Air Force, Army face off during Northern Edge
Release No. 2003078
March 10, 2003
By Sgt. Bradley Rhen
25th Infantry Division (Light) Public Affairs
EIELSON AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska - An enemy airplane, played by an Eielson A-10, approached the airstrip, like a fly unknowingly flying toward a spider's web.
An Avenger missile system crew, nestled amongst the trees on a snow-covered hill overlooking an airstrip, is gazing skyward.
In this game, where the first to be spotted is likely the first to be killed, the Avenger trains its sights on the plane and gets its fly before even being detected.
This was the scenario March 5 when elements of Battery B, 1st Battalion, 62nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment from Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, defended an airstrip against Air Force A-10 Thunderbolts from here as part of Northern Edge '03.
The A-10s flew six sorties over the airstrip, and the battery's Avenger and Stinger teams successfully engaged five of them. However, it was not known if all the teams engaged the planes before they, themselves, were engaged by the planes.
Sergeant Tony Bond, an Avenger team chief, said Avengers' bread and butter is digging in and camouflaging their vehicles, then waiting for an enemy to enter their area.
"They didn't see us," he said. "They might have seen a couple Stinger teams, but they didn't see us because we were way off [the airstrip]."
Bond said his team successfully engaged three A-10s during the exercise.
In addition to the Humvee-mounted Avengers, the battery also has shoulder-fired Stinger missiles that allow teams to dismount their vehicles and get better cover so they are even harder to detect.
Specialist Ryan Jackson, a Stinger team chief, said this extra mobility helped his team get the jump on the A-10s.
"I think we had the early engagement on them before they saw us," he said. "Our benefit is they don't know where we are. We could be anywhere on the hills and ridges."
The opportunity to train with live aircraft is extremely beneficial to the teams, said Sgt. 1st Class Kevin Bruhn, 2nd Platoon's platoon sergeant.
"They can actually go through their tracking and engagement sequence," Bruhn said. "Instead of putting notional aircraft and pretending there's something out there, there's actually aircraft for them to engage."
"For those of us stationed in Hawaii, we don't see a lot of live aircraft so it gives us the benefit of seeing real aircraft like you would in combat," Jackson added.
Providing air defense for a static asset such as an airstrip is one of the critical missions of ADA, according to Capt. William McKnight, the battery commander. During the field training exercise, the battery also trained on providing defense for a convoy and conducting a Stinger missile ambush.
McKnight said this training will help prepare the battery when it goes to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team. The training was based on lessons Battery A learned on its recent deployment to JRTC with the 3rd BCT.
"We're trying to get ahead of the power curve in terms of incorporating those critical tasks into our training now," McKnight said.
Northern Edge is Alaska's premier joint training exercise and is designed to exercise joint operations, techniques, procedures and command and control relationships and enhance interoperability among the services. More than 1,600 soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and coastguardsmen are participating in the exercise, which began March 3 and runs through March 14.
The force-on-force training with the Air Force is one part of the battery's training during its month-long deployment to Alaska. It has already completed two days and nights of extreme cold weather training and will conduct weapons qualifications and crew certifications before returning to Hawaii next week. (PACAFNS)
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