Key Field hosts Alaska guardsmen during annual training exercise
Apr. 18—UPDATE: This story has been updated with the correct acronym for Agile Combat Employment as well as to correct the spelling of Brigadier General Tony Stratton's name.
The Mississippi Air National Guard 186th Air Refueling Wing at Key Field will be a bit crowded for the next few weeks as the base welcomes several hundred guardsmen for an annual training exercise.
The Alaska Air National Guard 176th Wing, under the command of Brigadier General Tony Stratton, is training under a new Air Force doctrine known as Agile Combat Employment and have come to Meridian to practice.
"We do a lot of operations things where we move airplanes around," Stratton said. "We do it very quickly, very professionally, but underneath that we have to have the logistics footprint and the capability to do it."
The ACE doctrine calls for a small number of airmen to quickly and efficiently set up the critical infrastructure and equipment needed to support Air Force operational forces, Stratton said. The airmen must be able to provide necessities like food and shelter as well as fuel for airplanes and communications.
"Our main focus for this exercise is in the Indo-Pacific region," he said, "So long distances, contingency locations, bare bases and then being agile and moving at a rapid rate so that we can't be targeted by our enemy."
ACE relies on airmen to be able to serve in more than one capacity. While each service member is given training and resources to become an expert in their field, the smaller number of personnel requires each service member pitch in anywhere they can, Stratton said.
"It's airmen that are doing jobs that are not in their specific specialty code," he said. "Things like marshaling airplanes, helping to fuel airplanes, providing perimeter security."
Throughout the two-week training, airmen will live, eat and sleep within the exercise area to simulate the isolation of an island. They will also participate in supporting various operational teams including search and rescue and fighter aircraft.
Stratton said one aspect of training will be "hot refueling," or refueling a fighter aircraft while it's still running. Refueling is usually done after an aircraft has been turned off and allowed to sit for several hours for the engines to cool.
The 176th Wing's training is part of a larger annual exercise called Southern Strike involving more than 2,000 service members from more than 15 states and four countries. With Southern Strike being based out of Gulfport, Stratton said the scenario was very similar to what his troops would encounter if they were needed to deploy.
"Southern Strike provides us with the opportunity to go to multiple contingency locations because you have a lot of small airfields around here. That will be very illustrative of what we'll find inside the South Pacific," he said. "And you actually have the water here as well, so we can get our forces out there."
Stratton said the other aspect of Southern Strike was the involvement of different branches of the military as well as service members from other countries. Any deployment of troops to the South Pacific region, he said, would need to have a coalition of nations in its supply chain to succeed.
This year's exercises at Key Field will be the third time Stratton's troops have practiced the ACE doctrine and the furthest the 176th Wing has traveled to test their skills.
Contact Thomas Howard on Twitter @tmhoward
