Air Force aircraft with the 31st Fighter Wing during an ‘elephant walk’ at Aviano Air Base, Italy.

WASHINGTON: The reactivated 15th Air Force is less than four weeks old but is already prepping for an experiment at Tyndall Air Force Base on a new way of getting ready for large-scale wars, known as the “lead wing” concept.

Even before 9/11, when the Air Force was patrolling no-fly zones over Iraq, the service deployed single squadrons for short tours in the Mideast. Commanders were confident that repeated deployments to the same region, combined with a well-established support infrastructure in that region made settling in and starting up operations relatively routine. Most missions involved small groups of aircraft, so squadrons didn’t have to spend a lot of time rehearsing how to work together as a full air wing.

But a large-scale conflict – say with Russia or China — would require wing commanders to coordinate multi-squadron operations. There would be little time for a pick-up team of squadrons to figure out how to work together on arrival. And depending on where and how the war broke out, there might not be many bases nearby – or at least not many left after the initial barrage of long-range missiles and bomber strikes. That means squadrons must move as a well-coordinated wing.

Air Force photo

Maj. Gen. Chad Franks

“Now what we do is we deploy our squadrons, mostly into CENTCOM AOR [Area Of Responsibility], and we all show up at an established base, and that’s where we start working together,” said Maj. Gen. Chad Franks, 15th AF’s commander. “We know that in the future, especially against a peer competitor, that probably won’t be good enough….How do we form teams ahead of time so that our team can work together before they deploy?”

“That’s what the lead wing concept is getting after,” he told reporters covering the Air Force Association’s 2020 conference. “We’ll bring together units here, in CONUS [the Continental United States], and we’ll train as a team.”

Before a squadron deploys abroad – ideally well before – it’ll be put under the command of a lead wing, which may not be the same wing it reports to normally. That lead wing will bring together multiple squadrons together under a single commander and train them together. Once 15th Air Force has certified the wing as ready to deploy, it’ll be presented to the joint planning process and the theater commanders as an integrated package.

Why is Franks leading the way? His 15th Air Force oversees training, organization, and equipment for Air Combat Command’s fighters and other tactical, non-nuclear forces, which had been split somewhat arbitrarily between 9th Air Force, which focused on supporting CENTCOM, and 12th Air Force, which also ran operations over Latin America. (9th and 12 Air Force still exist as headquarters, but both are now focused purely on theater operations, not training). That gives Franks command of more than 600 aircraft and 46,000 personnel (both military and civilian) organized in 13 wings.

Not all of those wings will become “lead wings,” Franks said. He expects to designate six of them, probably all fighter wings. “To be honest, I don’t have a whole lot of details… because, again, we’re still working our way through it [and] experimenting with it,” he said. “We’re going to have an exercise next month… We’re looking at doing it down at Tyndall.”

(Tyndall was devastated by Hurricane Michael in 2018 and will become a testing ground for new ways of running bases. It’s also still in rough enough shape to be a good test of units’ ability to deploy to an austere forward location).

The lead wing model has some similarities to the Air Expeditionary Force (AEF) organization the service tried in the late the 1990s, Franks acknowledged. “The big difference between the AEF, and the lead wing is the fact that we will now train those units [together] ahead of time,” he emphasized. “The AEF… was more of a scheduling device, [because] they still ended up meeting up down range, and then executing in combat. The lead wing is designed to get those teams together here stateside before they go downrange or go on any kind of alert cycle.”

The lead wing idea has been percolating around the Air Force for a while, Franks said, along with other novel concepts. But implementation sped up when one of its leading advocates, Gen. Mark Kelly, took over Air Combat Command, and when the new Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. C.Q. Brown, instituted a strategy he calls “Accelerate Change or Lose”: “I want to go fast, I want to go fast, I want to go fast,” Brown told the AFA conference yesterday.

“We, for a while, thought we had a little bit longer time for experimentation, [but] we’re going to start moving out much quicker,” Franks said. “Now we need to accelerate and make some decisions on our organizations and how we’re going to go about doing this.”