Twelve Lockheed Martin F-35B Joint Strike Fighters from the United States Marines Corps’ Marine Air Group 12 (MAG-12) in Iwakuni, Japan, deployed to RAAF Tindal in August to participate in Exercise Pitch Black.
But before the aircraft began their involvement with the multi-lateral air combat exercise, MAG-12 spent a week practicing an air task force concept that the Corp’s refers to as Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO). In this instance the EABO concept used Tindal as the main base and the RAAF’s bare base at Curtin in north west Australia as its forward deployed (or advanced) base.
The aircraft and crews were from two forward-deployed Marines Fighter Attack Squadrons VFMA-121 ‘Green Knights’ and VMFA-242 ‘Bats’, operating as a single unit for both the EABO and Pitch Black activities. Support was provided by elements of MAG-12’s maintenance and wing support squadrons and a pair of Lockheed Martin KC-130J Hercules tankers from VMGR-152 ‘Sumos’.
The Operations Officer for MAG-12 in Iwakuni, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Behrmann, told ADM that the deployment to RAAF Curtin exercised the ‘Hub and Spoke’ methodology of the Corps.
“The hub was Tindal in this example, where we float in the headquarters element and all of our forces initially, and then we executed a spoke operation out to Curtin - which is out in Western Australia, about 800 miles away,” LTCOL Behrmann explained. “We also had robust reach back to our home base in Iwakuni and what that did is it forced us to develop a Primary Alternate Contingency and Emergency (PACE) plan for communications. That’s actually one of the things we're the most proud of, is that we were able to use that robust PACE plan and exercise high frequency radio to transmit both data, as well as voice, satellite communication systems, fibre, and a variety of other capabilities that truly embraced the EABO concept.”
The EABO concept itself is still being developed by the Corps - and will continue to evolve into the future - but the Curtin operation was the most comprehensive test so far.
“I can say that this is by far the most robust and in-depth evolution that we've done exercising EABO, and the after-action report that we do is going to have a lot of recommendations,” LTCOL Behrmann added.
“Although we have been constantly communicating the reflections that we got out of the EABO exercise that we did as a part of the unit level training before Pitch Black, this was in execution, a Marine Corps-only period of training for us. That said, we did share our concepts with Australia and Singapore (a future operator of the F-35B).”
LTCOL Behrmann also said that the deployable version of the F-35’s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) was rigorously put to the test during the EABO and Pitch Black.
“We did deploy ALIS down there with the mobile facility and infrastructure, and we did not push the ‘easy’ button, we did not connect it into fibre internet - which would have been the easy way to do it. We actually deployed a team from our higher headquarters; the 7th Comm battalion sent a team of enablers, as did the Marine Air Control Group, which is one of our adjacent units,” LTCOL Behrmann explained. “That brought a very small aperture terminal satellite dish, which was one of the parts of our PACE plan. And that is what we've had the ALIS system running off of. It's not as easy, but it has been working very reliably and very well.”
From a Pitch Black perspective, LTCOL Behrmann said the F-35Bs flew both day and night missions from Tindal as part of either Red or Blue Air, depending on the scenario of the day. Alongside the RAAF F-35As flying from Darwin, Pitch Black 2022 was the first time the fifth-generation Joint Strike Fighter has been involved, and LTCOL Behrmann said that sortie rates had been pleasingly high.
“We brought a total of 12 F-35Bs down to Tindal, in addition to two KC-130Js, that are supporting refuelling operations, and also doing some of their own organic training such as air delivery, and rapid ground refuelling and things of that nature. And then it's also very valuable for our maintenance squadron that's embedded throughout the task force that we brought down; as well as the wing support squadron that I referenced,” he detailed at the beginning of the second week of Pitch Black 22.
“The pace of flying is generally two or four aircraft flows, with three per day is what we're looking to do. I'll brag a little bit on behalf of my team and say I'm very, very proud that up to this point, we have only lost one sortie in the entire month of flying that we've been doing - and we're pretty proud of that."
