News

Reservists participate in major exercise

  • Published
  • By Sandra Pishner
  • 446th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
MCCHORD FIELD, Wash. --  More than 125 446th Airlift Wing Reservists will head to Wisconsin the beginning of June for field exercise Patriot Warrior, a large-scale joint forces exercise.

More than 90 Reservists from the 446th Civil Engineer Squadron and more than 35 people from the 446th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron will participate.  The flight nurses and flying medical technicians from the 446th AES make a return appearance in the exercise, formally known as Global Medic.  For the civil engineer Reservists, this is just the beginning.

Exercise Patriot Warrior is the Air Force Reserve Command portion of the larger U.S. Army Reserve exercise series. The joint exercise will involve roughly 5,000 military personnel, 500 from the Air Force Reserve.

The Citizen Airmen from the 446th AES, who will depart June 11, have been involved with this exercise since 2003.

"We'll be doing an AE trainer on the way there and back," said Senior Master Sgt. Selina Novasio. "For us it's the same exercise, just the name has changed.  We've been there every year in some capacity; whether it's just a few instructors or as participants."

Deployed aeromedical evacuation, or AE teams, work to evacuate patients from combat theaters to hospitals close to their homes of record where further care will be provided, if necessary, Air Mobility Command officials said. These often lengthy airlift transports are when the AE teams must be the most vigilant.

The exercise, according to Novasio, teaches the AE Reservists how to perform their duties in an expeditionary, or field environment.

"You take a bare base and you're standing up operations.  It's excellent training.  When I deployed in 2010, we arrived at a lot, filled with trash and we stood up operations and it went exactly like the exercise. It was actually disappointing because I thought it would be better because exercises, you know, are painful," Novasio said with a laugh.

AFRC Headquarters chose to rename the exercise to adequately portray the various functional areas that now participate in the exercise to accomplish wartime austere bare base operations training - such as civil engineers.

Reservists with the 446th CES will experience the exercise in waves, as half the group will depart June 7, and swap out with the other half mid-way through.  This is only the second year a civil engineer unit has joined Patriot Warrior, with the 433rd Civil Engineer Squadron, Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas being the first in 2014.

"We're the second Air Force Reserve CE playing in the exercise," said Master Sgt. Nathan Wright, 446th CES Operations superintendent.  "So there is a lot of growth just from last year, trying to figure out the best way to do it. They're trying to go off lessons learned from last year."

The CE team, with 12 specialties, will arrive at an austere location and build an operating base.  Once the base is established, the team will provide sustainment and maintenance of the forward operating base, FOB for short, to make it livable.

"We should get Silver Flag credit for doing this," said Wright, referring to the CE contingency combat support training conducted at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida. 

For a look at what the McChord Reservists can expect at Patriot Warrior, take a look at this video about Patriot Warrior 2014 on the Air Force YouTube channel.