Lt. Col. Barry Greene Details Changes To SGAUS Commo Program Including Federal Training Exercises & Instructor Course

In Part 3 of our Commanders Briefing podcast with Lt. Colonel (MD) Barry Greene, President of the State Guard Association of the United States, we explore recent developments in the Communications Program and its expanding role in federal disaster response. Lt. Col. Greene discusses how SGAUS can now coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security to assign communication frequencies for State Defense Forces during federally supported operations. He also highlights the exciting ability of SGAUS to now conduct national-level communications exercises. For those interested in the future of the Commo Program—including how the new three-tier badge system works and how certified members can take on instructional roles.

For the full episode visit: https://www.patreon.com/posts/sgaus-speaks-out-121207347?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

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.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Force Next is COMO Communications. Very excited about this, working
very very hard with Colonel David Albanize in New York
and Warrant Officer Ray Richard Martino. They have helped me

(00:32):
develop back when I was G six in New York
what became New York's COMMO program. Then mister Martino helped
us work out with SAUGUS that we have now worked
out a program with Department of Homeland Security that now
we at SAUGUS can help DHS assign frequencies that are
permanent assigned frequencies for federal disaster response to individual state

(00:57):
defense forces. I am the signatory on that per DHS,
and what that allows us to do now is to
run exercises nationally, and we have been. We've run now
three in a row at our annual conference national COMMO
exercises where literally any SDF could communicate and any SDF

(01:19):
that wants access to the national frequencies to now exercise
on themselves just needs to come through our COMMO program
and get a copy of the PDF form to fill
out and we'll get them approved as long as they're
a lawful SDF. But we're now unrolling three levels of
the badge for the COMMO program, and we're going to

(01:41):
offer it a chance this fall for people to earn
the senior badge coming in and learning basically the instructor
credentials to teach the COMMO course. But the COMMO Course,
like all the others, we want it taught at home
station and it largely comes from what the New York
Guards original COMMO course was, which is again took most
of our people the better part of a year to complete,

(02:04):
but it qualified them in an emergency to operate as
a low level radio tech, which is what we need.
So that's COMMO