Sprawling Pacific exercise revealed Air Force needs some doctrine ‘refresh’: General
“So when you have this mix of [major command]-retained [operational control] — those forces coming into another combatant commander’s theater, where he’s got his own theater-assigned forces — you can imagine that there may be some differences,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. John Klein.
By MICHAEL MARROW
on August 03, 2023 at 2:59 PM
WASHINGTON — Following the conclusion of Air Mobility Command’s (AMC) largest readiness exercise in its history held for the first time in the Indo-Pacific, officials are starting to unpack lessons learned, with a key takeaway being the need to “refresh” Air Force doctrine to better coordinate logistics forces, according to a top service official.
“There’s definitely some refresh that needs to take place… There’s some refreshing of Air Force doctrine, probably some joint doctrine, and that’s some of our intent in getting after the institutionalization of the command and control of GAMSS forces,” Maj. Gen. John Klein, commander of the Air Force Expeditionary Center, said during a virtual discussion hosted by the Air & Space Forces Association on Thursday. GAMSS stands for the Global Air Mobility Support System, the Air Force’s troops and assets that provide ground support for mobility operations.
Klein explained that two of the biggest lessons from the Mobility Guardian exercise last month — involving some 3,000 people and 70 mobility aircraft from US and allied forces, with a total of seven countries participating — largely fall into the areas of commanding and controlling forces and connectivity.
Specifically, Klein said AMC gained insights about simultaneously steering deployments through two air operations centers: the 618th Air Operations Center at Scott Air Force Base, the Air Force’s component of US Transportation Command tasked with global missions, and then the theater-based 613th Air Operations Center at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
https://breakingdefense.com/2023/08/sprawling-pacific-exercise-revealed-air-force-needs-some-doctrine-refresh-general/
