Air Task Forces and the Future of Force Presentation
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Voiceover:
Please welcome our moderator, the editor in chief of AFA's Air & Space Forces Magazine, Tobias
Naegele.
Tobias Naegele:
Good morning. So among the highest interest items after Warrant Officers is deployments from what
we've seen on traffic on our website. We've got just the right couple of people here to talk to us about
changing the way the Air Force is deploying. We have the A3, Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain and Brig. Gen. Dave
Epperson, and these guys are rebuilding the way the Air Force is going to build out deployments in the
future.
So we've heard a lot about task forces. We started hearing about task forces last summer. The Air Task
Force was going to be the new thing. And now we have heard about combat wings. And what I'd really
like you guys to do is to unwrap that for us. And as a warning to everybody, you will be educated on a
whole new set of acronyms that will be totally confusing. So I've asked them not to overdo it on the
acronyms and to just try to use the whole phrases and then we'll get to the acronyms by the end, and
then you'll know the difference between, well, I won't even get into them. I'm going to get them wrong.
So let's just start. Air Task Force—what is it? And then how is it different from the wings that we're going
to go to?
Lt. Gen. Adrian L. Spain:
Can everybody hear me? I think this is on. Great, thanks. Yeah, thanks a lot, Tobias. I really appreciate
you being here. And thanks to the AFA for hosting and allowing us to talk about this really important
topic for the Air Force and for our Airmen. I'd like to start by backing it up a little bit before jumping right
into Air Task Forces. We've been on this journey, this evolution of how we deploy for really a long time.
Ten years ago as a group commander, we were talking about it in terms of white space, "Hey, how do
we build in more white space and more predictability for our units?" Five to seven years ago, we started
talking about it in terms of, "Hey, how do I deploy in teams to build up mutual support, camaraderie,
war fighting ethos before I get there? And I have a grouping and a core of folks who can help take care
of each other when we descend upon a deployed location in theater and not show up alone."
And in this journey from Gen. Goldfein, "Hey, we're going to do some men teaming here. Instead of
sending people out as individuals, we're going to send them out in a men of three." That was the goal to
build some of that. The expeditionary air base, you almost got me there on the acronym, expeditionary
air base is a natural evolution of that where we're still trying to build up bigger teams from fewer places
to go to rotational locations and execute a war fighting mission that have built up some comradery and
familiarity and some training together at the command level in the expeditionary air base, while still also
crowdsourcing a decent amount of the remaining support that go into these rotational locations. It's
important to remember also during that time, we never got relief from the deployments. So as we
evolved over time, we had to really continue and figure out how to do this while we still supported a hot
fight in Syncom and while things got hotter around the world in different places.
And so it had to be slow and steady over time to build this up. And the expeditionary air bases were a
natural evolution of that. And then the Air Task Forces from that was really a clean sheet look from the
XABs, from the expeditionary air bases, to figure out a better way to consolidate more, have fewer
