Airmen practice closing base during Eagle Flag exercise

Published April 28, 2010
By Staff Sgt. Zachary Wilson
U.S. Air Force Expeditionary Center Public Affairs

JOINT BASE McGUIRE-DIX-LAKEHURST, N.J. -- Airmen participating in Eagle Flag exercise 10-2 had the opportunity to accomplish an Eagle Flag first-rather than open a base, they were tasked with closing one.

Air Force planners needed a venue to prove the concept of operations for closing an operating location. Since Eagle Flag has traditionally focused on opening operating locations, the match was made to fit. In practice, closing a location essentially runs the sequence of opening a location in reverse.

Framed within the context of an Eagle Flag exercise, the team of 34 subject-matter experts from various organizations was called upon by higher headquarters to test a concept of operations that called for the closing of an operating location several years after its original opening.

"This exercise tested the participant's ability to take a 60-day plan to close an operating location and condense that timeframe to two weeks," said David Griffin, an Eagle Flag planner with the U.S. Air Force Expeditionary Center's Expeditionary Operations School. "This exercise was more focused on command and control and was focused to exercise their plan to close a base."

The team of senior and mid-grade officers and noncommissioned officers met for two days before going into the field, said Col. Joseph Douez, 319th Mission Support Group commander at Grand Forks Air Force Base, N.D. and the exercise's simulated Air Expeditionary Group commander.

"I was given a list of documents before arriving here, including a draft concept of operation for base closures that gave me an idea of what we would be doing before we arrived," he said. "We also had a lot of interaction with Air Forces Forward (Air Force warfighting headquarters staff) during the process. After a half-day of academics, we were given one day to plan."

With the plan in place, the team set about implementing in a realistic, field setting set in the spirit of Eagle Flag. The team had a plan in place but needed the setting to put it into practice.

"The Air Force is aggressively seeking to establish and continuously refine the base closure process and our posture in Iraq defines this need," said Col. Mark Ellis, the Expeditionary Operations School commandant. "Eagle Flag is a key step in furthering this process."

According the participants, a major concern was determining what items would be re-deployed and which items would stay in the host-nation.

"When a contingency starts and we deploy a lot of equipment to an operating location, it is all on a (unit type code)," said Lt. Col. Gregory McClure, 11th Civil Engineer Squadron commander from Bolling Air Force Base, Washington D.C. "However, as the location transitions to a sustainment phase, a lot more equipment then comes in that was not originally required. Our challenge was to determine how we could account for that equipment and what would we do with it going forward."

Another area Colonel McClure noted was the environmental impact operations had on a location over a period of time and if there was significant damage done to the runway as a result of operations and if so, how that gets handled and at what level.

For Lt. Col. Douglas McClain, the 305th Aerial Port Squadron commander at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst and the exercise group's logistician, the concept of the exercise was refreshing, even for senior Air Force members.

"Since I went on my first deployment in 1995, we were always focused on getting into the fight as opposed to getting out," he said. "We are actually trying to get ahead of the power curve as a change-of-pace."

Besides the logistical challenges, the exercise also called for participants to interact with community members, played by role players, who had varied feelings about the base closure. Some would be impacted by the loss of commercial opportunities, suppliers, while others might face repercussions as American sympathizers once the forces departed the region.

All of this added realism of the scenarios and to gave participants additional areas to consider when developing their plans, officials said.

The exercise came right on the heels of the end of Eagle Flag 10-1, a Joint Task Force Port Opening exercise which had been conducted from April 12-18. The first exercise tasked more than 100 Airmen and Soldiers to open a port in a country to begin transferring aid and supplies to people in need as a result of a humanitarian crisis.

The second exercise fast-forwarded to four years in the future and with an uncertain political situation in the host nation. While preparing for the drawdown, the American forces had planned on closing the base within 60 days but exercise observers/controllers added a twist - they would have only 15 days to pack up and leave.

The participants wrapped up on April 22 and will submit their lessons learned to higher headquarters, in hopes they will be used by Air Force planners as the service continues to work with joint and coalition partners on the withdrawal process.

"It is pretty cool knowing that the Air Force will be able to benefit from what we have done here," Colonel McClure added.

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