iraq war, a couple of CALL staffers answered a few questions a week as a secondary duty, Kinsey said.
“I can remember when we toasted each other with a cola because we had 20 in a week,” Kinsey said.
Now, providing upward of 120 answers a week, they don’t have time for cola.
“Some have had more than 150 documents attached to them,” Hayes said. “In January, we answered 500. That’s a lot of people.”
The center also has gotten busier with the onset of the war. Developed in the 1980s, when combat missions included only a couple of units, it has grown from an on-site library to include an online database, a CALL training school and the RFI program.
From July to December, the CALL Web site had more than 500,000 hits a month. The staff oversees the online transfer of billions of bytes of information on Army tactics, organization, procedures and other information that helps soldiers do their jobs in the field.
And it’s a two-way feed, with troops in the field not only seeking information but also providing insights and tips gained on the battlefield and at tactical centers. CALL staffers take that information and turn it around within 18 hours, kicking it back to others who need it.
Any soldier — or Marine, airman or sailor — may file an RFI, but those deployed or about to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan have priority. The staff tries to answer those questions within eight hours.
“Recently, we got one that said, ‘I’ve got two Soviet mine rollers and no clue how to use them,’” said Albert Fehlauer, lead RFI research analyst. The soldier was trying to train Iraqi troops on their own weapons. “That’s the rewarding aspect. You feel that you’re really helping people.”
The CALL staffers try to answer all other requests within 48 hours.
When a request, which can be filed at the CALL Web site at http://call.army.mil, gets to the center, the staff first checks to make sure it’s legitimate.
Then they make certain the person making the request is authorized to receive the information.
They can answer secure questions on SIPRNET, the government’s secure network. They also try to get a military e-mail address, also for security reasons.
Then the staffers sort through the library at the center — including 3.4 million documents — to see what videos, papers or pamphlets might help. They also have 100 subject-matter experts who can answer questions. If they still don’t have a good answer, they put out a call to units who may have dealt with a similar situation.
“This information is aimed at a fairly narrow section of the world,” Fehlauer said. “Each question is added to the archives in case someone asks the same question later.”
Often, even if a question has been asked before, they have to research it again. “Unfortunately, the enemy changes and adapts,” Kinsey said.
For that reason, the staff also tries to stay ahead of what soldiers might need. Five CALL analysts are always deployed with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It keeps our hand on the pulse of the Army,” said Daniel French, chief of collection and analyses. “It’s hard to fight that we really need to do this.”
But they also look for information the civilian sector might need, so they can have it in a transmittable form in advance.
“During Hurricane Katrina’s march across the Gulf [of Mexico] prior to landfall, we received an urgent request from the Pentagon on anything we had on hurricane recovery efforts, to include Hurricane Andrew” in 1992, Hayes said. “CALL was able to pull and deliver the data in 45 minutes. This turned out to be the first of roughly 40 requests from government agencies, National Guard and active-duty components prior to and during the disaster request.”
Hayes said CALL responds to requests from anyone — civilian government representatives included — who may need information, as long as they can serve soldiers first.
For example, a retired Dutch sergeant wanted to find an old friend who served in the U.S. Air Force. During World War II, the airman was shot down in a British Lancaster, temporarily buried in Europe, and then his remains were moved to the United States.
“We were not able to completely answer his question,” Hayes said, “but we did link him up with an organization that could help him.”
Sometimes, available information is too secret for CALL. In those cases, the staff tries to connect the requester with the source of the information.
“We’ve had less than a handful where we’ve had to say, ‘I’m sorry. We don’t have that,’” Kinsey said. “We rarely have a week go by that somebody doesn’t come back and say, ‘You saved our lives.’ ”