DYESS AIR FORCE BASE, Texas -- Twenty-one aircraft assigned to military bases from all over the world took off Dec. 10 from Dyess in participation of a joint forcible entry exercise.
The exercise, Joint Forcible Entry 16B, is a U.S. Air Force Weapons School large-scale airdrop and land-mobility exercise in which participants plan and execute a complex air-land operation in a simulated contested battlefield.
The students of the USAFWS are in charge of planning the exercise twice a year as part of the integration phase of their course. The purpose of the exercise is to train officers and enlisted specialists as tactical experts and leaders skilled in the art of integrated battle-space dominance across the land, air, space and cyber domains.
“The goal of this phase is to get the different frames of the Air Force together to fight a big air war,” said Lt. Col. Scott Lew, 317th deputy commander of operations. “The total focus is on our joint capabilities and our mission to get jumpers on the ground. If we can’t do that, then nothing else matters.”
The simulated scenarios are in place to help participants overcome challenges brought on by a hostile combat environment and recover units such as the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
Participants have the ability to synchronize aircraft movements from geographically-separated bases, command large formations of dissimilar aircraft in high-threat airspace and tactically deliver and recover combat forces via airdrops and combat landings on an unimproved landing strip.
“During the exercise, different aircraft took off to Nellis AFB, Nev., to perform an airdrop over the Nellis Test and Training Range,” Lew said. “While that was going on, the combat Air Force side of the house prepped the environment and ensured the air and ground were safe to execute the mission.”
For the past two years, Dyess has been the host base for the launch of the C-130 Hercules and C-130J Super Hercules that participate in the exercise.
“This exercise takes a lot of manpower,” Lew said. “There are a lot of people who have put in hours of hard work for this exercise to happen and close to 200 of those Airmen were from Dyess alone.”
The USAFWS had six students plan and participate the exercise, along with the Airmen participating from the 317th Airlift Group and 7th Bomb Wing.
“We had a lot of great support from the 7th Bomb Wing to pull it off,” Lew said. “We couldn’t have done it without them. It was a total Team Dyess effort.”