From State Defense Forces to The US Army: MEMS Certification Goes Global

In Part 3 of our Commanders Briefing podcast with Lt. Colonel (MD) Barry Greene, President of The State Guard Association of the United States (SGAUS), we explore the current status and recent developments of the Military Emergency Management Specialist (MEMS) Academy. The MEMS Academy is a credentialing program in the field of Emergency Management, certified and provided by SGAUS. It offers three levels of qualification—Basic, Senior, and Master—and includes an optional “flash” device for those who have deployed in actual incident responses. Established in 1998, MEMS has become the most professional and recognized emergency management certification available to members of State Defense Forces, the Department of Defense, first responders, and civilian emergency agencies.Lt. Colonel Greene shares insights into how many individuals have been certified through the MEMS program and discusses new updates to the training, including digital access and streamlined coursework to accommodate busy service members and emergency professionals. He highlights the growth in participation and the increasing demand for MEMS training across the country. The President also dives into how significantly the program has expanded and evolved over the years, noting that various departments of the Federal Government—as well as troops from foreign nations—have pursued and received MEMS certification, demonstrating its global reputation and value.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode was made possible by Dustin Colgrove, Ben Perry,
Colonel C McAdams, Sr. And other Patreon members. Support us
at patreon dot com Forward slash state defense for us.
Moving over to your training programs, the meat of the
topic of the podcast here, let's dive into your first

(00:21):
your Military Emergency Management special Specialist program. As that program doing.
I know you certified a lot of people. Can you
give us like an idea of all park on how
many you've certified.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Oh, I don't have a total number. I'm fairly certain
we've we've we've gone over ten thousand at this point,
but I'm not one hundred percent sure. I know that
at any given point now we have we have over
one thousand to two thousand in the pipeline, Which is
why I'm not afraid of our cyber numbers, because we're

(00:59):
doing in it the MEMES thing. The the other thing
that's interesting to know about MEMES, which is the emergency
the Military Emergency Management Specialist badge, which is our anchor program,
and we're about to add a new badge to it.
By the way, there's a new MEM's badge called mems
l n O but UH, which is a gold colored
UH Master MEMS badge, But the the underpinnings of the

(01:25):
MEMS MEMES badge are all federal disaster operation stuff. And
what's made it really fascinating about this program is that
it's not just state defense forces. We have now badged
people and memes that ranging from the United States Army,

(01:46):
the National Guard, Army, National Guard, Air National Guard, United
States Coast Guard, United States Coast Guard Auxiliary, the Italian
Coast Guard I believe has now been badged MEMS. Now
we recently got request and are now helping a platoon

(02:06):
I mentioned the thirty eighth parallel recently, there's a platoon
in Korea right now and the US Army that's all
working through their MEMS badges while they're deployed. So the
MEMS badge has grown way above and beyond the state
defense forces and is now being recognized in the uniform
services world as a definitive measure that the individual has

(02:30):
been through an extensive amount of military emergency management training,
including a whole stack of federal certifications. And as I said,
in my case, and nobody was more startled than I
was when they put me in charge of over seven
hundred people in Texas. But it's one of those of
as you go through these various levels of memes, badge

(02:53):
training and whatnot, you are in fact certifying and learning.
And then if you exercise this stuff at exercise which
I did we did in the New York Art constantly,
you're actually qualifying to run task forces and strike teams
and big disaster response teams. And so nothing thrills me

(03:16):
more than knowing that members of the federal military have
recognized this program and the extraordinary job Sergeant Major Fred
Tretti has been doing as director of the program for years.
The people that founded the program did a phenomenal job,
and Sergeant Major Tretti, by the way, he's a US
Navy veteran, he's a submariner doing a phenomenal job. Thousands

(03:43):
of people going through it. COVID was the biggest response
because all the people deployed, when they were sitting there
board at their posts used the time to get their
MEMS badge studies out of the way, so it was big.
So we're expecting probably two to three thousand people through
the MEMS programs just this year, just basic memes. That's

(04:05):
before we even lump on Senior Memes, Master mems, and
now Memes Leno which is the pinnacle, which means you
got all that much more training and jock training and
are ready to basically sit the military Leno seat in
any joint Operations center. So very proud of those products,

(04:27):
those programs,