 So what we're doing here over the next two weeks is the operations forces are coming in and then underneath it all of these support and logistics folks are going to be there to make sure that the most critical thing fuel for the airplanes and then they're also going to take care of the human beings right? You've got to have a place to sleep, you got to have food to eat, you've got to have facilities to utilize right? And each one of these airplanes to give you an example the C-17 that's sitting out here pushing fuel into that fuel bladder right now it takes approximately 10 maintenance hours for every hour the airplane flies so the logistics piece behind that is in very substantial and that's what we're practicing right now that like I said the operators that C-17 flies around the world probably once a month and it does it on a very regular basis but it goes into areas that are built up regular Air Force bases it goes into Navy facilities big airports with lots of infrastructure what they're going to be practicing over the next two weeks is to bring that that airplane to places like here a key field which we call contingency locations where they have to practice setting up all that support for all of the logistics personnel that are going to support that airframe now we also brought two helicopters in here last night two HH-60 helicopters that do combat search and rescue and personnel recovery and we're going to have an HC-130J that is going to roll in here today to do that as well and then again the footprint that goes along with that's about 125 people to make sure that that mission set can get done right the maintainers and the support folks that go behind it so that's our main focus for this exercise is in the Indo-Pacific region so long distances contingency locations bare bases and then being agile and moving at a rapid rate so that we can't be targeted by our adversary so basically at Gulfport we have what we call a forward operating site right so it's a more robust more support facilities more infrastructure that's built into it and it's close enough both to the water right so the combat search and rescue forces inside of the Indo-Pacific it's 80% water right not a whole bunch of landmasses there they need to practice their skill sets out over the water they need to be threatened over the water right be able to react to threats that they think that they'll get inside of that area of responsibility and so southern strike provides us the opportunity to go to multiple contingency locations because you have a lot of small airfields around here that will be very illustrative of what we'll find inside of the South Pacific for example right and you actually have the water here as well so we can get our forces out there and the other piece of it is it's a it's a cohesively joint environment so right now you'll see the Marine Corps over here down the runway you've got Belgians as well right when we go into the Indo-Pacific one of our our cornerstone pieces is that we're going to have to work in a coalition environment we can't provide everything we need so we're gonna have the countries that we have solid relationships help us get to where we need to go and help us support the forces so we can generate the combat power that we need to generate so this will be the third time that we've that we've gone to the what we call ace right agile combat employment so we started out three years ago and we took our organization up in Alaska out to King Salmon which is what we would call kind of a warm basin concept right it's 80 percent of the forces are not there on a day-to-day basis but the 20% are there and so when you need to go basically you make that phone call and they expand that out and so we did very similar to what we're doing here not any over water operations but we did basically over land we used six different contingency locations and we use King Salmon as the forward operating site and we do a readiness exercise inside of the 176 wing every year because the bottom line is we have to be ready to go every time we get called and we have to be able to respond in a matter of hours not a matter of days weeks or months right last year basically we did what we call a main operating base out of joint base Elmendorf Richardson and then we pushed the forces out to multiple locations and in that situation it was more about contested environment austere communication so what we've done recently is so I'm a Brigadier General I'm at the 07 level relatively senior level in our organization commanding the organization here is a junior field grade officer so a major and then when we push them out to contingency locations we're going to turn it over to a company great officer which is the captain and we're going to turn it over to a junior non-commissioned officer which is a staff sergeant and so those are the concepts that we've been building on so it was the same thing we had a major that was out of King Salmon and then we had a captain and a major last year that we're kind of running the operations as we pushed them out okay so we're developing right so go back to the previous question so when we were at King Salmon we had our fuels folks POL right they get out there they put fuel in the airplane and they kind of had some margin right they had some extra time in their hands so they went over and they talked to the security forces that were doing perimeter security for the base and they said hey you know what you guys are qualified with the M4 you're qualified with the M9 you guys are going to help us do perimeter security and we're going to do the same thing here as the multi capable airmen so basically it's airming that are doing jobs that are not in their specific specialty code things like marshaling airplanes helping to fuel airplanes providing perimeter security in the communications realm right they might ingest data analyze it and push it back out I just like to thank the staff from southern strike thank the Air National Guard Bureau for providing us with the resources and funding and then of course the folks here key field have been awesome in letting us come in here and test these concepts right so all these things are kind of new things this special fuel download that we're doing on the C17 into the bladder that's going to help us build to the next level which is actually leaving the C17 running and parking a fifth generation fighter like an F-35 or an F-22 right next to it while it's running and taking fuel from that airplane so that we can do a rapid combat turn and again get outside our adversaries capability to target us so I think it was Billy Mitchell it said hey whoever owns Alaska is going to dominate the globe right so up in at J-Bear in a C17 we can take everything that we have within nine hours all anywhere in the northern hemisphere right so this is kind of our power projection so as we power projected from J-Bear to Gulfport so Gulfport is our forward operating site and then as we come to the contingency location meridian being one of two all we're doing is the same distances that we would be expected to execute inside of the pacific because huge distances thousands of miles in the pacific right so that was our walk phase was king salmon that's only hundreds of miles away from us right and then we expanded that out to western Alaska last year and so this year it was time to kind of get up and get more to that jog phase which was power project farther away from home station