In a crisis, to ship from New Mexico to here in a quick, fast way for the same amount of assets would take 100 C-17s for one deployable air base system. Here, you leverage the rail cars, the trucks and a few airlift items that would get things here quicker. So what took us, for example, 120-plus days as we shipped from Holloman Air [Force] Base in New Mexico to this theater now is, in one day, from Sanem, Poland, to here.
Could it have been Sanem to Norway, Sanem to the south in Greece? Certainly. But because of, again, this long-standing relationship, we have an aviation detachment that’s been here a while with an aviation rotation with the C-130s and the F-16s. We have a perfect partner and host with Poland, and that’s why we chose Poland.
It seems like the Air Force is moving to a more disaggregated and distributed way of operating in this theater. Why is that a good and necessary thing, especially with this new National Defense Strategy?
When you talk about distributed, the other way you could talk about it is dispersed. I first came in the Air Force with 30 main operating bases here in this theater, with probably double the amount of blue-suit personnel [and] triple the amount of aircraft. So when you hear, from the recent NATO summit, when you talk about the “four 30s,” [that’s] 30 squadrons, 30 surface ships, 30 brigades in 30 days.
I just mentioned to you 120 days from Holloman to here to ship all that equipment. Now you can have that equipment pre-positioned here, disperse it out from the few main operating bases that we currently have, and put a squadron dispersed. You gain resiliency, you gain agility of operations and greater coverage by spreading your war-fighting capabilities throughout.
And you show the allies, too, that you’re here with them in whatever crisis that they face. “We are here with you and we will be here with you, and we’ll be here quickly with those assets.”
