Joint Task Force Case Study

On Tuesday, January 12 at 16:53, Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, suffered the worst earth-quake in two centuries. It first hit just south of the capital, Port-au-Prince, with two additional strong aftershocks of 5.9 and 5.5 magnitude quickly following and more than thirty significant aftershocks of a 4.5 magnitude or higher throughout the night and into the early morning (Smith 1). The resulting death toll was estimated at over 230,000; decapitating the country’s government and many organizations already assisting them. Among the souls lost were senior leaders of the United Nations representatives to Haiti, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and the Government of Haiti (GoH) (Joint 2).
Very shortly after the quakes the orders and requests for military humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations were quickly drafted. From this operation, Operation Unified Response, the US Joint Forces Command, Joint Center for Operational Analysis developed the USSOUTHCOM and JTF-Haiti… Some Challenges and Considerations in Forming a Joint Task Force case study. The study looked at how
Before the earthquake, SOUTHCOM did developed a functional plan (FUNCPLAN 6150-06) for HADR operations in theater, but the plan was written for a traditional J-code organization and had not been updated to reflect the SOUTHCOM organization just prior to the earthquake. Moreover, there was no standing Concept of Operations (CONOP) or Operations Plan (OPLAN) with an associated Time Phased Force Deployment Data (TPFDD) built for a HADR event that the staff could use to begin force flow planning. Adding to these complications, SOUTHCOM’s logistics and deployment expertise had been disaggregated under the original functional staff organization (Joint