Military units supporting relief operations in Japan face bandwidth shortages.

Byline: Bob Brewin

Defense Department relief operations in Japan range from the simple -- sailors picking up debris in a fishing village -- to the sophisticated -- troops conducting aerial surveillance over the country using an Air Force unmanned Global Hawk aircraft based in Guam.

The United State has 50,000 military personnel stationed in the country and U.S. Ambassador to Japan John V. Roos said, "We have units from all of our services, with a multitude of capabilities, from medical to communications to civil engineering, poised and ready to support where needed."

This includes four Navy ships, including the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier operating off the east coast of Honshu, the main Japanese island. Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a spokesman for the Navy 7th Fleet, said in an e-mail from the command ship USS Blue Ridge Sunday that H-60 helicopters from the Ronald Reagan conducted surveys of the at-sea debris field and made four drops of humanitarian supplies ashore.

Navy P-3 Orion aircraft operating from Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa also are flying missions to survey and assess the debris field at sea, Davis said.

According to Davis, four destroyers, USS Fitzgerald, USS John S. McCain, USS McCampbell and USS Curtis Wilbur are at sea east of Miyagi prefecture, which includes the battered city of Sendai, assisting Japanese authorities with search and rescue and recovery operations.

The Ronald Reagan, he said, will serve as a floating airport, refueling helicopters from the Japan Self Defense Force, Japan Coast Guard, and fire and police units involved in rescue-and-recovery efforts ashore.

The 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force dispatched a small command and control team from Okinawa to Yokota Air Base in mainland Japan last Friday. Yesterday, it sent a Deployable Joint Command and Control System to Naval Air Station Atsugi to support its operations, said Lt. Lindsay Pirek, a Marine spokeswoman on Okinawa.

Pirek said eight CH-46E helicopters from Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 265 have been repositioned from Okinawa to Atsugi to conduct relief operations. The Marines also deployed a refueling point to support helicopter operations from Okinawa to Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni on Honshu.

The Marines leased a high-speed ferry, the Westpac Express, which travels up to 45 kilometers an hour, to establish the refueling operation.

The Air Force deployed its high-altitude Global Hawk unmanned aircraft form Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, to collect digital imagery of earthquake and tsunami damage over the weekend.

Lt. Col. Brandon Baker, the detachment commander at Andersen, said, "The Global Hawk offers tremendous capabilities in the aftermath of a natural disaster or other crisis. In our mission over Japan, we are able to provide decision-makers with near real-time imagery showing the damage caused by the tragic earthquake and tsunami. The images provided by the Global Hawk allow Japanese authorities to focus their search-and-recovery efforts, and will aid in the long-term process of clean up and [reconstruction]."

Military units operating in Japan face bandwidth shortages and network limitations that inhibit communications and command and control, Defense sources told Nextgov. Misawa Air Base, located on the northeast tip of Honshu, warned its personnel on a blog post Friday that the Defense Switched Network, which handles voice calls, was in backup mode and had only limited capacity, a fact confirmed by a Pentagon source Monday.

The blog post added, "We have a number of connectivity issues. Internet has been up and down due to our connections through other places in Japan. For example, Yokota [Air Base] and several other locations are having issues because we all have power and connectivity issues right now."

The Pentagon also took the extraordinary step of blocking access to a range of commercial websites to ensure that its networks have enough bandwidth to support mission-essential communications, Nextgov learned. This move, a military source told Nextgov, possibly indicates one or more undersea cables used by military networks were damaged by the earthquake.