 For the Swamp Fox team, thanks for what you do. Thanks for being here, giving up your time to be part of this mission. Hello, I'm Brigadier General Evan Pettis, the commander of the 378th Air Expeditionary Wing, and I'm here today with Lieutenant Colonel Tripp Bows, the commander of the 157th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron. Tripp, tell me a little bit about the 157th. Where's the unit from, and what do you guys do? Yes, sir, 157th is part of the 169th Fighter Wing at McIntyre Joint National Guard Base in Columbia, South Carolina, so part of the South Carolina Air National Guard. Okay, fantastic. So you're a guard unit, which means your composition is a little bit different than the active duty units that we often see out here at Prince Sultan Air Base. Tell me a little bit about what's different about a guard fighter squadron. Well, our squadron in particular, 66% roughly, are part-time citizen soldiers who have other civilian careers. They're doctors, lawyers, teachers, police officers, pretty much anything in the private sector. We have them, and then they come out and they're your typical weekend warrior, one weekend a month, two weeks a year total. And then on top of that, we have about 33% of our force is gonna be full-time. Maybe 5% of them are AGRs, so really no different than being on active duty, same benefits, same requirements, and then the other 75% of those are gonna be technicians who are federal civil employees with slightly different rules. On top of that, we also have an active association. So we're a total force integration squadron, and we have roughly 100 active duty folks who are assigned to our squadron, and they fit right in. They're part of the 316th Fighter Squadron. I think that's one of the neatest things to me being out here in the area of responsibility, and in US Air Force's central area, is we have active duty units come in, reserve units, guard units, associate units that have some kind of mix, and once the people and the iron hit the ground, it is very difficult to tell unless you just walk up and ask somebody the difference. It is. The 316th has their own heraldry and patches, but when they come to McIntyre, they wear small Fox patches, and they're one of us. That's right. It's really neat to watch the team in operation because it's one of the things I'm really proud about as an airman is how well all this folds together, and what an enhancement this is to our capabilities that you have a unit of citizen's shoulders that can stand up like this and go forward, be spun up and do the job exactly like as if it was a full-time unit, because you're not gonna come out here not ready. You're gonna train and be ready. What's that training like? Yes, sir, well that's the reason we have full-timers. Full-timers are there to train every single day, and then when we get caught upon, we're gonna train the part-time force and bring them up to the standard. Many of our pilots are, I'd say our average is probably about 1500 hours in the F-16, whereas if you look at an active duty squadron, they're probably five or 600 hours, I would guess, as kind of your basic guy. So we bring a ton of experience as pilots, and then also our maintainers. They've all been doing this for years, and they have a lot of this core knowledge that they can bring, and then we share that with the active associates. This is kind of a seasoning program, and then we put them back out on active duty. Well, the experience is evident. Just walking around the line, talking to some of your airmen. Some of these guys have been at this for a very long time, and it's really impressive to watch them work. Do you have any messages you'd like to give to the team? Well, for the Swamp Fox team, who's really a family, is thanks for what you do. Thanks for being here, giving up your time to be part of this mission. We're just looking to enhance all the capabilities that PSAP has. Yeah, well, talking about capabilities, tell me a little bit about what you're gonna be doing while you're here at PSAP. Well, primarily we're gonna do anything the Synccom commander asks us to do, so projecting air power through AFSINT, and executing the missions just throughout the entire Synccom AOR. Just in the first week, we've already flown in some nine hour missions, so it's a long way to travel to get the mission done, but that's what we're here to do. Absolutely, I mean, your presence here is very reassuring to our partners and allies. It gives us a great capability to maintain stability, build partnership, deter regional aggressors. We can't thank you enough for what you do here. And really, I guess the one thing I'd leave is anything that you wanna say to the families back home who are sacrificing without their loved ones. Well, it's really the same message of just thank you. We can't do it without them. So, yeah, they're putting up with a lot, so we appreciate that. Absolutely, thank you very much.