Before summer, every state and territory National Guard will be equipped with communications gear that allows military and civilian agencies responding to an emergency to talk to each other.

That may not sound like a major development, but in an era when every agency seems to have its own equipment and frequency, it is.

Col. Kenneth C. McNeill, deputy director for command, control, communications and computer systems at the National Guard Bureau, says, "Our mission here at the J-6 is to make sure the states have radios that can talk to first responders."

The solution is called the Joint Incident Site Communications Capability (JISCC), which can be easily transported by land or air and set up in a short time to ensure smooth communications between all onsite personnel.

Currently, more than half the 54 states and territories, including the District of Columbia, have JISCC units, which carry a price tag of about $600,000 each. Some states have two.

"One May," McNeill says, "all 54 states and territories will have this capability."

The JISCC is many things. It links to a satellite for Internet service, providing telephone and video conferencing. But what gets McNeill passionate about the self-contained and easily transportable unit is its interoperability.

With a JISCC nearby, firefighters are suddenly able to talk to police. Military members on the scene can coordinate with medical technicians. They can do this, too, without any change in radios.

"That is significant," McNeill says. "That is the thing we didn't have before."

People like McNeill didn't need to be told the importance of communications. But the lesson came anyway in those first crucial hours after Hurricane Katrina crashed ashore in August 2005.

Civilian and military first responders were forced to communicate the same way the Greeks did at the battle of Ephesus in 498 B.C.

They used runners.

"We were completely without communications," says Lt. Col. Gary Ladd, communications chief for the Mississippi National Guard.

Cell phone towers toppled from the wind like trees at a lumber camp. Land line communications vanished when flood waters engulfed Bell South, taking the Internet with it.

"If you didn't have a satellite phone," Ladd says, "you weren't going to make a call."

In Louisiana, about the only folks with the ability to talk across any distance were members of the 62nd Civil Support Team (CST), says Col. Ronnie Johnson, the communications chief for the state, who called the CST the "backbone of communication."

But it was no answer for the scale of the demand. "There's only one of them," he says.

Also, much of the state's tactical communications gear was in Iraq with the 256th Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

Confusion reigned in the wake of the communications breakdown. Stranded people remained cut off because they couldn't tell anyone where they were. People died for the same reason. Rescuers wandered about simply hoping to stumble upon someone in need of rescue.

"Everybody takes communications for granted when it's working," says Ladd.

That was then. This is now.

"We've done a whole lot of things since Katrina," Johnson says.

Even far away from the Gulf coast, Katrina's impact has been felt, but in a positive way.

"Katrina was, no pun intended, a watershed event," says Col. Neil Currie, the Washington National Guard communications director. "Since Katrina, within the state of Washington, we've had a large amount of new equipment start flowing our way."

That's true elsewhere, as well, for both the military and civilian sides of coin. Mobile cell telephone towers that can be set up in minutes to replace inoperative ones are standard issue in the civilian world of emergency management.

The state police in Louisiana have replaced the limited band width of the 800 Mhz radio system that failed. They now have a more capable 700 Mhz system, Johnson says, with a lot more capacity that is less likely to overload.

"We have also bought a lot more tactical small handheld radios," he says, referring to the Guard.

The Louisiana Guard is one of several states now using an Interoperable Communications Extensions System (ICE-S). Johnson says the Guard has about 24 of the systems around the country.

The ICE-S allows for continued cell phone communications if the normal service has been knocked out. It uses Blackberry devices and broadband frequencies to provide a limited number of people with the ability to make and receive calls.

Currie says the Washington Guard has an ICE-S, also.

"There are about 100 phones with it. You hand them out to key people," he says.

But one major communications system continues to fall short in numbers.

The Army Guard is still trying to acquire a sufficient number of the Single Channel Ground and Air Radio Systems (SINCGARS), which have a price tag of $17,000.

An NGB document shows the Guard needs 93,843 SINCGARS radio to meet Fiscal Year 2013 Modified Table of Organization and Equipment requirements.

Currently, it has on hand 52,148 and an additional 16,378 "acceptable" substitutes.

The radios are the Army's primary means of tactical communications. Built for use in combat, SINCGARS can operate among more than 2,300 channels and have countermeasures built in to prevent the enemy from eavesdropping on conversations.

But when the lights went out on communications in New Orleans after the hurricane, it demonstrated how the shortage of SINCGARS can have an impact on the homeland mission of the Guard, as well.

Active-component units had them; the Guard, for the most part, didn't. That meant units in the most technological advanced land force in history were reduced to communication via hand signals and runners.

To fully fund the SINCGARS requirement, the Army Guard would need $345.3 million.

Back at NGB, McNeill explains that the JISCC effort predates Hurricane Katrina. Events on Sept. 11, 2001, triggered the push. Communications between agencies was difficult if not nonexistent during that sad and chaotic day.

"Post 9/11, we realized that there was an interoperability gap for the National Guard to talk to civilian first responders," McNeill says. "In today's environment, if you're not interoperable, you're irrelevant in the homeland."

It isn't needed in the "go to war" world overseas, but the homeland needed that capability, he says. His office surveyed states and found gaps that needed filling.

Although the interoperability effort was underway when Katrina arrived, McNeill says, it was that hurricane's power and destruction that opened the eyes of a Congress that had been reluctant to fund the gear.

"Post-Katrina, they got it," he says.

An additional $55 million was put in the supplemental budget for interoperable communications gear in 2005, soon after the hurricane's fury had passed. But lawmakers also told the Guard to get the equipment to the states most affected by hurricanes before the next storm season in early summer 2006.

McNeill says the JISCC is built from "commercial-off-the-shelf stuff." Nothing had to be invented. It was simply a matter of gathering the right gear and packaging it into a transportable and workable unit.

It is a larger version, he says, of the communications package used by the civil support teams. But this package is built for the joint task force commander.

Before the 2006 hurricane season rolled around, he says, the Guard had put eight JISCC units in the hurricane states and had two in reserve as fly-away kits.

Currie says the state of Washington has even deployed its JISCC unit to a nearby state and calls it "a pretty powerful package."

McNeill says that the enthusiasm for the unit is as great across the National Guard as it is in his office.

"The [adjutant generals] want more of these," he says.

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