Fail Today, Win Tomorrow: Reflecting on Pacific Wargames
By David Roza
The Department of the Air Force swung for the fences this summer with a massive six-week exercise stretching from Japan to New Mexico where more than 12,000 Airmen and 700 Guardians worked with their sister services and foreign partners to simulate as realistically as possible what it would be like to go to war in the Pacific.
Air Force officials said the Department-Level Exercise (DLE) was the largest in a generation, with Airmen and Guardians simultaneously operating in as many as 50 locations across millions of square miles. The goal: See what worked and what didn’t, and what it would take to succeed in a real fight against a peer rival like China.
“We stressed the system, and we know where we fell short, and we know the capabilities we need to go forward,” said then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin, in his final keynote address as Chief at AFA’s ASC Conference. “So failure is good—in training. … We’re taking those lessons, and as an enterprise, we owe it to our Airmen to follow through on those and have the enterprise solve some of those gaps. We can’t have our Airmen walking into a fight in the complexity we expect and have them untrained and learning on the fly.”
Air Force and Space Force generals who oversaw elements of the DLE recapped lessons learned throughout the conference, focusing on two themes: distributing command and control (C2) and strengthening logistics.
“Command and control is inherently difficult, and the fog and friction of war, especially when you add in logistics, are paramount to overcome,” said Lt. Col. Dan Blomberg, commander of the 35th Civil Engineering Squadron, discussing Exercise Resolute Force Pacific, in a video Allvin shared during his address.
“What do you do without parts, what do you do without materiel?” he added. “REFORPAC allowed us the ability to make mistakes and learn from them very quickly. That opportunity to learn, iterate, and execute in one fell swoop is worth its weight in gold.”
Distributing C2
Keeping track of thousands of Airmen flying hundreds of aircraft on dozens of missions all at once is highly complex, involving numerous chains of command, reporting requirements, and decision-making authorities.
For the past two decades, the Air Force grew accustomed to handing off control to the 609th Air Operations Center (AOC) in Qatar, which oversees operations in the Middle East theater. But the relatively unfamiliar Hawaii-based 613th AOC, which oversees Pacific Air Forces, hasn’t seen that kind of action. That’s a challenge for the transport aircraft that fly in and out of the region doing long-haul supply missions.
“We’ve got a long way to go still on that, on command relationships and command and controlling those aircraft,” said Maj. Gen. Charles Bolton, commander of the Illinois-based 18th Air Force, echoing similar points made by Allvin and Gen. John Lamontagne, head Air Mobility Command, which oversees Air Force transport aircraft.
“A lot of folks in our Air Force think they can just snap their fingers and say, ‘Hey, I need a C-17 or C-130 to go from A to B and then to C,” Bolton said. “Well, across that expansive airspace with 50 different locations and 14,000 short tons, it’s certainly not that easy.”
The Air Force needs “to better understand” how to manage air transport so that commanders can better prioritize missions, he said. That includes getting the 618th and 613th AOCs to work more closely together.
“Every theater is a little bit different,” Lamontagne said. “That burden is on the 618th AOC to integrate with all the AOCs out there.”
Air Force officials usually focus on C2 for fighters and bombers, said Pacific Air Forces boss Gen. Kevin Schneider. But C2 for logistics—for transports and tankers—is no less critical.
“We need to equally invest time and thought and resources into the command and control of logistics and sustainment to give ourselves the best ability to generate airpower,” he said.
Air Combat Command’s Gen. Adrian Spain was happy to report on one C2 success: A Combined Air Forces Component Commander (CFACC) based in Hawaii managed to oversee operations in Nevada and California during exercise Bamboo Eagle. Usually a colonel closer to the exercise role-plays as the CFACC, Spain explained.
“The ability to do that with the CFACC calling balls and strikes, frankly, and prioritizing where our energy and resources need to go, was really the major lesson learned for us,” he said.
On the other side of the coin, generals said no single air operations center can handle something as large as the DLE, especially if adversaries isolate that center via electronic warfare, cyberattacks, or kinetic strikes such as cruise missiles.
To make the force more flexible and responsive, Schneider and other top generals who oversaw the DLE called for pushing decision-making authorities as far down the chain of command as possible, particularly when it comes to logistics and sustainment.
“With that comes perhaps some doctrinal changes,” he said. “What are the delegations that I need to give or others need to give, down to the lowest echelons of command, so that they can make the decisions about where the fuel needs to go, where the munitions need to go, how runways need to be repaired … to most effectively generate airpower?”
Lamontagne noted the success of a new tactic where C-130 transport planes operated from regional hubs such as Guam and Japan.
“Instead of holding all our C-130s at the theater level, [Pacific Air Forces and Air Mobility Command] allocated C-130s to Japan and Guam task forces, and found that was very, very effective for those commanders that were running those operations,” he said.
Lt. Gen. David Miller Jr., the head of Space Operations Command, saw a similar trend for space forces.
“With the level of complexity and scale of this challenge that we face, we are not going to be able to joystick all this from one C2 center, and we are going to have to expect more and more from the tactical-level units of action to execute mission command,” he said.
Miller recalled how, at one point during the exercise, a joint operations director requested a Space Force colonel to help out—and Miller had only a captain to spare. It worked.
“You’re getting the captain, and that captain did an amazing job,” he said. “We’re going to have to move forward with a level of expectation that we have not had in the past.”
Likewise, Spain said the Air Force must continue “to reinforce and foster the mindset that for a period of time, you will be operating under mission command and commander’s intent,” because connectivity between echelons cannot be guaranteed.
Similarly, systems built for U.S. operators need to be able to flex to allow partners and allies in, as well as to let higher echelons push responsibility and authority down the chain.
“We do this with allies and partners, we do this as a team,” Spain said. “We cannot build a U.S.-only system and then try to snap a releasable enclave on the end of it.”
“Integrated by design” cannot be just a buzz word, Spain said.
The Air Force’s mobility fleet may have the most work to do in this regard. “The Air Mobility fleet is not connected,” Allvin said. “Why hasn’t it been? Well, when we built these systems … we didn’t have a full appreciation for the premium that we would put on integration.”
The Airlift Tanker Open Mission Systems kit and Starlink demonstrated how a group of C-17s carrying hundreds of paratroopers from Alaska to Australia during the DLE could change their plans on their way to meet a group of tankers over the Pacific.
Lamontagne said the changes happened in real time. “Instead of jumping on an HF radio or waiting for 30 minutes out, they could solve problems well in advance and just drive solutions and make everything easier,” he said.
A recent $200 million funding boost will equip several C-17 and KC-135 squadrons with better connectivity tools and start the long modernization process, Lamontagne said.
The same goes for space systems: Miller said his troops need better “shared awareness tools” so that they can more easily explain to terrestrial commanders what’s going on in space. “So if we make a decision to do something that delays, they understand the context of why we are pushing for that delay,” he said.
Pre-Positioning
One big twist in the DLE, Allvin said, was the way the events unfolded. Most Air Force wargames start out with all the equipment already in place—but not the DLE.
“We didn’t start the exercise in the middle of the fight,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to get to the fight to see if we can win the fight. And this provided realistic challenges for all of our Airmen to overcome.”
To move large amounts of troops and equipment across the Pacific Ocean in a hurry, Air Mobility Command had to face up to limitations. The entire U.S. military must rely on C-5 and C-17 transport jets and C-130 planes equipped with large external fuel tanks to get to the fight. But AMC has just 222 C-17s, 52 C-5s, and 150 or so C-130Js.
The DLE underscored how moving equipment efficiently now frees up future cargo capacity later.
“Everything that we did across the Pacific this summer was enabled by Air Mobility Command,” Schneider said. “We have to be very deliberate and smart about where we put kit, where we put gear, so that units that are falling into their fighting positions are ready to go immediately in that regard.” In other words, if the gear isn’t in place, it will take much longer for units to be ready to join the fight.
Lamontagne said AMC is already moving hundreds of pieces of equipment, including heavy forklifts, tow vehicles, and equipment used to start and maintain aircraft into the Pacific so it’s ready to go when needed. Some of that gear came out of excess stock in the continental U.S. and Europe.
“We have an opportunity that we’re actually moving out right now, not waiting for warehouses to be built for storage,” Lamontagne said.
The Hawaii-based 515th Air Mobility Operations Wing can use the gear to keep Air Force transports ticking even if no conflict occurs.
Launching aircraft takes more than just equipment: it also takes fuel, electricity, communications, and other infrastructure that is well-established on the air journey to the Middle East, but not so much to the Pacific. The Air Force has not really built expeditionary infrastructure from scratch since Desert Storm, Bolton said.
“Those are the lessons learned that we took away from the DLE,” he said. “Where are those points where we still have some infrastructure” shortfalls?
Infrastructure stood out to Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, as well. While flying in a C-130 over the northern end of the island of Tinian, he saw Air Force civil engineers rapidly unearth a jungle-bound airfield first used in World War II.
“The CEs (civil engineers) have cleared this place, are building hangars, rolling tarmac in a fraction of the time we would traditionally need to do construction,” he said. He was so impressed, he said, “when I came out of there, I wanted to just hire another 50,000 civil engineers in the Air Force and have them do all of our construction.”
Like carving an airfield out of the jungle, Allvin hopes the Air Force will make operating across the Pacific more manageable. The DLE was meant to show the way.
“If, after all the money that we spent, after all the resources, after all the planning, after all the execution, if all we did was just go and validate things we already knew, it might not have been a best use of our resources,” he said.
