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315th AW teams with Army for deployment Exercise

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Shane Ellis
  • 315th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
HUNTER ARMY AIRFIELD, Ga. --  The 315th Airlift Wing at Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina, moved more than a million pounds of combat fighting power Dec. 10 and 11 from Hunter Army Airfield here during a joint-force emergency deployment readiness exercise with the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division.
 
The two-day exercise integrated C-17 air and ground crew training for 315th AW Airmen as well as Soldiers from one of the 3rd Infantry Division's Immediate Ready Companies who can deploy within 22 hours.

During the exercise, four C-17 Globemaster IIIs were used to deploy two Abrams M1A2 tanks, an M88 recovery vehicle and two M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles to North Air Force Auxiliary Field - North, S.C.

Once on the ground at North Field the service members swapped cargo with the assistance of a contingency response team from the 315th Airlift Control Flight and redeployed to Savannah marking the end of a day.

According to 1st. Lt. Jose Ramirez, platoon leader for the 1-64 Armor, 3rd Infantry Division delta team at Fort Stewart, Georgia, the exercise was designed to work as a real world movement and operation.

"Our purpose today was to showcase our skills, increase our proficiencies and maintain our readiness for our global response mission that we assumed today," said Ramirez. "As you saw today we were able to get these fighting vehicles on this bird in less than an hour - strapped down and ready to go."

Ramirez said he was looking for quick deployment operations and from his point of view that's exactly what the Airmen and Soldiers delivered.

Lt. Col. Sean Kuester, 1st Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment commander, said he is thankful for the partnership between the Army and the Air Force.

"Our unit right now is on the global response mission and as the IRC we are working with the Air Force to get as much of this type of training as possible," he said.

Ideally, Kuester said he would like to see this type of training occur at least once per quarter with rotating crews. He believes this frequency of training is sufficient to maintain the level of global response mission readiness needed to support any mission at a moment's notice.

Lt. Col. Don Thigpen, 315th ALCF commander, said these missions take a lot of skilled planning prior to their execution and the collaboration of our joint force ground-level planners was a major factor in the development of a series of equipment preparation courses to maintain mission readiness.

"Putting exercises like this in motion allows us to execute what we are trained to do," said Thigpen. "This is full contact. These are real planes, with real cargo and everything is really moving. Mistakes made here are going to reflect much more severely than a table-top planning exercise."

Thigpen went on to say that he is thankful for the opportunity to work with the Army and to have the ability to send a small element, such as the one at North Field or the team at Hunter Air Field, to operate independently off station that can control the flow of loading and offloading aircraft.

Army and Air Force leaders on the flyaway agreed that these partnership building opportunities are valuable and work to strengthen interoperability of our U.S. military forces.