{"id":7515,"date":"2023-04-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-27T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/?p=7515"},"modified":"2023-04-28T06:49:31","modified_gmt":"2023-04-28T06:49:31","slug":"mississippi-guard-hosts-southern-strike-exercise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/?p=7515","title":{"rendered":"Mississippi Guard hosts Southern Strike exercise"},"content":{"rendered":"
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GULFPORT, Miss. (AFNS) — \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the U.S. Air Force\u2019s newest concepts, Agile Combat Employment<\/a><\/strong>, is the focus of the Southern Strike 2023 exercise at the Gulfport Combat Readiness Training Center<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0
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Approximately 2,000 U.S. military service members participated in the joint international combat exercise hosted by the Mississippi National Guard<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0
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During the two-week exercise, a combined force of Air National Guard<\/a><\/strong>, Army National Guard<\/a><\/strong>, Air Force, Navy<\/a><\/strong>, Marines<\/a><\/strong> and Coast Guard<\/a><\/strong> units trained to prepare for air-to-air combat, aerial refueling, aerial and ground transport and close air support.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The exercise centers on emerging ACE tactics, techniques and procedures and multi-capable Airmen training.\u00a0
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Army special operations<\/a><\/strong> forces were\u00a0among the participants that conduct counterinsurgency, close air support, search and rescue, noncombatant evacuation and maritime special operations. International partners were also\u00a0involved in air and ground training scenarios.\u00a0
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\u201cAgile Combat Employment is a method of employing our personnel in resources instead of going to one large main operating base,\u201d said Col. Bryce Butler, exercise director. \u201cWe disperse our assets and forces throughout many different contingency locations as it confuses adversary planning.\u201d\u00a0
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The key to ACE is to spread out aircraft and supplies across multiple airfields rather than concentrating them in a few central locations to make it more complicated to target all of them.
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\u201cWe disperse forces in order to complicate potential adversaries\u2019 planning,\u201d Butler said. \u201cWe have to have Airmen that not only know the job that they have been trained for but other jobs as well. When you disperse to those smaller bases and you have less personnel there, they have to be able to know many different jobs in order to be able to make the mission happen.\u201d\u00a0
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The annual exercise provides valuable training scenarios to prepare fighters for various threats and enhance their knowledge of the ACE concept.\u00a0
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\u201cSouthern Strike provides us the opportunity to go to multiple contingency locations because we have a lot of small airfields around here that will be very illustrative of what we\u2019ll find inside of the South Pacific,\u201d said Brig. Gen. Anthony Stratton<\/a><\/strong>, the commander of the 176th Wing, Alaska ANG. \u201cWe have the water here as well, so we can get our forces out there working together in a cohesive environment.\u201d\u00a0
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ACE relies on multi-capable Airmen to recover, refuel, reload and perform maintenance to aircraft. This ensures they are ready to rapidly deploy a proactive plan of operation to boost resilience and survival while generating combat power.\u00a0
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\u201cMulti-capable Airmen are doing jobs that are not in their specific specialty code, things like marshaling airplanes, helping to fuel airplanes, providing perimeter security, ingesting data, analyzing it and pushing it back out,\u201d Stratton said.\u00a0
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\u201cWe may have to cover great distances, and so, no matter where we are in the future with our adversaries, whether they be in Eastern Europe, in the Pacific or wherever else, we have to be ready to employ this concept and remain agile so that if we\u2019re detected and targeted, we\u2019re able to redeploy to different locations using the ACE concept,\u201d said Maj. Gen. Barry A. Blanchard, assistant adjutant general – air, MSG.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GULFPORT, Miss. (AFNS) — \u00a0 One of the U.S. Air Force\u2019s newest concepts, Agile Combat Employment, is the focus of the Southern Strike 2023 exercise at the Gulfport Combat Readiness Training Center.\u00a0\u00a0Approximately 2,000 U.S. military service members participated in the joint international combat exercise hosted by the Mississippi National Guard.\u00a0\u00a0During the two-week exercise, a combined […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7517,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7515"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7518,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7515\/revisions\/7518"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adn.monetizemail.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}