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KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan - People from across the world
gather every year to celebrate the holidays with their families, but
being home for the holidays isn't always an option for some. With
the Morale Net, Airmen at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, can do the
next best thing -- communicate with their families through video,
voice or text.
Since the Internet's birth, it has grown to
encompass many elements of daily life. One element is communication.
To enable open forums of communication between Airmen and families,
members of the 451st Expeditionary Communications Squadron maintain
a morale networking system called the Morale Net. The Morale Net
provides all KAF airmen and contractors directly supporting the
451st Air Expeditionary Wing mission with free internet access.
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December 3, 2013 - Senior Airman
Trevor Pype, 451st Expeditionary Communications Squadron, cyber
transport technician, maintains the Morale Net system at Kandahar
Airfield, Afghanistan. The Morale Net provides free Internet access
to Kandahar airmen and contractors directly supporting the 451st Air
Expeditionary Wing mission. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman
Jack Sanders)
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“I love the Morale Net and how it allows me to keep in
touch with my family back home,” said Tech. Sgt. Corina
Schrank, 451st Air Expeditionary Wing bioenvironmental
technician. “I have four children and a husband at home, so
being able to video chat with them not only makes it easier
for me to be here, it makes it easier on my family for me to
be gone. At least they know I'm safe. They know I'm always
thinking of them even when I'm not home. Without being able
to be in contact with the people I love the most in this
world, I wouldn't be able to do the job I love the most in
this world. So, for that I'm truly grateful.”
The
Morale Net provides peace of mind to airmen and their
families, which allows them to keep their focus on
completing the mission. The system allows for large scale
Internet access across multiple areas of the base.
“The Morale Net is a very large system,” said Senior
Airman Trevor Pype, 451st ECS, cyber transport technician.
“It's a 150 megabyte-per-second bandwidth system that serves
15 access points on KAF going out to a maximum of the
currently registered 8,000 devices.”
The Morale Net
works by using a priority set up. The set up determines
which users receive amounts of bandwidth, the smallest range
of frequencies constituting a band, within which a
particular signal can be transmitted without distortion. The
bandwidth determines which programs on the computer will be
able to access the internet and how quickly they can send or
receive information.
“The system has a priority set
up,” said Pype who's deployed from RAF Mildenhal, England .
“Certain things such as (video chat and social media) are
extremely high priority because that's how people are able
to contact their families. Other things such as stores and
(video viewers) are lower priority and certain things are
outright blocked.”
Pype said the priority set up
allows the system to ensure the primary function of the
Morale Net --keeping open channels of communication for
airmen and their families. Without the Morale Net, that
would be very difficult to do during the holidays.
Those open channels of communication are important to
airmen, and when the system goes down the ECS team knows.
“We understand when people are upset if it's down,”
Pype said. “Because, the principle behind the Morale Net is
so people can contact their families. We understand that. If
somebody is in the middle of an important phone call with
their loved ones and it goes down, that could have just
separated their link between them. People get frustrated
with it.”
Pype said the large linking chain that
keeps the Morale Net functioning requires constant
maintenance and monitoring for it to work properly, and when
it does go down the ECS airmen work hard to ensure it's
restored as soon as possible.
“When it does go down
for individual areas, it could be any part of that chain,”
Pype said. “It could be that the individual access point has
died, it could be a mouse chewed through one of the various
wires from here to the camps. From Camp Davis to Camp
Bradley Smith there could be five, six different fiber optic
links. When a mouse chews through one of those we'd have to
find exactly where the link broke. It's frustrating.
“It's difficult to say how I feel about it,” Pype said. “On
one hand it can be stressful (working on the Morale Net)
because of how many things can go wrong and do go wrong, how
much maintenance is required to keep it going. But, it also
kind of feels good because we're providing people the morale
they really need.”
Morale is an important factor in
mission accomplishment and the airmen at KAF understand that
from the top down, Pype said.
“The Moral Net being
provided to our airmen highlights the credibility of our Air
Force Leaders in recognizing the value of staying connecting
with family and putting our money behind it,” said Chief
Master Sgt. Terence Greene, 451st Air Expeditionary Wing
command chief. “It is a part of Comprehensive Airman
Fitness. We have Airmen who say ‘goodnight' to their kids
each night as they are tucked in at home; ‘farewell' as they
leave for school or work, and this gives our warriors the
peace of mind needed to execute air power. This is a far cry
from my first deployment in 1990 where all we had was the
two-week old US Mail, a 15-minute morale call each week, and
if we were lucky, an occasional (Video Home System) tape
shipped over by the unit.”
Pype said another question
people ask about the Morale Net is in or regarding to speed.
“Most local connections that people get are anywhere
between two-and-five megabyte connections,” Pype said. “My
personal Internet at home is 2.5 megabytes whereas this is
150. The actual speed is quite a bit larger than my home
Internet, but it's also serving a lot more people. A typical
household user has one router, which is a router, switch and
access point all combined into one, whereas we have one
router with 75 or so switches and hundreds of access points.
It's quite a large area that it encompasses.”
Keeping
the system functioning takes a lot of work. Pype says he
knows their work doesn't go unnoticed. It's something taken
seriously throughout his chain of command.
“Morale
Net is our highest priority, non-mission-essential system,”
said Lt. Col. Eric Welcome, 451st ECS commander. “The 451st
ECS team works hard to maintain and upkeep the Morale Net
because they know it's a vital communication tool for Airmen
to keep in touch with their families; which greatly assists
in maintaining focus on completing the mission.”
Mission focus is a priority commanders have spoken to at KAF
at several functions. The Morale Net helps ensure KAF airmen
keep their laser focus in a way, Welcome said.
With a
grateful community of airmen, the work of the ECS team and
the Morale Net will continue to keep families connected in
one form or another during a deployed holiday season.
By USAF Senior Airman Jack Sanders
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2013
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