The Air Force Launched 15 Percent of Its C-17 Fleet in a Recent Surge Exercise

A flight of 24 C-17 Globemasters – 15% of the USAF’s C-17s – from the Charleston, SC-based 437th … [+] Airlift Wing in mass formation for a show of force flight over the Ravenel Bridge.

Courtesy, 437th AW Public Affairs

With little advance notice, the leadership of the 437th Airlift Wing directed its airmen to get 24 C-17s – 15% of the USAF fleet – in the air for a two-day maximum effort exercise early this month. The sight, sound and reality of 24 C-17s taking off in 16 minutes was meant to send a message about an Air Force seen as struggling. It can still fly.

On January 5th, two days after personnel from the 437th AW based at Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina reported back to work for the New Year, two dozen C-17 Globemaster IIIs flew in trail-formation over the landmark Ravenel Bridge in Charleston Harbor before dispersing to take on different missions across five operating locations in concert with other Air Force, Army, and Marine forces.

The missions which followed the flyby aimed to demonstrate an ability to pull off the Agile Combat Employment (ACE) strategy that the Air Force has championed as a new operating paradigm in the Pacific. There, strategic and tactical forces stretched across long distances will have to operate semi-independently, likely with interrupted logistics support and command guidance.

Such dispersed operations notwithstanding, mass remains important and the launch for the Ravenel flyby was the largest ever from a single base, populated entirely with active-duty aircraft from the 437th. The Air Force claims 157 Globemasters in its inventory (the Air National Guard has 47, the Air Force Reserve, 18) so the flight represented a notable proportion of the nation’s fleet.

Two things made it possible – heavy work by all-hands in the Wing and the reliability of the C-17 itself. In contrast with much of the Air Force fleet, the airlifter has a respectable mission capable (MC) rate in the high 70% to low 80% range.

Set against the fleet-wide MC rate (71.5% in 2021) the big airlifter stands out. Compared with older aircraft like the B-1B Lancer (40.69% MC in 2021) and even newer airplanes like the F-35A (68.8% MC in 2021) it stands out even more.

If getting 24 tails aloft at once and operating them over a two-day mission span resembles the demands of combat and the disassociated operations the USAF can expect if hostilities break out in the Indo-Pacific, so too did the challenge issued to the 437th’s people.

Some of the two dozen 437th AW C-17s takeoff from Joint Base Charleston during a 16-minute mass … [+] launch.

Joint Base Charleston Public Affairs, Tech. Sgt. Alex Echols

“My leadership knew what was happening,” 437th Airlift Wing commander, Colonel Robert Lankford, explained. “But the airmen on the line did not know what was happening until they came in the day after the New Year’s Holiday and I dropped an order on them that said, ‘Be prepared to go.’ They didn’t have the lead-time normal for something like this. It was a big lift.”

Forty-eight hours later, the C-17s flew en masse before taking on their individual assignments. Planning for the exercise actually began last Fall Col. Lankford says but it was kept among the Wing’s weapons officers who scoped out a combined force event intended both to stretch the Air Wing’s capacity and its ability to operate in a contested and degraded tactical and command-control environment.

For context, Lankford offered that, “There’s nothing like [this] that we do as far as generation of airplanes. On any given day, we’ll launch and recover six to 10 aircraft, spread throughout the day.” The 437th got 24 C-17s airborne without swapping any stand-by aircraft in. Every airplane that was planned to takeoff climbed away on-time. Only two of the Globemasters needed some sort of maintenance before being turned around for their designated missions immediately following the flyby.

“We worked people hard,” Lankford acknowledges. “It basically went off without a hitch. I’ve never seen anything like it from a maintenance point of view and I challenge anybody to find a better team of professionals than I have here at the (437th Maintenance) squadron.

The meat of the exercise centered on delivering assets and personnel to operating locations within a notional conflict zone stretched across North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Some of the C-17s were tasked with setting up a remote tactical operations center at Pope Army Airfield in North Carolina and delivering special tactics airmen via a parachute drop to a nearby drop zone where they secured a dirt landing strip for follow-on operations.

A 437th C-17 crew begins transferring fuel to an R-11 refueling truck it carried to MCAS Beaufort … [+] for transfer to waiting Army AH-64 Apache helicopters.

Joint Base Charleston Public Affairs, Tech. Sgt. James Cason

Other Globemasters flew to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, NC for a rapid HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) launcher pick-up and delivery to Pope AAF. Still other 437th airplanes landed at MCAS Beaufort, SCSC
, bringing gas to refuel Army AH-64 ApacheAPA
helicopters in an integrated combat turn.

437th C-17s delivered logistics support while under simulated fire at Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia, maneuvering cargo into a hot landing zone using improvised flight profiles and off-loading under combat pressure. “We have to fight to get to the fight,” Col. Lankford, said. “This exercise tested our ability to accomplish the mission, while geographically dispersed and with limited communications.”

Fighting to get there included both logistic and tactical obstacles. “In any future conflict,” Lankford says, “I don’t foresee us being able to set up a CENTOM model – large static bases where we can do hub-and-spoke operations.” Airlift capability will be spread out and its control challenged by adversaries.

That includes direct kinetic threats to the 437th’s airlifters. “There could be a scenario where heavy C-17s could need a fighter escort as they enter an area,” Lankford explains. “It’s completely possible those fighters will have to defend us as part of a strike package.” The possibility raises the prospect of escorted airlift missions not seen since the Korean War and the exercise reflected it.

Over 20 red and blue-air F-16s from Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., and McEntire Air National Guard Base, S.C., fought for air superiority in a series of engagements while the C-17s and joint force partners moved the people and pieces necessary establish a simulated missile defense system. While no direct escort missions were flown, the blue-air force had to achieve enough success to allow the airlift component to operate.

A 55th Fighter Squadron pilot maneuvers his Blue Force F-16C to fight off a Red-air fighter (he’s … [+] looking at it) struggling to gain control of the airspace 437th C-17s would fly through.

20th Fighter Wing, Airman 1st Class Steven Cardo

While C-17s fly with a standard three-man crew (two pilots and a loadmaster), most aircraft in the exercise added another pilot/air-mission commander. The 437th’s Operations Group commander was airborne as overall mission commander as well. Wing squadron commanders were also put in place commanding detachments upon arrival at each operating location.

“When they couldn’t reach me or the air-mission commander because of communications challenges, they had to make their own decisions on how to proceed,” Lankford says. Simulated missile attacks at some of the locations forced the local commanders to decide whether they could finish their assigned offloads, uploads, refueling and communications support or abort their tasking – taking off abruptly or simply hunkering down while simulated missiles impacted.

The exercise also sought to give teeth to the Air Force’s “multi-capable airman” concept in scenarios including the Apache refueling at MCAS Beaufort wherein C-17 crews took aboard a pair of R-11 fuel trucks, flew them to the location, transferred fuel from the Globemaster into the trucks which then rolled off the airplane and refueled the AH-64s.

The Wing sent a small number of dedicated refueler personnel with the C-17s but their aircrews and other USAF personnel had to turn their hands to transferring fuel from the airlifters to the helicopters. The same applied to the 437th ground support personnel under simulated fire at Hunter AAF.

“They were able to do [different] things down there, from who’s driving the forklift to who’s doing the uploading,” Lankford observes. “That doesn’t just have to be one of my port specialists. Maybe the pilot in command is driving the forklift, maybe the loadmaster is.”

437th personnel set up a command and control tent at Pope Army Airfield.

Joint Base Charleston, 2nd Lt. Taylor Ferry

The exercise was also an opportunity to expose personnel accustomed to operating in what Col. Lankford calls the “warm comfort of Charleston” to unfriendly (if fictional) climes divorced from the support of their home base. The Air Force’s decade-long shift to live-virtual-constructive (LVC) training may reinforce procedures and planning acumen at less cost but cannot convey even the limited real-world variability of simulated fire exercises.

The 437th’s commander says the exercise exceeded all of his expectations. “We were able to do a mass generation, validate the capabilities of our maintenance group, do the fly-by then really execute to a complex scenario. There are tons of lessons learned and I’m confident in our ability to do this again tomorrow if we had to.”

Lankford acknowledges that improvements in distributed command and control are needed and are evolving, pointing to less reliance on Air Mobility Command’s 618th Air Operations Center (which handles most C-17 mission control and tasking) at Scott AFB near St. Louis. It’s “something we’ve not trained to,” he admits.

Lessons in how to break away from such centralized command and control of strategic aircraft recall the aftermath of another Indo-Pacific fight in Vietnam where the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command came under heavy criticism for trying to control B-52 mission execution from the distant safety of the American mid-west.

“As a Wing Commander, being able to control up to 24 dispersed jets means I’m going to need them [individual C-17 crews] to make smart decisions about whether to continue to a drop zone or offload zone under a threat in real-time,” Lankford affirms.

Carving out the time for such an exercise for AMC units like the 437th is difficult given their perpetual “on-call” status to respond to global contingencies but the Wing is looking at the possibility of annual maximum effort exercises. Col. Lankford says the first of these will take on other aspects of the January exercises and likely involve other C-17 Wings.

An in-cockpit view of the trail formation of C-17s which flew over the Ravenel Bridge in South … [+] Carolina during the recent C-17 mass force generation exercise.

Joint Base Charleston, Tech. Sgt. James Cason

But simply getting as many of the bulbous airlifters off the ground and downrange to a mission is a capability that the Air Force still has too little practice with. As Heritage Foundation defense expert and former fighter pilot John Venable noted in an Air Force Times article last year, MC rates in the low 70% range aren’t high enough to sustain an extended fight against a major adversary.

“Think about running a war against Russia or China, where you’ve got to generate all of your aircraft in order to make that happen,” Venable said. “That math does not bode well.”

If the Air Force’s Air Combat Command or Global Strike Command can manage to get more than 15% of any of their manned or unmanned aircraft fleets off the ground in a similar exercise, it will represent some progress for a service hard-pressed to fly.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2023/01/17/the-air-force-launched-15-percent-of-its-c-17-fleet-in-a-recent-surge-exercise/