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CAMP MURRAY, Wash.—In 2018, the Washington Air National Guard’s 111th Air Support Operations Squadron marked its 30th anniversary. The 56-member unit celebrated the milestone with a ceremony and reception during the August drill at its building on Camp Murray. Among the alumni in attendance was retired Col. Jack Arnold, the squadron’s first commander.
In 1987, Arnold was a major and a flying instructor for KC-135 aerial refueling planes for the 141st Air Refueling Wing at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane when Maj. Gen. Dennis Hague, assistant adjutant general for air of the Washington Air National Guard, approached him with an idea.
Hague had flown A-1 Skyraider attack planes in the Vietnam War, and Arnold had been a forward air controller for OV-10 Bronco light attack and observation aircraft in the last year of the war. Now, Hague wanted to bring an air support mission to the Washington Air National Guard, with the hope of eventually attracting a fighter or attack plane mission. Knowing Arnold’s background in air support operations, Hague met with Arnold at Fairchild and asked if he would take on command of a new air support operation squadron. Arnold quickly accepted the challenge.
The new squadron would be based at Camp Murray and provide support to the active duty Army I Corps, based at Fort Lewis. It would be the first time ever that an Air Guard unit provided air support operations for an active duty Army unit, Arnold said. Arnold faced skepticism about this from some Army and Air Force officials, he recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t think it’s a problem. Putting it together, we just need the right manning document,’” he said.
Arnold went to work coordinating with the National Guard Bureau, assembling a personnel plan, and lining up equipment.
Prior to his position at Fairchild, Arnold had completed a temporary assignment at the Air National Guard Support Center at Andrews Air Force Base, so he was familiar with the inner workings of the National Guard Bureau. “I kind of knew how their system worked at headquarters, and I think that benefited us in that I knew the ropes and people who were going to work with us on our manning document and getting us equipment and supplies and building us a budget,” said Arnold. “Also I had flown OV-10s and knew the air support mission.”
But for the Washington Air National Guard, it was uncharted territory. “The air to ground mission, especially being out in the field on the ground with the Army, was something that was totally new for the State of Washington,” said Arnold.
Preparing for the ORI
Arnold’s main concern was having the new unit mission-ready by 1990, when the Air Force would perform an operational readiness inspection, he said. That meant hiring a combination of drill-status and full-time personnel, said Arnold.
“We slowly started picking up people who had the appropriate AFSCs that we could use,” said Arnold. “It was much easier on the comm side of things, because there were so many comm units in the state. They also knew all the equipment that we’d be using, so that was a benefit. The hard part was trying to find pilots or navigators who had an interest in not flying and doing an air-to-ground role and being on the ground with the Army. That was difficult in itself, because a lot of flyers wanted to fly airplanes.” Arnold held out hope that the Washington Air National Guard would pick up an A-10 or F-16 mission, he said.
The Washington Air National Guard never acquired close air support aircraft, but Arnold continued to fill vacant positions.
The original 111th work space was a 40-foot trailer and a small parcel of land on Camp Murray, said Arnold. As more and more people came to work at the 111th, they packed into the trailer, said Arnold. The trailer became so crowded that members decided to play a prank on their commander one day. “They put my desk on top of the trailer as a joke, because there was no room inside, except for our admin people,” said Arnold.
Finally, the Washington National Guard gave the 111th a warehouse on the edge of Camp Murray facing Interstate 5, Arnold said. Arnold had the building renovated with a second story, offices on the sides and an open space for meetings on the ground floor center.
“This was home sweet home,” said Brig. Gen. John Tuohy, a major when he came to work as one of the 111th’s first fighter duty officers and the unit’s assistant detachment commander in July 1989, shortly after the 111th moved into its building.
The squadron inherited personnel and assets from a decommissioned squadron at Willow Grove Air National Guard Base in Pennsylvania. The equipment that came in from Willow Grove was “a mess,” according to Tuohy.
Arnold balanced the work of starting the unit with his full-time job as a Boeing instructor pilot. Arnold would come up with ideas on the road from his civilian job to Camp Murray and hand them off to Tuohy. “He’d drive down from Boeing and he’d write a bunch of things on his napkins and he’d hand these things to me – scribbled with pen and [stained with] catsup,” said Tuohy.
In the lead-up to the operational readiness inspection, a preliminary evaluation by the 15th Air Force “wasn’t pretty,” said Arnold. After inspectors said they’d be canceling the inspection, Arnold promised to be ready in six months. “We said, ‘No, we’ll get it right. We just needed some direction, and you’ve given us some insight,’” Arnold recalled. The inspection stayed on the calendar. “We changed how we were doing business a little bit, and in six months we had the Air Force Inspector General in to look at us….We actually surprised them, and we changed how the ASOC went to war,” said Arnold.
Tuohy recalled the moment at an event after an inspection field exercise when the members of the squadron learned that they had passed the ORI with an “excellent” rating. “You could see all 120 of us erupt,” said Tuohy. Passing that inspection “was really a milestone,” said Tuohy.
Post-Cold War Air Support Operations
After continued skepticism from both Army and Air Force officials, “Eventually, we gained the confidence of both the Corps and the Air Force, and they said, ‘Hey, these guys are doing what’s right, and they’re building an organization that’s strong and getting ready to go to the first Iraqi war,’” said Arnold. The 111th was preparing to deploy when the Gulf War ended.
“We had a lot of fun, we worked really, really, really hard, and we didn’t follow the rules because we didn’t know the rules. We made the rules for our unit,” said Tuohy.
In the early days, the truck yard behind the ASOC building was packed with trucks. “There wasn’t a spot out here that was not filled with a parked vehicle,” Tuohy said. To deploy the unit’s full capabilities along with trucks and trailers overseas would require 28 C-141 airplanes and a ship, said Tuohy.
These were the late days of the Cold War era. “You’re going to have weeks, maybe months to get in place while you’re waiting for the fight,” said Tuohy.
“Then times, of course, changed. We started to see little pockets of terrorism. We started to see these little factious groups rise up,” said Tuohy. With the logistical burden of deployment, “It quickly became apparent, at least to folks here, that we can’t go to the fight quickly.”
Members gathered for a strategy session one day to imagine how they could streamline their operations in a post-Cold War world. “We sat around here, and it was a combination of traditional members and some full-timers, literally in that break room probably over lunch and one too many caffeinated Pepsis,” Tuohy recalled. “We started to think, how do we shrink this? What could we take to the fight that could get us up and running, that could instantly bring to bear close air support?”
Eventually, Tech. Sgt. Kathy Rich made a suggestion that got everyone’s attention. “She goes, ‘You know, what if we took the satellite van off the big trailer, which had to be pulled by a big five-ton truck, and what if we figured out it fit on the back of the Humvee.’ And we go, ‘Oh boy, that’s brilliant!’” Tuohy recalled. At that time, the Humvee had only been used by the Army for a short time.
Tuohy made arrangements with I Corps to borrow a Humvee. Members successfully mounted the satellite system on top of the vehicle, Tuohy said. “We went from this massive big truck that had to pull it with this big massive trailer down to a Humvee, and then all that support gear was marginalized, and we condensed the stuff we had,” Tuohy said. “That allowed us to go from 28 airplanes…down to four airplane loads. We could get the notification, we could roll out quickly, we could work out of McChord [Air Force Base], we could get in there literally…within 72 hours.”
Next, the 111th developed an efficient staging process to load equipment into trucks for its response package. Members loaded trucks from a platform that became known as “Lester’s Landing,” in honor of the unit’s third commander, Lt. Col. John Lester.
The commander of the 12th Air Force learned about the quick response package and came out to Camp Murray to see it. “He just couldn’t believe it,” said Tuohy. “He goes, ‘I need those plans. I want to get this in the hands of the active duty guys.’”
The active duty Air Force was “a bit resistant,” said Tuohy, “and I can kind of understand – here’s this Guard unit that has been on board for less than three years, coming up with creative designs.”
But the 111th was proving itself, said Arnold. “We were showing people that not only were we good, but we were changing how the Air Force supports the Army on the ground,” said Arnold.
“An Innovative Unit”
Col. Gent Welsh, current commander of the 194th Wing, the parent wing of the 111th, got his start in the Air Guard with the 111th. When Welsh left active duty Air Force service in 1992, he went to an Air Guard recruiting office in Spokane. “I wanted intel, but the only opportunities in the whole state were in the 111th,” he said. He joined in March 1992, got married in June, and left for tech school two weeks later.
After Welsh was commissioned in 1994, he served as a communications operations officer in the squadron. He came to appreciate the ASOS’s relationship with the Army. “It was kind of cool to be one of the only Air Force units around here authorized to wear an Army patch,” he said. “We did lots of exercises and deployments.”
The 111th “was an innovative unit,” Welsh said. “They created doctrine and wrote the book before anyone knew the book needed to be written.”
Welsh looked up to the squadron’s Vietnam veterans, including Arnold. “Learning from those guys was such an experience,” he said.
After Arnold was promoted and moved into a new position in the Washington Air Guard, Lt. Col. Mike Miller became the squadron’s second commander, according to unit records.
The year after Welsh joined the 111th, then-Capt. Jill Lannan came off of active Army duty and joined the squadron.
“I decided to join after participating in the 111th’s ORE [operational readiness exercise] while I will still an Army AD Intelligence officer,” said Lannan, who today holds the rank of brigadier general and serves as Air National Guard assistant to the commander of the 24th Air Force. “I was tasked to play the G2 role and spend a week in ‘the field’ with Maj. Tuohy and others. I first met Lt. Col. Jack Arnold during this exercise. He was walking me through the site and asking my opinion on the set up. It was a mess! They were trying to put camo netting up after they had erected the tents (This was a first for them using the camo). I explained how easy it would be if they put up the netting first (seemed so basic to me but hey, I was a tactical Army officer!).
“After that week of understanding their mission and spending time with Tuohy and others they asked me if I would be interested in the ANG. I was getting ready to leave active duty so I could stay in Washington. I had no clue about the Guard but thought I should give it a try. What set this unit apart was the genuine comradery – a team that came together and had to figure this mission out as they went. I told them they needed me! It took six months for the Air Force to accept my MOS as the Air Force AFSC and then in Feb ‘93 I changed uniforms and have never, ever regretted that decision.”
Lannan joined the 111th as an intelligence officer, rising to chief of intelligence and then detachment commander.
Chief Master Sgt. Stephen Nolan was recruited out of the 143rd Combat Communications Squadron in 1994 and remained in the 111th for 21 years, filling a number of different roles. “Initially when I got there we were still growing, and we were pulling from all the different agencies. We provide the same comm networks but on a smaller level than the combat comms did. My expertise translated directly into it. As we recruited, we did a lot of recruiting of the combat comms.”
“From an operational standpoint, we had to understand the whole picture of the battle,” said Nolan. “We worked with Army fires to deconflict, can this target be hit with Army artillery? Can it be hit with rotary wing aircraft? Do we need AF aircraft to come in? That was our responsibility. I provided the comm links for them to be able to reach back to an air operations center or reach back to other locations via sat comm.”
In addition to performing its federal mission, the 111th also took part in domestic operations within its state mission. Among other accomplishments, the unit built and operated a high frequency communications tower to provide communications from Camp Murray in the event of a natural disaster, said Tuohy.
Developing a Simulator
After deploying to Afghanistan as a joint terminal attack controller (JTAC) with the 116th in September 2003, Senior Master Sgt. Greg Kassa, now retired, joined the 111th. Kassa decided to join the 111th because he could tell that members “wanted to be there and weren’t just punching a ticket. Everybody was there by choice….People were eagerly trying to make themselves better and be prepared for the next deployment.”
Kassa returned to Afghanistan in September 2004, a year to the date after his previous deployment. At Bagram Air Base, he was able to use his expertise as a former JTAC. “Exactly a year prior I had been over there but on the opposite end of the radio from the ASOC, and it was good to be able to help guide that and fix a few things that I saw broken as a JTAC,” said Kassa.
“Then we came back, we realized we were good but we weren’t as good as we could be on that deployment. At that time Lt. Col. Scott Whitmore and Capt Brian O’Flynn and myself sat down, and we had talked about a way to better train people to prepare to go overseas, and that’s kind of how we opened the door to the simulation world. We had done a little bit of work gathering stuff on our own, reaching out and saying, ‘Hey we’d like to see what we can do.’ We had a couple programs that kind of worked but not one that did everything like we wanted it. So they kind of cut me loose and let me run down that path.”
Then in 2007, the 111th set up the first U.S. ASOC ever to be under NATO control, according to Kassa. A team of 111th members went to Kabul, Afghanistan 30 days prior to the arrival of the main body to make advance preparations. For a year, personnel cycled through the center on rotations of at least six months, said Kassa. According to the citation for the 111th’s Air Force Outstanding Unit Award that followed that deployment, the unit managed 14,222 requests for air support and directed 1,762 shows of force.
After returning from their deployment, Whitmore, O’Flynn, and Kassa began to discuss the merits of a comprehensive simulation program at Camp Murray. Then the Air Force Research Laboratory invited the 111th to pilot a simulation program, said Kassa.
“In the early days it was very rudimentary….It was starting to work, and in 2013 we had a very, very early prototype that was good enough that we could go in and pull yesterday’s fight and train our guys on what was happening the day before….We knew the geography, we knew the trends, we were ahead of the curve, we could actually plan ahead to help guys, and it really helped propel the 111th…to being a force to be reckoned with as far as standardization, training, and capabilities,” said Kassa.
After that, the 111th received funding to establish an advanced simulation facility at Camp Murray, said Kassa. That resulted in the Robert J. Rehwaldt II Simulation Center for Joint Fire Power Integration, located at Camp Murray. It is the only training facility across the entire Air Force where JTACs and ASOC personnel can train for their complete air to ground mission in one building, according to Lt. Col. David Stilli, who joined the squadron as detachment commander and director of operations in March 2014, taking command of the 111th in January 2017.
Kassa and others from the 111th have provided briefings on the simulation center for various Air Force and Army audiences, said Kassa. All active duty air support operations units, and both Air National Guard ASOS units, now use the simulation model pioneered at the 111th, said Kassa. “What the 111th started out with...is now a fielded system,” said Kassa.
“A lot of technology that the ASOC community uses came from concepts and ideas from the 111th,” said Nolan.
Same Mission, New Requirements
The 111th deployed to Afghanistan again in 2012, said Kassa. In addition to its three deployments to Afghanistan, the 111th has also seen service in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Spain, Italy, the Republic of Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Germany, according to information provided by Stilli.
Chief Master Sgt. Kevin Whalen, now retired, joined the 111th in 2009 to take the squadron superintendent position. Before that, he had served in the 116th, which is part of the same Air Support Operations Group as the 111th, for several years. “We had a connection with the 111th since we both had the TACP mission,” he said, “Over time we had more and more interactions, running into each other at Army exercises. Then we also started trading folks, training with units as time went on.”
After Whalen joined the 111th, he was impressed by the caliber of the airmen in the unit, with multiple Wing and state-level Airmen of the Year awards in the years that followed.
Whalen played an important role in “getting more TACPs to come in to the unit” at a time when personnel and equipment requirements were changing within the career field, said Tuohy.
Career field training requirements are rigorous, said Nolan. “We’re responsible to maintain all of our AFSC qualifications, our satellite, our network, but on top of that, there are very rigorous field skills--land navigation, night vision goggle driving, going out and doing all the survival skill stuff,” said Nolan.
Today, the ASOS supports four Army National Guard infantry divisions: the Minnesota National Guard’s 34th Infantry Division, the Kansas National Guard’s 35th Infantry Division, the Texas National Guard’s 36th Infantry Division, and the 40th Infantry Division consisting of soldiers from the Western United States and Pacific region.
“Army commanders love the capability,” said 111th ASOS Chief Master Sgt. William Feger, who served in an active-duty ASOC before coming into the Guard. “The AFSCs have changed. The mission is the same. A lot of the changes are based on technologies that are out there now. Because of that close air support mission, you get a lot of different AFSCs in this unit. We have enlisted 1C4s, 1C5s, power pros, cyber—all in one location. It’s hard to find that diversity of AFSCs within one ASOC.”
Recently the 111th formed a coalition for an exercise with the United Kingdom ASOC. The unit also takes part in an annual Warfighter exercise with the Army. The 36th ID, JTACs from Louisiana, and the 284th ASOS of Kansas traveled to Washington State in November for an exercise with the 111th and the 116th ASOS.
“The SIM piece for us is huge, being able to train Army personnel,” said Stilli.
The 111th Tradition
“There is probably no other organization on Camp Murray that has produced so many general officers,” said Stilli. “It shows you the kind of people we had in the ‘90s and early 2000s who really made this squadron what it is today.”
In addition to Tuohy and Lannan, a general officer who served in the 111th while rising through the ranks was Brig. Gen. Craig Blankenstein, who commanded the squadron and retired after serving as vice commander and chief of staff of the Washington Air National Guard.
“We were like the farm house, the farm league train,” said Tuohy. Tuohy points to the diversity of perspectives within the squadron as a factor in the success of 111th alumni who went on to more senior leadership roles, including a number of general officers, colonels, and chief master sergeants. “We had such disparate groups from different walks of life,” said Tuohy. “The flyers came from all over. We had a variety of ground communicators. They all came in with different perspectives. It was kind of a melting pot, but in that we had really clever ideas from each element. I think that really shaped leaders [as they] went off to do other things, they were able to take that and apply it at their new positions.”
When 111th members went on to other units, they brought innovative ways of thinking with them, said Tuohy.
“What sets the 111th apart stems from Jack Arnold and his leadership from the beginning—the drive to figure it out as we went along—essentially doctrine in the making,” said Lannan. “That spirit lives on. As much as the entire ANG is known for our innovative spirit, risk taking and allowing Airmen a voice, this unit did that better than any and still does.”
“I’m pretty proud of the organization,” said Arnold, who retired from the Air National Guard after working in various roles at the state headquarters. “All the involvement in the world in different crises, and how they’ve performed, is remarkable.”
Thirty years after the squadron was formed, members and alumni continue to talk about the unit’s traditions and culture. “You walk into that organization and it feels…like family,” said Whalen. Arnold “did a good job of setting tradition,” said Whalen. “When you’re at that unit you know that you’re part of something – it’s not just another assignment.”
Col. Jack Arnold “set that tone, and 30 years later…the legacy of Jack lives on, and that’s remarkable,” said Tuohy. “Truly the 111th is the premier unit for this kind of mission today,” said Tuohy.
| Date Taken: | 12.29.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 12.29.2018 12:38 |
| Story ID: | 305740 |
| Location: | CAMP MURRAY, WA, US |
| Web Views: | 1,432 |
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