ACEing It: Fully Mission Capable

Photo By Staff Sgt. Emily Batchelor | U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft is connected to a C-17 Globemaster III aircraft for aircraft-to-aircraft refueling operations, one of the many agile combat employment strategies being tested at Exercise Southern Strike, at Gulfport Combat Readiness Training Center, Gulfport, Mississippi, April 20, 2023. Exercise Southern Strike 2023 is a large-scale, joint and international combat exercise, which features agile combat employment, counterinsurgency, close air support, non-combatant evacuations, and maritime special operations. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Emily Batchelor)  

GULFPORT, MS, UNITED STATES

04.25.2023

Story by Staff Sgt. Renee Seruntine 

102d Public Affairs Detachment

“Agile Combat Employment is a method of employing our personnel in resources instead of going to one large main operating base,” said Col. Bryce Butler, exercise director. “We disperse our assets and forces throughout many different contingency locations as it confuses adversary planning.”

The key to ACE is to spread out aircraft and supplies across multiple airfields rather than concentrating them in a few central locations to make it more complicated to target all of them.

“We disperse forces in order to complicate potential adversaries' planning,” Butler said. “We have to have Airmen that not only know the job that they have been trained for but other jobs as well. When you disperse to those smaller bases and you have less personnel there, they have to be able to know many different jobs in order to be able to make the mission happen.”

Participants in Exercise Southern Strike have the chance to strengthen alliances and maintain their combat readiness for upcoming missions. The annual exercise provides valuable training scenarios to prepare fighters for a variety of threats and enhance their knowledge of the ACE concept.

“Southern Strike provides us the opportunity to go to multiple contingency locations because we have a lot of small airfields around here that will be very illustrative of what we’ll find inside of the South Pacific,” said Brig. Gen. Anthony Stratton, the commander of the 176th Wing, Alaska Air National Guard. “We have the water here as well so we can get our forces out there working together in a cohesive environment.”

ACE relies on multi-capable Airmen to recover, refuel, reload and perform maintenance to aircraft. This ensures they are ready to rapidly deploy a proactive plan of operation to boost resilience and survival while also generating combat power.

“Multi-capable Airmen are doing jobs that are not in their specific specialty code, things like marshaling airplanes, helping to fuel airplanes, providing perimeter security, ingesting data, analyzing it and pushing it back out,” said Stratton. “Operation forces are practicing over the next 2 weeks to bring the aircraft to contingency locations where they have to practice setting up support for all of the logistics personnel that are going to support that air frame.”

The U.S. Air Force, particularly the 176th, is enthusiastic about training for the ACE concept and the ability to train as part of a cross-functional team to assist aviation force elements in dynamic, dispersed operations, especially in remote locations of the Indo-Pacific.

“We may have to cover great distances and so no matter where we are in the future with our adversaries, whether they be in Eastern Europe, in the Pacific or wherever else, we have to be ready to employ this concept and remain agile so that if we're detected and targeted, we're able to redeploy to different locations using the ACE concept,” said Maj. Gen. Barry A. Blanchard, Assistant Adjutant General - Air, Mississippi National Guard.

Units will continue to train in exercises such as these to improve this concept, continue to develop the multi-capable airmen, and to ensure the readiness of the National Guard.

• Date Taken: 04.25.2023
• Date Posted: 04.25.2023 14:07
• Story ID: 443302
• Location: GULFPORT, MS, US