HONOLULU, Hawaii — Mobility Guardian 2023, the Air Force’s premier training exercise for its airlift and aerial refueling fleets, gets underway within the Pacific this week with a watch on potential conflict with China.
Now on its fourth iteration, this yr’s Mobility Guardian is the biggest thus far at around 3,000 U.S. and allied airmen and 70 cargo and tanker planes. It’s the primary time that Air Mobility Command has brought its marquee biennial event overseas.
The exercise goals to prove how easily the Air Force can dispatch personnel and cargo to the Pacific in a crisis, and the way easily U.S. troops collaborate with their partners within the region. Also a part of the event are America’s allies within the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing coalition — Australia, Canada, Recent Zealand and the UK — plus France and Japan.
“Historically, we’re used to specializing in [U.S. Central Command],” exercise planner Lt. Col. Jake Parker said. “It is a completely different [region] that has a totally different focus. It’s really shifting the way in which that we predict through our tactics, techniques and procedures.”
Earlier within the week, aircrews and support staff from across the US began their journeys to U.S.-run and allied bases in Hawaii, Guam, Australia and Japan, where they may serve because the backbone of several other military exercises across the region through July 21.
Mobility Guardian is basically unscripted on purpose, Parker said. That forces troops to think on their feet to navigate the vast Pacific, arrange communications and other support services in regions they’ve never visited, and roll with the punches when things don’t go in response to plan.
Logistical snags are already putting that flexibility to the test.
One bleary-eyed crew of nearly 50 airmen departed Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina, after midnight Thursday after weather delayed their outbound C-5 Galaxy for multiple hours. Then the team was waylaid in Honolulu when the crew that was scheduled to ferry them to Guam didn’t arrive at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on time.
Once aircraft reach their final destinations, airmen plan to work from bare-bones tents and trailers like those arrange at the sting of Andersen Air Force Base, Guam.
The Charleston-based airmen headed for Guam will act as a deployed wing staff, taking control of the airfield from a contingency response team already on the bottom to establish a command post that may direct forces across the region on aeromedical evacuations, search and rescue missions and airdrops.
Mobility Guardian also gives airmen the possibility to check out myriad other initiatives, from latest teams which will help ensure continuity of communications, to command-and-control apps, to a real-time sleep study.
Participating airmen told Air Force Times they’re curious to see how ideas just like the service’s latest deployment model, often known as AFFORGEN, play out in the actual world.
“We’re purported to go together with generators and nothing, and arrange initial comms,” Master Sgt. Justin Braden, a combat communications specialist, said aboard a C-17 Globemaster III in Charleston. “We’re attending to do more of what we’re purported to be doing … once you go on deployment. I need more opportunities like this.”
Leaders have stressed they aren’t expecting perfection, and urge airmen to lift any issues that might help the Air Force improve after the exercise is completed.
Rejoice, they said, and show the world what the Air Force can do.
“I would like the very best and brightest,” sixteenth Airlift Squadron commander Lt. Col. Nicole Stenstad told airmen in a pre-deployment briefing in Charleston on Monday. “I would like you to place your best foot forward.”
Rachel Cohen joined Air Force Times as senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in Air Force Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), the Washington Post, and others.