ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam—A 6,000-mile overnight trip across the Pacific Ocean may sound daunting, but it was just the start of the road for the California-based 21st Airlift Squadron, which landed here July 10 aboard a handful of C-17 transport jets for a new kind of exercise aimed at testing the limits of thousands of Airmen and Space Force Guardians.
“Our advisor gave us some green mattresses and she said, ‘you’re going to really like that we gave you these,’” Capt. Milton Doria, one of the aircraft commanders that day, said from the moonlit flight deck of a C-17 somewhere over the Pacific en route to Guam.
“I don’t know what she meant by that,” he added, “but I expect we’re going to sleep on the aircraft for certain missions … we call it ‘Hotel Boeing.’”
From July 8 to mid-August, Doria and about 12,000 other Airmen and Guardians are practicing air combat, airlift, airdrop, aerial refueling, aeromedical evacuation, and other missions across the Pacific alongside other U.S. armed forces and America’s foreign allies and partners, as they would if the U.S. goes to war with China.
Called the Department-Level Exercise, the DLE pulls together drills such as Pacific Air Forces’ Resolute Force Pacific and Air Force Special Operation Command’s Emerald Warrior, as well as training led by other branches of the U.S. and foreign militaries.
But fighting a simulated war requires thousands of tons of equipment, and few machines are better at flying that equipment over vast distances than the C-17, a four-engine jet that can fly an Abrams tank across an ocean and land it on a relatively small (3,500-foot) runway. C-17s flew from South Carolina, Hawaii, and elsewhere across the country for this exercise.
“The C-17 is unique in the sense that we are the ones who create that velocity in the system,” said 21st Airlift Squadron commander Lt. Col. Edward Silva, “because we can travel long distances and we can also carry a lot of cargo and people.”
The DLE cranks that velocity up a notch, as C-17 aircrews will push their physical and mental limits flying back-to-back ocean-crossing sorties while taking on greater autonomy to prepare for communications blackouts in a future conflict.
“It’s very empowering, but it also makes you a little uncomfortable flying a $202 million aircraft around the Pacific, and you’re like, ‘I hope I’m making the right decision,’” Silva said.
The Heart of It All
Though stationed at Travis Air Force Base in northern California, the 21st Airlift Squadron actually drew much closer to its roots with the flight to Guam. First activated near Brisbane, Australia, amid the U.S. military’s retreat from the Philippines in April 1942, the “BEE Liners” flew troops and supplies in and out of every American war since World War II.
Wearing cartoon bees on their shoulder patches, squadron members dropped 1,000 paratroopers into battle over Korea in 1950, flew supplies to Marines besieged at Khe Sanh in 1968, and delivered medical supplies for humanitarian missions in Rwanda, Haiti, and other places around the world.
The tradition continued at the DLE, where the unit’s black-and-yellow banner stretched across one side of the air-conditioned shipping container that housed the C-17 operations center at Andersen during the exercise.
“You’re in the heart of how we distribute our tails across the Indo-Pacific region … anything that touches the C-17,” said Silva, who runs C-17 operations for the DLE.
On the wall across from him hung a whiteboard with a sortie schedule and lists of aircraft commanders, crews, and tail numbers. Airmen in flight suits and camouflage uniforms typed at laptops, keeping track of radio codes, intelligence reports, aircrew gear, payroll, and the other details of running a combat air freight and passenger service over a third of the Earth’s surface with just about 250 personnel.
While other transport aircraft can be assigned to regional commands, C-17s are ultimately controlled by U.S. Transportation Command, headquartered 15 time zones away at Scott Air Force Base, Ill.
“Our headquarters tells us, ‘These are the priorities of things I need to do,’ and then we decide how to fill those, place the crews in the tails, and then send them where they need to go to complete those priorities,” Silva explained.
Some of the missions involve simple airlift, such as carrying the power generators, toolboxes, liquid oxygen carts, maintenance stands, and other gear for fixing aircraft. Others are more complicated, such as dropping about 330 paratroopers over Australia for exercise Talisman Sabre, or practicing aeromedical evacuation missions with foreign partners.
“It is a challenge to balance that with, ‘who’s asleep right now, who needs to go within the next 12 hours?’” Silva explained. “The five-person crew is an individual resource that we have to make sure are getting fed, getting sleep, you know, all the things that a human requires. And then, ‘now I need you to go fly for 24 hours.’”
Seasoning
Compounding the challenge is a 2,000-person shortage among the Air Force pilot corps, as more pilots are leaving service sooner and leaving behind an experience gap.
“Our burden to carry is to make sure that we’re developing our pilots in a way that we can still execute all the operations that we did in the past with more seasoned pilots,” Silva said.
That means stateside training continues even during a high-tempo exercise overseas. Several C-17 pilots flew checkrides: sorties with an examiner judging if the pilot is ready for an upgrade to a higher role such as aircraft commander. Doria, for example, looked forward to racking up hours as aircraft commander, which helps open more career opportunities.
And it’s not just the pilots getting seasoned. Aboard the flight to Guam, Master Sgt. Brooke Held, an evaluator loadmaster with 15 years of experience, was supervising two brand new loadmasters in the fine art of getting cargo and passengers on and off an aircraft. The task requires puzzle-solving, an eagle eye, and a ready supply of elbow grease, and for one of the junior loaders, it was only their second mission on the job.
“It’s going to give them experience loading pallets, rolling stock, helicopters,” Held said. “This is all new to them, so I think that’s the best thing for us, is the training we’ll get out of it.”
Mission Command
Beyond checkrides, the BEE Liners will also practice operating more independently than usual to prepare for a future conflict, which could see Russia and China jam the U.S. military’s communications networks.
“I’m trying to teach our crews to be able to operate independently and autonomously,” Silva said. “Just give them a thing that they need to accomplish, but don’t tell them how.”
Aircraft commanders may have to decide on their own whether their jet can fly with a broken subsystem or two, whether to extend the flight duty period beyond 24 hours to get a job done, where to do their fuel stops, and where to do crew rest.
“Some of our recent AMC commanders have been pushing us to take more risks and be comfortable with that, as long as we know how to mitigate it and make sure that we can still execute safely,” Doria said.
They should have plenty of opportunities to do so: the 10 C-17s on station at Andersen flew 20 sorties between July 10 and July 13, a “very busy” pace, Silva said. One of the jets that flew overnight from Travis to Guam was back in the air on a mission just three hours after landing.
The challenge is staying sharp: while air crews have mandatory rest periods, some sorties take off at odd hours, making it difficult to adjust. The overnight flight to Guam was one of them, where the three pilots took shifts in the bunk behind the flight deck.
The bunk is blocked off by blackout curtains, has a heavy metal hatch to cut off noise from the cargo bay, and has a separate climate control panel, but many C-17 crew members still survey the field of caffeine products to stay awake.
“Some people go hard, they take those five-hour energy shots, but those make me jittery,” said Doria, who prefers caffeine in the form of gum or soluble liquid. Some pilots don’t drink coffee until they hit the road so that it gives them a bigger boost during critical phases of flight.
“We need to be at the top of our game whenever we’re landing,” he explained. “Can’t miss little things here.”
Held has her own techniques for keeping fresh.
“You’ve got to take care of yourself, because if you don’t, you’ll go downhill real quick with this job,” she said. “It can be really hard because you are so tired from a different time zone, but you have to get up, exercise, get clean, and eat real food, not shopette hot dogs.”
The DLE series is just the latest requirement for a mobility fleet straining to meet worldwide demand. Right before the exercise, the 21st Airlift Squadron had to take a few pilots off desk duty at the higher wing and group levels and put them back on the flight deck to respond to rising tensions in the Middle East.
“We just came off of a sprint of real-world operations that we had been doing in other theaters,” Silva said. “And so we went from one theater and created velocity and came into this theater and brought, like, everything that we needed to do that within a couple of days.”
The 21st Airlift Squadron isn’t alone: Air Mobility Command boss Gen. John Lamontagne said pulling together enough tails for the DLE amid recent deployments meant the command “basically flushed the wings of just about every training tail they have.”
The grind continues after the DLE, as the 21st Airlift Squadron enters another stretch of high- tempo operations.
“Family time is just kind of short right now for everybody,” Doria said.
But across the board, BEE Liners looked forward to the exercise as a rare chance to bond as a squadron. Back home, most squadron members are off on a mission somewhere around the world, but at the DLE, the vast majority of the unit is sharing a hotel.
“Sometimes you might be in the squadron for a year or two before you finally cross paths” with a fellow squadron member, said Doria, himself a recent arrival to the unit. “Now on our down-time we get to go play volleyball, go out to eat, that sort of thing.
“And sometimes if the exercise is pretty brutal and nobody’s having a good time, you bond through the pain,” he added. “You share that experience.”