Marines to hand off decontamination duties to guard.Members of the Marine Corps' chemical-biological response unit will be laying down their protective suits and picking up weapons in the near future. The future will witness the National Guard taking over the responsibility, said Col. Dwight Trafton, commanding officer of the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF CBIRF chemical-biological incident response force (US DoD) .) The Guard's civil support teams will be taking over as first military responders to a biological or chemical release. In November, the Defense Department announced a fielding plan for 11 new civil support teams, the final step toward fulfilling the request of Congress that every state and territory have one. The 11 teams that are to be funded in the Defense Appropriations Act for 2005 are: the District of Columbia District of Columbia, federal district (2000 pop. 572,059, a 5.7% decrease in population since the 1990 census), 69 sq mi (179 sq km), on the east bank of the Potomac River, coextensive with the city of Washington, D.C. (the capital of the United States). , Delaware, Guam, Montana, North Dakota, New Hampshire New Hampshire, one of the New England states of the NE United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts (S), Vermont, with the Connecticut R. forming the boundary (W), the Canadian province of Quebec (NW), and Maine and a short strip of the Atlantic Ocean (E). , Puerto Rico, South Dakota, U.S. Virgin Islands, Vermont and Wyoming. CBIRF was formed in 1996. The unit has deployed to many national security events, and responded to anthrax and ricin ricin /ri·cin/ (ri´sin) a phytotoxin in the seeds of the castor oil plant (Ricinus communis), used in the synthesis of immunotoxins. ri·cin n. contaminations of federal office buildings. Additionally, CBIRF teams have deployed overseas for exercises in Jordan, Bahrain, Iceland, Qatar, Kuwait, Italy, France, the Philippines and Japan. Trafton had some advice on current and future equipment and training needs of all chem-bio units. Among the requirements of decontamination decontamination /de·con·tam·i·na·tion/ (de?kon-tam-i-na´shun) the freeing of a person or object of some contaminating substance, e.g., war gas, radioactive material, etc. de·con·tam·i·na·tion n. teams are new level A protective suits. Each suit would have drinking tubes and longer lasting filters that will allow forces to finish their missions. "We have got to come up with equipment that keeps us downrange down·range adv. & adj. In a direction away from the launch site and along the flight line of a missile test range: landed a thousand miles downrange; the downrange target area. longer." In order for a unit to be effective, its members must have the utmost confidence in their gear, he said. Trafton noted that in the past, even bending down to pick up a person would give a Marine reason to pause. "We have to have confidence in our equipment," he said. "For that we need to train on contaminated ranges." Trafton praised the National Guard civil support teams, and said that a key component of any successful mission was the psychological edge that comes from good training. "Working in this environment is very, very scary," he said. "When the Marines show up, they instill in·still v. To pour in drop by drop. in  stil·la tion n. a level of confidence."
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