Hundreds of planes and thousands of service members are flying across the Pacific as part of the largest air fighting exercise in the region’s recent history.
The U.S. Department of the Air Force kicked off Resolute Force Pacific 2025 — or REFORPAC — on July 10 and will continue until Aug. 8. It’s department-wide exercise is bringing in the U.S. Air Force and Space Force as well as personnel from allied countries.
Inside the U.S. Pacific Air Forces Warfighting Center at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, the room buzzes with activity as service members and civilians working with different U.S. and allied military forces work at a series of monitors. On the wall, BBC News is broadcasting live.
Col. Kenneth Burton, PACAF’s deputy chief of staff, said that going with BBC was a deliberate choice so that troops participating in the exercise think about what’s going on across the globe in real time rather than thinking about American domestic politics.
Though it’s just an exercise, REFORPAC is taking place in a real-world setting and those involved will be adapting to real-world conditions from weather to geopolitical tensions.
About 400 aircraft, 12,000 airmen and 700 Space Force guardians are participating in the exercise from 50 locations across the Pacific and Indian Oceans as the Pentagon tests its ability to surge forces into the region in the event of a major crisis or conflict.
It’s a massive undertaking. Gen. Kevin Schneider, top commander of PACAF, said “we’re going from Alaska to Hawaii to Guam to a few other places in between. It’s about 6,000 miles east to west, 4,000 miles north to south … only the U.S. Air Force can do that at that scale and with the speed at which we’re doing it.”
The surge of forces comes as tensions have run high across the Pacific. The Chinese and Russian militaries have increasingly pursued joint air and sea patrols, while Russia and North Korea have deepened their own military cooperation as North Korean troops fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine.
On Friday, two U.S. Air Force bombers escorted by Japanese and South Korean fighter jets conducted a joint flight near the Korean Peninsula, drawing an immediate rebuke from North Korea.
In a statement published Sunday by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, the North Korean military said that “irresponsible acts of the U.S., Japan and (South Korea) steadily heightening the level of tension and danger on the Korean Peninsula should be closely watched and deterred.” The statement also warned of unspecified “grave consequences” and that North Korea maintains “sovereign right to take countermeasures against provocative military actions.”
Among the things the U.S. military wants to put to the test is the Air Force’s strategy of “agile combat employment” — known to airmen as ACE — in which commanders hope to spread their forces to as many facilities and air strips in the region as possible to make them harder for enemy forces to hit.
Lt. Col. Jarred Chamberland, lead planner for the exercise, said that the training “was built to facilitate the movement of forces into theater, to stress that part of the system, sustain those forces while they’re operating within the theater for almost a month here, and then agile combat employment them around the theater.”
“In this exercise, they get the opportunity to take all that, put it together with their joint counterparts, with allies and partners, to ensure that they’re practicing the skill sets that we’ve taught them,” said Chief Master Sgt. Kathleen McCool, PACAF’s top enlisted leader. “We talk a lot about mission ready airmen. We want our airmen to be prepared on day one to go into any type of contingency and be able to execute.”
The Air Force’s plans for ACE in the region have been years in the making. Military officials have been scouting for air strips they can use, ranging from dirt runways to places they can renovate into concrete runways with all the bells and whistles.
“It’s a mindset shift for (how) we’ve done business as the Department of Defense since Since 9/11,” said Brig. Gen. Carla Riner, who normally serves as chief of staff of the Delaware Air National Guard but is serving as acting operations officer for PACAF in the exercise. “This is a very different environment to operate that has to be sustained in a very different way. These aren’t these huge fixed bases that we have in (the Middle East) that are secure and safe and easy to get in and out of.”
Schneider said that “we made a lot of progress on the austere locations over the years. I was here (in Hawaii) in 2015 in a different job, when we really started down the road in agile combat employment. And we had ideas about places from which we were to operate. Those places are now becoming realities.”
Among the airfields the Air Force has focused on is a runway on the island of Tinian in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas. It was once used by the Enola Gay in its mission to drop the atomic bomb on Tokyo 80 years ago. The Air Force has been pouring resources into reviving the World War II-era airstrip for 21st-century operations.
The effort hasn’t been without controversy. While Air Force commanders say that by spreading out their forces through ACE makes them harder to hit by creating more targets for their enemies, some in island communities that neighbor these airfields argue the presence of American forces draws them into danger they wouldn’t have been in otherwise.
People in Guam and the CNMI living close by have long lived with the threat of missile. But in 2018 the false alarm missile alert in Hawaii spurred discussion of the Aloha State’s vulnerability to an attack. Since then, testing and training using real missiles has ramped up on both sides of the Pacific.
In 2022, North Korea did a series of missile tests — more than at any time since its missile program started — sending ripples across the Pacific. More recently, the Chinese military launched a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile with a dummy warhead that flew 7,400 miles before splashing down in the Pacific south of Hawaii — the first known of its kind by China in more than four decades.
Brig. Gen. Mike Zuhlsdorf, PACAF’s director of logistics, engineering and force protection said that the military has been in constant contact with island leaders — especially in the CNMI — as well as working with local businesses and contractors in the operation.
Commanders also say they are working to mitigate their environmental impact. Col. Patrick Miller, an officer working on logistics — notably fuel — said that “we have deliberately made some choices during this exercise to use fuel distribution out of fixed containers, instead of exercising some of the capabilities we have to lay out bladders and build berms.”
Miller explained that “we are not exercising some of the capabilities that we could do at wartime to make our lives a lot easier. So we’re deferring to things that are a little bit harder to do, but are tried and true to make sure we don’t have those type of environmental issues during this exercise.”
It’s also a milestone in training for the small Space Force. In addition to active duty personnel, U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific commander Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir said that National Guard space units from California, Colorado and Hawaii are participating with more personnel reporting remotely from across the country and world.
Mastalir said that in the Pacific “our adversaries are increasing the number of satellites that they have on orbit, specifically architected, specifically tuned, specifically calibrated to (area of operations), and specifically used to target and attack us and allied forces.”
“You have guardians that usually sit inside of (operations) centers located and distributed around the world, often not even seeing the light of day, working 24/7 operating systems that are in the space domain so they can’t really see, taste, touch, hear or smell the environment that they’re operating in,” said Command Master Sgt. Jason Childers, the Space Force’s senior enlisted leader in the region. “So to be able to conduct exercises like this, where we can have the simulated, live and virtual and synthetic scenarios that allow us to operate alongside of our Air Force teammates and others across the joint force, certainly helps to enhance our readiness as space-minded war fighters.”
The military is conducting the ambitious exercise during the Pacific’s storm season — the possibility of intense hurricanes and typhoons sweeping through the areas they’re working is an ever-present reality. Commanders say that’s no accident.
Burton, a career Air Force weather officer, said that it’s a reality that planes break, personnel get stuck in places, and that they have to deal with whatever the weather throws at them regardless of whether its peace or wartime. He also said that for the exercise, personnel with little experience in the Indo-Pacific area of operations will get a real-world taste of what it will be like to work with other units in the area.
“There’s other units that are coming in, so now it’s connecting the extra pieces of that puzzle that aren’t assigned here every day,” said Burton. “You can try to simulate this. You can put this on paper, you can put it through computers and run that, but until you actually put real people at real stations controlling assets, and trying to link that together to answer the questions you have, you really haven’t proven success.”
Source: The Garden Island
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