Rethinking Train-as-You-Fight for large wars and peer conflict.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.
W
ith eyes on China in the Pacific and Russia in Europe and the Arctic, the Air Force is implementing its deployment rethink and returning to large-scale exercises not seen since the Cold War.
“We’re starting at the right spot: how we intend to fight and then moving backward to ensure we have the organization and the training and the readiness to support that,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin in his keynote address at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference Sept. 16. “This is not an intellectual exercise. We’re moving out.”
The drive to shape two dozen “deployable combat wings” are at the heart of those plans. By organizing units that train together at home before they deploy to a combat zone, Air Force planners want to build the more cohesive units, with deep-seated relationships and trust, and to better communicate the risk vs. reward of deployment decisions when they go to the Secretary of Defense.
The Air Force Force Generation Model—known as AFFORGEN—provides the underlying pacing and structure for future deployments, putting units and their Airmen on a rotational cycle through four six-month phases, from training to ready to deployable and then reset.
AFFORGEN aims to provide Airmen and their families with a sense of predictability, operational commands with an understandable and predictable schedule, and the Air Force staff with a means to better explain to combatant commands, the Joint Staff and the Defense Secretary the impact of a given deployment decision now and into the future.
“It really does help us to articulate capacity and risk when we get to the number of combat wings that are resourced to be independently deployable,” said Lt. Gen. Adrian L. Spain, the deputy chief of staff for operations. “We’re going to have a fixed number of those. … We’re going to be able to say, ‘Hey, this is how many deployable combat wings that we have.’ The number that we’re working toward is 24.”
The bottom line: Air Force and Defense Department leadership will at last have “a predictable and sustainable amount of forces for both rotational and crisis response.”
The push to establish Deployable Combat Wings (DCWs) follows an evolutionary curve that began with so-called Expeditionary Air Bases (XABs), first deployed in fall 2023, and the newly introduced Air Task Forces (ATFs), the first of which will deploy in 2025. Deployable Combat Wings will follow in 2026, according to the Air Force, replacing both XABs and ATFs. Among the 24 DCWs, 16 will be in the Active-duty force and the remaining eight will come from the Guard and Reserve.
To complement the DCWs, the Air Force is also introducing Air Base Wings and Institutional Wings, furthering the idea that units are closer together and regularly train together. The aim is to better facilitate effective command and control overseas by enabling wing commanders to build battle plans with familiar platforms and units, which becomes especially important when communications could be compromised in combat.
In recent times, a regional Combined Forces Air Component Commander directed operations, but in a more contested environment, that’s not going to be possible, Spain said. Recalling his own time as commander of the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing at Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates from 2018-2019, he said, “We were getting tasking from the AOC and executing the daily flying schedule for the most part.”
But in a fight with a peer, like China, that’s not going to be possible all the time. “What we’re going to ask our wing commanders and that command echelon to do in the future conflict against a peer adversary is significantly different,” he explained. “You’ll be under attack constantly, kinetically and nonkinetically. You’ll be disconnected from your higher headquarters, probably on a more routine basis than we have [recently] seen, and you’ll have to deal with that circumstance.”
Air Component Commanders will provide subordinates his or her intent, through mission-type orders, and those subordinates will then have to be able to execute missions whether or not they can communicate.
“The next fight is going to be dramatically different,” Spain said. “And so part of this unit of action is not only forming them in a certain way but training them to be prepared for that environment.”
The Air Force tested the concept during Exercise Bamboo Eagle, in which a reconnaissance wing, preparing to deploy under the Air Task Force model, commanded fighters in a simulated conflict. Disconnects, such as how best to employ forces without the background of operating those forces, can be worked through, leaders say, by ensuring operational expertise is brought in at the staff, as well as at operational levels.
“I think the first thing is that we need to introduce it to all the Airmen and put them in the environment,” Allvin said in a roundtable with reporters.
To exercise these new operational concepts, the Air Force is expanding the number and scale of operational exercises, including limited-notice, large-scale exercises that push the limits of the force. REFORPAC, a planned two-week exercise set to take place across the Pacific next summer, will integrate U.S. Air Force operational concepts into the joint U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s plans for operationally relevant training. It will require forces to disperse to an array of bases under simulated attack, with spotty communications, and also surprise elements to add stress and realism.
Modeled on the Cold War-era REFORGER exercises in Europe, where Army and Air Force units practiced defending Europe against potential Soviet attack, REFORPAC will build on recent larger-scale exercises such as Bamboo Eagle, led by Air Combat Command this year, and Mobility Guardian 2023, led by Air Mobility Command.
“The piece that we’re building—that we’re adding to—is doing this at scope and scale,” said Gen. Kevin B. Schneider, commander of Pacific Air Forces, in an interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Instead of individual units training, let’s do them all together. Let’s do a theaterwide, PACAF-focused event. This is REFORPAC—Resolute Force Pacific—the exercise that we’ll execute in ’25.”
Schneider said the exercise will draw together multiple training events to something larger and more coordinated. “We’re going to combine the air mobility supporting all of our unit-level exercises in the theater and be able to surge capacity into the western Pacific at scope and scale,” he said. “I’m really excited about what we’re going to do with that.”
Exercises like this one can also strengthen regional partnership and alliances, and help allies get used to working with U.S. Air Force and Space Force personnel—and vice versa.
But there are practical limitations to what’s possible. There are only so many Airmen and aircraft, and there is only so much money available for training. Budgets squeezed by legislative caps, repeated continuing resolutions, and potential political paralysis following the presidential election could impact the scale of REFORPAC this first time around.
“One of the challenges—and as a younger guy, I lived this—is [that] exercises help build readiness, but exercises also come with a cost,” Schneider added. “When it comes to exercising, there’s tremendous benefit that comes from it. [But] there’s also tremendous benefit from being able to just focus on the things you weren’t able to do during an exercise: Take care of maintenance, take care of some of the other things, and make sure that your people and your equipment are healthy to be able to respond across the spectrum.”
Flexibility remains a priority, and no one formula will work for every exercise, or every deployment. Leaders from across the spectrum recoil at a one-size-fits-all model. Some commands will have permanently assigned forces, such as U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Pacific Air Forces; others, such as Air Force Global Strike Command, which runs continuous bomber and ICBM operations, will largely operate in place.
“We don’t have the luxury, as opposed to other long-range platforms, of being on a cyclical AFFORGEN two-year cycle. We are always on,” said Col. Keith J. Butler, who commands the unique 509th Bomb Wing, which flies B-2s out of Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo. “Whiteman is the only place that has the B-2. We are absolutely low-density, high-demand. We’re what’s called a threshold force. We’ve got to be ready to go all the time.”
B-2s flew a major combat operation in October, striking underground weapons bunkers in Yemen in a demonstrative show of force.
Wing commanders who oversee permanently assigned forces overseas, such as U.S. European Command, also noted that the Air Force’s changes will apply differently to those units.
“The AFFORGEN model really doesn’t apply to us as easily as it does in the United States,” said Brig. Gen. Tad D. Clark, commander of the 31st Fighter Wing of F-16s, MQ-9s, HH-60s, and 5,000 Airmen, headquartered at Aviano Air Base, Italy. “The reason is our assets fall under a combatant command.”
Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall acknowledged such differences in September. “The problem with implementing [AFFORGEN] that I’ve seen—and I think it’s widely recognized now—is that one size doesn’t fit all,” Kendall said Sept. 6. “Every unit doesn’t have the capability, just because of its mission requirements, to do that sort of a model cycle.”
But if AFFORGEN can’t precisely align with every command, it can be aligned in spirit, leaders say. Every unit will have a reason for why something won’t work in their particular corner of the Air Force. But, at the same time, most should be able to adapt to the operational intent.
“What [Allvin] and I have been encouraging people to do is figure out what kind of a readiness creation and expenditure cycle makes sense for what you do, and then tailor around it,” Kendall said. “So don’t use just the one model and feel like you rigidly have to follow that or force it into your place where it may not be compatible.”
Flexibility is and always has been the key to airpower, leaders say. Commanders just have to put that concept to work.