In December, the Force Support Department of the Civil Engineer and Services School (CESS) at AFIT launched the first combined Force Support Contingency Courses. In addition to educating Expeditionary Force Support Squadron (EFSS) Commanders, Deputies, and Superintendents, CESS hosted newly designed contingency courses for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, Equal Opportunity, and Airman and Family Readiness Center deployers. Students from all four functional areas joined together during the first day of the course to learn doctrine, operational planning, command and control, and current operations. Then each functional area split into separate classes to learn functional-specific curriculum to complete their deployment training. In addition, protocol deployers were simultaneously attending a deployment protocol course and also interacted with students from the other classes deploying to the same location. This unique approach to consolidating the majority of A1 deployment training not only saved expenses from shared faculty and guest speakers, but more importantly provided the deployers a better understanding of deployed A1 capabilities and built their network with other A1 deployers in advance. These courses will be offered before each AEF deployment cycle with the next set of courses scheduled for the end of April. For more information about these and other Force Support courses, visit www.afit.edu or contact the AFIT Force Support Management Department at DSN 785-5654 ext. 3525. To view a short video highlighting the courses and capabilities of the AFIT Force Support Department, click on the following link: http://av.afit.edu/CESS/ForceSupport/ForceSupportPromoVideo10Nov2008.wmv