About WhiteCell.ai
ABOUT WHITECELL.ai
Better exercises before the real event.
Jurisdiction → Exercise → Evaluation → Improvement
WHAT IS WHITECELL.ai?
WhiteCell.ai is an AI-supported exercise management platform that starts with the jurisdiction: its hazards, capabilities, dependencies, gaps, and operating reality. Its methodology is informed by HSEEP and Master Exercise Practitioner principles and supports the exercise lifecycle from initial planning through evaluation and improvement.
Clyde assists with research, analysis, and exercise development; the human exercise professional and jurisdiction determine what is accepted and validated. WhiteCell.ai does not claim FEMA endorsement, certification, or approval.
MEET CLYDE
Community Lifelines, Your Dynamic Exercises
Clyde is the AI-assisted exercise partner inside WhiteCell.ai. The name reflects WhiteCell’s jurisdiction-first approach: understand the community, organize conditions through Community Lifelines, and use that validated picture to help build your dynamic exercises. Clyde can assemble evidence, identify questions, connect dependencies, and help practitioners see how local conditions should shape exercise objectives and scenarios.
Clyde researches, proposes, challenges assumptions, and helps develop scenarios. Exercise control and evaluation support are planned capabilities and remain under development.
THE WHITE CELL PHILOSOPHY
WhiteCell draws inspiration from rigorous exercise environments such as the Army’s National Training Center, where realistic conditions, capable opposition, candid observation, and failure in training expose weaknesses before they matter.
Emergency management has no traditional opposing force. The pressure comes from time, uncertainty, cascading failures, damaged infrastructure, resource shortages, incomplete information, public behavior, and the consequences of earlier decisions.
WhiteCell uses those pressures to challenge a jurisdiction without creating a “gotcha” exercise. Participants must have a fair opportunity to recognize problems, make decisions, coordinate resources, recover from mistakes, and succeed.
Clyde should understand why an inject exists, which objective or capability it tests, how participants respond, and how earlier decisions affect later conditions. This creates disciplined, realistic pressure—not an opponent trying to beat participants.
It is to make the exercise honest.
BUILT FOR THE JURISDICTION
WhiteCell starts with the real community, not a canned scenario. Clyde researches hazards, Community Lifelines, capabilities, gaps, dependencies, mutual-aid relationships, and other conditions that should influence exercise design.
Users review, correct, add to, and validate that information. Over time, the result becomes a jurisdiction-owned exercise baseline that can be reused and improved.
Local knowledge can correct outdated public information, document capabilities and dependencies that Clyde cannot see online, and identify questions that still require validation.
The jurisdiction decides what is true.
Founder
Lee D. Schnell — Founder, WhiteCell.ai
WhiteCell.ai was created by Lee Schnell, a FEMA Master Exercise Practitioner and retired military officer with decades of experience developing, supporting, and participating in exercises at tactical, operational, and strategic levels.
In emergency management, Lee has developed exercises ranging from Civil Support Team-level events to statewide hurricane and terrorism exercises, working across the exercise lifecycle from initial concept and design through conduct, evaluation, and improvement planning.
That experience shaped the WhiteCell approach: understand the jurisdiction first, challenge assumptions, create credible conditions, and reveal weaknesses before they matter.
WhiteCell.ai is being developed to make that disciplined, jurisdiction-informed exercise-development capability more accessible to organizations that may not have a dedicated Master Exercise Practitioner or a large exercise staff.
Contact: info@whitecell.ai
THE END STATE
WhiteCell’s long-term vision connects a validated jurisdiction baseline to exercise design, realistic conduct, evaluation, and measurable improvement. It is intended to support the full learning cycle: create credible conditions, observe decisions and effects, identify cascading consequences, and convert lessons into action.
Current: build and validate the jurisdiction baseline.
Guided exercise design from priorities through evaluation criteria.
Observation, evaluation, and improvement planning.
The end state is a disciplined, jurisdiction-specific exercise program that can ask hard questions, learn from failure, and improve readiness before a real incident while building organizational knowledge that carries forward into the next exercise.
Origins & Philosophy
White Cell Naming & NTC Influence
In many exercises, a White Cell operates behind the exercise environment. Depending on the exercise, it may help control and support play, manage simulated conditions and evolving challenges, adjudicate events, or support execution and evaluation. That practical concept—not a claim that there is one universal doctrinal definition of “White Cell”—inspired the WhiteCell.ai name.
One philosophical influence on WhiteCell.ai is the transformation of Army training associated with General Donn A. Starry and the development of the National Training Center. Starry was an important leader and advocate in the Army’s post-Vietnam training transformation and NTC development, working alongside other Army leaders, commands, planners, and institutions. He did not single-handedly create the NTC or its opposing force.
“I think that’s great; that’s exactly why we built that center. That’s how units and soldiers learn.”
General Donn A. Starry, Selected Works of General Donn A. Starry, Volume II, Combat Studies Institute Press / Army University Press.
Historical Sources & Further Reading
- U.S. Army Center of Military History, The Origins and Development of the National Training Center, 1976–1984.
- U.S. Army Center of Military History, The Army’s Training Revolution, 1973–1990: An Overview.
- Combat Studies Institute Press / Army University Press, Selected Works of General Donn A. Starry, Volume II.
- U.S. Army, Exercise tests Army War College students to think, act under pressure (an example of White Cells supporting exercise control).