http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC2XIGMI2kM for the Brits doing their worst case....

"Ay - Nope - Er."

God Yes, NIMS training was by far the most useful and relevant training I've received in the fire service...in the current era, the problem with interagency communications is not *tech*, it's *rules*, and I was thoroughly impressed by NIMS' common sense, 6th grade reading level, scalability, and "rules for new rules". It's a very realistic framework that accomodates, among other things, the fact that you and everyone else has other things to do and to remember, that your personnel are going to have IQs from maybe 85 on up to 150, that if you don't figure out how everyone gets paid you can't figure out anything else, etc. I kid you not, FEMA's NIMS 100 (or -700) training is the best free mini-MBA you could give yourself. Pushing old, unsexy NIMS will do more than any amount of shiny radios or infinite numbers of useless "command center" RVs,

So, ok, in that case - a WWII USAT - and in the brief interval when this was a USAFS - who's the crew? Merchant Marine? Or do people like get trained in the Navy and then transfer briefly to Air Force control? I know that the Army has a huge rotary-wing fleet and maybe some fixed-wing exec transports, that the Air Force has some limited rotary wing assets for Special Ops and rescue, and the Navy and Marines have lots of both, and I knew the USAF had like some fishing boats to pick up crashed drones with, but I gotta say I did think ships were an exclusive Navy province...any other counterintuitive intersections you know of?

Was anyone else disoriented by the designation "USAFS" and the very concept of a *ship* owned and operated (however briefly) by the Air Force? The mind boggles at the concept of a USAF-staffed ship; did they somehow contract the Navy to do it?

From the broad, shallow social perspective, I do think it makes a whole lot more sense to focus a lot of money on increasing the ability of the disabled to participate in the physical world unassisted (as through something like this, R&D $$ intensive or no,) than it does to spend an equivalent amount of resources on the converse - trying to make the phyiscial world more accessible to the disabled (via curb cuts, handicapped spaces, extra-wide bathrooms, etc.) I'm confident that the several billion $US / year focused on the latter could make some huge strides in the former at better cost...