A flurry of recent military air activity over the U.S. Pacific coast signals the latest iteration of Bamboo Eagle, one of the Air Force’s newest and most important warfighting exercises, and one that’s very clearly intended to be a rehearsal for a future conflict with China. As you can read in our past feature here, Bamboo Eagle emphasizes a range of scenarios and tactics that directly play into the Pacific theater, with a focus on the specific demands of the maritime environment and long-range over-water air combat operations.
Run by the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center, Bamboo Eagle 24-3 began on August 2 and the exercise is due to wrap up tomorrow.
The scale of Bamboo Eagle is evidenced by publicly available flight-tracking software.
In recent days, multiple simultaneous tanker tracks — at one point, as many as 17 — indicate the number of aerial refueling assets required to support the aircraft involved.
These missions, and many others related to the exercise, are being launching from air bases and civilian airports along the California coastline, as well as from their home stations, before conducting their missions in temporarily restricted airspace over the Pacific.
As far as combat aircraft are concerned, Air Force B-1B and B-52 bombers, as well as F-16, F-22, and F-35 fighters, have all been noted taking part. Since this is a joint force exercise, U.S. Navy and Marine Corps assets are involved too.
Identified supporting assets include Air Force E-3 AWACS command and control jets, E-11 Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) aircraft, and RC-135 Rivet Joint intelligence-gathering aircraft.
Also involved are red air aggressors, including F-16s, as well as F-5s from Tactical Air Support, a private contractor. Among the red air F-16s are examples from the 706th Aggressor Squadron, which was last year converted from a reserve squadron into a new aggressor unit to provide additional replication of adversary fighter threats.
According to an Air Force media release, more than 150 aircraft are involved in Bamboo Eagle 24-3, together with more than 3,000 service members from over 20 units.
Beginning earlier this year, Bamboo Eagle is the latest addition to the Air Force’s roster of large-scale air warfare exercises and its focus on how to fight in a future major conflict in the Pacific makes it stand out.
The maneuvers are an extension of the well-known Exercise Red Flag that takes place out of Nellis Air Force Base. As in the past, participants from Red Flag, including foreign squadrons, have been rolled into Bamboo Eagle, which has taken place immediately after the Nellis-based exercise. On this occasion, both the U.K. Royal Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force are taking part.
Leveraging the units assigned to Red Flag and moving at least some of them from Nevada to a series of locations along the West Coast, provides an important training boost to the participants — especially in the overwater realm — but also makes the most of having a larger number of assets available at the same time. As with much in the Air Force right now, it’s about doing more with less.
In the past, aircraft taking part in Bamboo Eagle have operated out of bases at Nellis, Kirtland, and Hurlburt Field, among others.
Back in January, when the first edition of Bamboo Eagle was kicking off, Brig. Gen. Richard Goodman, at that time the commander of Nellis Air Force Base’s 57th Wing, explained to The War Zone about the relevance of the new exercise to the Pacific theater:
“The kind of activities that happen at Nellis lead the way for the U.S. Air Force, the Joint Force, and our allies. Over the past two to three years the Weapons School here has moved to a model of advanced integration that notably includes maritime operations, Joint Force integration in the maritime environment, operations in long-range over-water environments, Agile Combat Employment, disaggregated mission generation, and aggregation of combat air power.”
While the level of activity in the skies over and around the California coastline is impressive, this is only one element of an exercise that also relies heavily on elements that are played out in the virtual realm.
Reflecting broader Air Force concerns, certain critical elements of Bamboo Eagle, including command and control (C2), are put to the test in a Virtual Flag exercise. As we have discussed before, shifting air warfare training into the virtual realm allows much larger and more complex scenarios to be played out, repeatedly and without restriction, free from the restraints of geographic separation, and — very importantly — away from the gaze of potential hostile powers.
Since there is still no substitute for real flying operations in a training environment, Bamboo Eagle also involves extensive use of more traditional assets, although these live-fly elements are blended within a live-virtual constructive (LVC) exercise.
Overall, Bamboo Flag’s advanced training program has been engineered to very closely meet the demands of what the Pentagon refers to as the Pacing Challenge, which has a particular focus on the Indo-Pacific region.
“We are talking about things like distributed basing, challenged command and control [C2], dis-aggregated operations, and the aggregation of combat air power to be applied at the time and place of our choosing,” Gen. Goodman told The War Zone earlier this year. Among the particular elements to be trained, Goodman identified “advanced threats, over water, tyranny of distance, and really stressing elements such as air-to-air refueling, long-range communications [and] command and control.”
While many of these same elements are also found in Red Flag, the maritime and long-distance focuses of Bamboo Eagle really sets it apart.
Flying overwater not only offers the aircrew involved a very different perspective and particular challenges, but there’s also a big logistical component. This includes practicing how U.S. air power would deal with resupply and distribution in the Pacific context, including Agile Combat Employment — a doctrine that stresses flexible and reactive operations over significant distances and in highly contested environments.
As part of Agile Combat Employment, Bamboo Eagle sees participants brought together in hub-and-spoke operations, in which a host wing sets up a mission command center and is responsible for planning, directing, and coordinating different units (‘spokes,’ comprising fighters and airlifters, for example) at forward bases.
As we described in the past, in the context of Bamboo Flag 24-1, “The four spokes, all of which are located closer to the airspace that is being used for the exercise, set up secure communications, ground refueling, air mobility teams, and aircraft security elements in preparation for the start of this eight-day Agile Combat Employment exercise.”
These kinds of training scenarios closely match how the U.S. military and its allies would be expected to go to war in a future conflict with China in the Pacific. To ensure survival, not only would multiple aircraft units need to be dispersed across different locations, and kept on the move, but overall control and mission planning would need to be similarly distributed.
As the Air Force has explained in the past: “Distributed control allows subordinate commanders to respond to changes in the operational environment and exploit emergent opportunities. This concept does not dilute the authority of the commander; rather, it proliferates that authority across a command.”
With a range of high-end, high-intensity air warfare exercises, operating in the real and virtual worlds, and increasingly spanning both, the U.S. Air Force is looking at ways to better expose aircrews to the kinds of challenges they would face in a potential conflict in the Pacific.
While Bamboo Eagle is just one element of that training enterprise, the intense air activity it generates is a very visible reminder of a broader shift toward combat in a maritime environment and at long distances in the Indo-Pacific theater.
Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com