934 AW exercises deployment capabilities

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Scott P. Farley
  • 934 AW Public Affairs
Minneapolis, St. Paul --  The 934th Airlift Wing exercised its ability to plan and execute a deployment during its unit training assembly at the Minneapolis St Paul Air Reserve Station June 5-6.

The exercise, a simulated deployment to Baghram, Iraq, stems from the Air Force Instruction 10-403 that requires units to exercise 50 percent of their tasked unit type code cargo and personnel every 20 months. This requirement can be satisfied with more than one exercise, as long as one of those exercises includes at least 25 percent of the cargo.

Master Sgt. Todd Rice, 934AW Logistics Readiness Squadron superintendent, said the wing has generally met this requirement in the past through unit readiness exercises and unit readiness inspections, as well as deployments.

"We have a general idea when the next ORI is and judging from the past one, we can backwards plan and see when we'll start doing OREs," said Sergeant Rice. "What we are looking at right now is (when the ORI schedule and deployment requirements) will line up. The next time we do this it will be part of our ORE buildup."

Maj. Erick Holman, the installation deployment officer and the operations officer for LRS explained the exercise is the pinnacle of months of preparation and used the 2008 inspection as a starting point to begin and set goals on improving how the wing deploys and meets Air Force requirements successfully.

"Our goal was for the cargo and personnel to meet their processing times according to our schedule," said Major Holman. "A lot of the weakness we saw in the 2008 ORI are the things we started with as a baseline. One of those was realizing practice makes perfect. This exercise kind of caps several smaller iterations we've been doing for six or seven months of a crawl, walk, run approach."

Sergeant Rice said that the exercise was a learning experience for the wing as all of the parts of the process came together during the exercise. Those parts included LRS, deployment control center, cargo deploy flight, personnel deployment flight, command post, and the unit deployment center for every unit are all integral to the process.

"The exercise was beneficial in all-around learning and in all functions. There are so many parts to the deployment machine," said Sergeant Rice. "There's a lot that happens, so there's a lot that can go wrong."

Sergeant Rice said while fulfilling these Air Force requirements in this way is unusual for the wing, performing these functions is the second nature to the 934th Airmen who perform these tasks regularly.

What's been great about this exercise is we know how to do it, we've done it before, we've done it for the ORI," said Sergeant Rice. "However you never know what will go wrong until you actually do it. This has been great for identifying our strengths and weaknesses."

"Before this exercise we wanted most of the people involved in the control centers and the work centers to have done their jobs at least twice before going into this exercise," said Major Holman. "Overall the cargo processing has gone really well. We have hit all of our times. What we are finding in personnel processing is there have been some errors that are consistent across a lot of the units, so we need to look at some of our processes and how we are distributing information."

Sergeant Rice said holding an exercise like this presents many challenges in terms of scheduling during a UTA weekend, but it is important to the mission to keep people proficient.

This is a UTA weekend and just like any other weekend, we've got a million things going on," said Sergeant Rice. "So it's a real fine balance between taking people away from what they have to do and to fight this war and get in some good training."

Major Holman said that because of the turnover in the wing, it is vital to keep going through the process and teaching people.

"There's always a lot of turnover with deployment machine functions, so it's an issue of constant and continual training" said Major. Holman. "The only way to ensure we remain proficient is to train on a regular basis."

Despite some folder issues and other small inconsistencies, Major Holman said the exercise was a success.

Overall it's been a successful exercise because people everywhere I'm seeing are learning a lot," said Major Holman. "We've got a lot of folks who were out there for the first time, and they're soaking it up like a sponge."