The Citadel Shield-Solid Curtain exercise—the name doesn’t give much to go off of, but it’s something that happens every year.
More than half of the island of Coronado is made up of a military base, Naval Air Station North Island (NASNI); the planes flying overhead, the ships coming in and out, it’s hard to miss.
NASNI is also the home to three of the total 11 aircraft carriers the United States owns and operates, the USS Abraham Lincoln, USS Carl Vinson and the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
Stationing three Navy Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, it’s safe to say that NASNI is a vital part of the U.S. Navy and therefore, needs to be protected.
This is where the Citadel Shield-Solid Curtain exercise comes in.
“We do this exercise every year, it’s a nationwide exercise,” Navy public affairs officer Kevin Dixon said in a phone call to The Coronado News. “The purpose of which is to exercise our ability to protect our installations.”
According to the U.S. Navy’s website, different commands of the Navy—the Commander, Navy Installations Command (CNIC) and the Commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command (USFFC)—conduct the two-part protection exercise each year to demonstrate the Navy’s commitment to protecting life, equipment and facilities.
The CNIC is responsible for worldwide U.S. Navy shore installation management while the USFFC trains, certifies and provides combat-ready Navy forces to combatant commanders, according to the Navy’s website.
Citadel Shield (CS) is a field training exercise led by CNIC and Solid Curtain (SC) is a command post exercise led by USFFC.
In easier words, a command post exercise is primarily about exercising the command unit, or the people that are in control and making the decisions going on at that location, according to Dixon.
The field training exercise is a ‘boots on the ground’ aspect of the exercise. Members of the military out in the field carry out the necessary actions to resolve an issue.
“It’s like the head and the body,” Dixon said, referring to the command post exercise as the head and the field training exercise as the body.
“SC/CS is designed to ensure our people and security forces are at peak readiness to deter and respond to potential security threats,” the Navy’s website states. “This annual exercise uses realistic scenarios to ensure U.S. Navy security forces maintain a high level of readiness to respond to changing and dynamic threats.”
The exercise lasts about two weeks every year, said Dixon, and the city of Coronado is not immune to the effects of the exercise.
A traffic alert went out on NASNI’s facebook page warning residents ahead of time that they would experience some traffic delays as they “may see or hear security activities as Navy personnel simulate scenarios to test and improve responses to various security threats.”
“We were doing a portion of our exercise that required us to go to a higher security posture for the base,” Dixon explained. “That involved closing a couple of our gates momentarily while we simulated doing that process.”
