The recent Resolute Force Pacific exercise was longer and less scripted than most big wargames and focused on sustaining an air campaign at the operational level, Pacific Air Forces commander Gen. Kevin Schneider said Sept. 2. It also tested the Air Force’s agile combat employment model at a much larger scale than has been tried previously and forced planners to innovate solutions to its larger logistics challenges.
At its July 17 start, the Air Force described REFORPAC as a chance for the Air Force and other participants to test themselves with “large operations in contested, dynamic environments.” Speaking at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies on Sept. 2, Schneider said Airmen “have innovated and overcome tough obstacles to get critical pieces in place, demonstrating our collective capability to project decisive airpower into and throughout the Indo-Pacific with dramatic speed and scale.”
In typical combat exercises like Red Flag, “scenarios will be largely focused to solve tactical problems, each day,” with just a little bit of evolution over two weeks, Schneider explained. But REFORPAC, which took place over a month from mid-July to mid-August, “took us … to an operational level,” he said.
While Red Flag exercises typically follow a “fairly set scenario, there was a lot more free flow in this,” Schneider said. Add in the preparation and disengagement time, and it was “probably six weeks’ worth of execution,” during which the Air Force grappled with “How would we sustain an operational campaign over time?”
Participants had to “go with the flow” and be “able to deal with the challenges and really take a look at a lot of logistics and sustainment,” Schneider said. The Air Force identified “those critical enablers that allow us to succeed over time and over duration through the course of a campaign. So that was perhaps my biggest takeaway from REFORPAC, was to be able to go from a tactical to an operational level of thinking and execution.”
ACE
The agile combat employment model calls for many small units of aircraft and Airmen to deploy to remote or austere locations and then quickly move to a new location as needed. The idea is to keep an enemy guessing about where USAF assets are and not make it easy to cripple the force with a few long-range precision weapons. These small units would be supported by a few transport aircraft and Airmen performing multiple roles.
Technology initiatives that might underwrite ACE in the future include uncrewed logistics aircraft, aircraft that don’t need runways, mobile power stations, and multi-function ground equipment.
During the exercise, Schneider said he was impressed by Airmen’s “collective ability to figure out how to make ACE real, how to make it successful.” While previous experiments with ACE have focused on small units of fighters around China, REFORAC focused on “scope and scale,” he said. The exercise honed skills in “specifically, the command and control of [logistics] and sustainment. How do we sustain this, not just for a week, not for two weeks, but for a month? How do we get all of our kit in? How do we know what kit to bring in the first place?”
The next step was to “be adaptive [and] predictive”—thinking about what parts might be needed where before there was a crisis—and proactive on maintenance. When aircrews called in maintenance codes for their aircraft when returning from a mission, commanders had to determine, “where do we put them? How do we best enable those aircraft to go to the places where there’s fuel, there’s munitions, there’s maintainers, there’s parts, and there’s a serviceable runway from which they can operate, so we can turn them quickly?”
The wargame “did a lot to help us understand the gaps that we need to cover, [and] also highlighted the ingenuity of our Airmen to solve these problems on the fly fairly quickly.”
He added that prepositioning of supplies “is a critical enabler. And I think the more that we can exercise at scale, like we like we did this past summer, the more we understand: OK, what is it that we really need to operate [fighters] out of austere locations for two weeks to a month.” Some of the answer will be “pre-staging at intermediate locations,” he said, but the Air Force now has a better idea of “what the burn rate on these parts or capabilities” will be.
For ACE, the Air Force is also looking for access to “airfields, landing strips and other capabilities around the region,” either for basing or overflight, “or to rehabilitate them through troop labor, like we’re doing” on the island of Tinian. “We’re improving our positions, and we’re improving the places from which we operate every day,” he said.
During the exercise, he pointed out, “we had about 420 aircraft involved, not only from the U.S. Air Force, but from the joint force and others. And about 300 of those were west of the International Date Line. And again, we’re flying thousands of sorties over the course of the exercise and operating in an airspace or [air] spaces that probably run 5,000 miles from north to south and 6,000 miles from east to west. We can do it.”
Base Defense
Part of the wargame simulated “attacks on air bases that were of maybe lower- or moderate-intensity, but drawn out over long periods of time,” as well as “examples of high-intensity, shorter-duration attacks,” Schneider aid. Even under those conditions, “you see air forces being able to survive and generate airpower quickly.”
The attacks highlighted “things we need to take a look at…[such as] detection and sensing; our ability to recognize that attacks are inbound, indication and warning.” With such capabilities, the Air Force would be better able “to flush our aircraft into the air quickly, to put fuel in aircraft, to put munitions on aircraft.”
The drills also underscored the need to rapidly assess and repair damaged runways and get them back in service, he said. Toward that end, USAF is looking at whether to pre-stage equipment at the locations “or new and innovative ways of fixes, and taking holes and turning them into usable surfaces again.” Besides the importance of base hardening and resiliency, he said, USAF is reviewing “micro dispersal, or small-scale dispersals” to protect forces.
The Air Force and Army also had an opportunity to frankly assess the effectiveness of air defenses, which are the Army’s responsibility.
“We have a really close relationship with the U.S. Army component in the Indo-Pacific,” Schneider said. “And knowing all the capabilities that they bring for base defense—for Patriots, things like that—how can we work together?” There was a recognition that to generate forces, the Air Force and Army are “probably going to go to the same or similar areas, so we lay all our cards on the table to figure out ways that we can buy down the risk … and work together, whether it’s for base defense, logistics and sustainment or other capabilities to give us that synergistic effect.”
Command and Control
Over the months of planning that went into REFORPAC, Schneider said plenty of time was devoted to considering “how we’re going to get after command and control [and] battle management.”
This is “a critical piece” because of the need to coordinate the widely disparate and dispersed ACE effort, he added.
And while Schneider praised the Air Force’s work on modernization efforts like the F-47 fighter and B-21 bomber, he also noted the “there is a need to continue to invest in command and control/battle management,” he said, without specifically naming the E-7 Wedgetail that was deleted from the fiscal 2026 budget.
“I would say that those investments in command and control pay out in the near term before some of the other modernization efforts will deliver on their timelines.”
Asked where he would invest additional resources if they became available, Schneider said “I keep going back to the command and control piece: making sure that we have the the manpower of the C2 nodes across the Indo-Pacific … making sure that we have our ability to communicate both through space-based platforms, air-based platforms, and terrestrial platforms. And part of that is the data systems that we put in our Air Operations Centers and our wings. So, people [and] pipes.”
