Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force

XVIII Airborne Corps. They do this through a long-standing set of relationships with other services and nations that would be the envy of any foreign ministry in the world. We’ll let General Keane explain.

Tom Clancy: You’ve been saying that XVIII Airborne Corps has a unique relationship with the units of the U.S. Transportation Command [USTRANSCOM], particularly the Air Mobility Command [AMC] and the Military Sealift Command [MSC]. Talk a little about your partnership with these organizations, would you please?

General Keane: The U.S. Air Force and XVIII Airborne Corps tend to think of ourselves as being just one [entity]. We’ve been, in a sense, brothers for years going back to World War II. We train together, exercise together, deploy on operations, and go to war together. We cannot complete our missions without the Air Force, it is that simple! XVIII Airborne Corps could not be a strategic crisis response force without the Air Force’s ability to respond as rapidly as our units. Their challenge is just as great as ours. The Air Force is out operating as an air force every day, peacetime or war. Their planes are all over the world, and if a crisis comes, they have to bring their planes back and assemble their crews. And if the mission includes a parachute assault (with the 82nd Airborne Division), they have to assemble their airdrop crews that are qualified to do that, because not all transport crews are. So they have a great challenge, and they practice for it with us all the time.

Our relationship with the Navy’s Sealift Command [MSC] is the same. As you know, we now have nine of the fast sealift ships [33-knot ships like the SL-7 class] and we’re going up to [a force of] nineteen with the LMSLR program. They just christened the first two of those, the USNS Shughart and the USNS Gordon, named for our two Army Medal of Honor winners [posthumously] from Somalia. We cannot project the nation’s combat power to great distances without sealift. It’s that simple. We could project a smaller force, but only sealift gives us the capabilities to project the forces we need, in the time required, and sustain them over time.

Now, in conjunction with MSC, we’re constantly exercising with them. Once a quarter [every three months] here at XVIII Airborne Corps, we conduct what we call a Sea Emergency Deployment Exercise. Just recently, we ran one of these with elements of a brigade from the 101 st Air Assault Division. We moved their equipment and flew the helicopters down 625 mi/1006 km from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Jacksonville, Florida (at the Blount Island Naval Terminal), then shrink-wrapped the aircraft and loaded them aboard a fast sealift ship. We then had the ship moved up to Norfolk, Virginia, where it practiced three different types of operations at the time. First we off-loaded part of the load at the Norfolk cargo terminal, which represented an improved port facility which we may encounter, similar to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. At the same time, we took some of the equipment off the vessel, and put it into the water onto amphibious literage and drove it onto a pier that we had built, as if it was a degraded port, like that of a Third World country [like Mogadishu, Somalia]. Finally, we took other equipment off the ship on lighters and drove it over the beach as if it was a beach landing. We call that last one an “over the shore” operation. It was a tremendous operation, and we do three or four of these a year. In addition, back to my previous comments on our partnership with the Air Force, we do at least several similar operations with them each month. Obviously, though, the Air Force element that we spend the most time with is the 23rd Wing, which is based right next door at Pope Air Force Base [AFB], North Carolina.

Tom Clancy: Could you tell us about the joint [inter-service] training exercises that you participate in?

General Keane: In addition to the exercises that I described previously, we also continuously practice joint operations with our other sister services. In fact, we’re doing twenty-two joint exercises this year [FY-96], with sixteen more planned for next year [FY-97]. Most of the joint exercises we do are with II Marine Expeditionary Force [II MEF, based at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina], 9th and 12th Air Forces, and the 2nd [Atlantic] Fleet. The approach that we take with these joint exercises is that each one of the service components [Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps] will be responsible for a JTF headquarters on an exercise, and we switch that responsibility out during the year. The nature of the operation or scenario that is conducted will have the other service components working for that JTF headquarters. For example, for the JTFEX-95[11] exercise that we conducted in August of 1995, Admiral Jay Johnson [now the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)] who commanded 2nd Fleet, was the JTF commander, and I [at the time commander of the 101st Air Assault Division] was his deputy commander. Now sometimes these are field or fleet training exercises with troops [actual ground, air, etc.], though more and more, we conduct these exercises using networked computer simulations. We have found that we can hone and maintain our skills through computer simulations, and reduce the cost of large-scale exercises.

Tom Clancy: You’re getting ready right now [May 1996] for a very large joint exercise known by the various names of JTFEX-96/Purple Star/Royal Dragon. Could you please tell us how you expect it to run?

General Keane: For Royal Dragon, we’ll [the XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters] be the Joint Land Component Commander when our part of the operation kicks in. Prior to that, though, I’ll be working for the JTF headquarters, which will be aboard the command ship USS Mount Whitney [LCC- 20], and commanded by the new 2nd Fleet Commander, Admiral William Vernon Clark, who recently took over from Jay Johnson.[12] One of the more interesting parts of our part of the exercise will be the inclusion of multi-national forces. We recognize that coalition warfare has manifested itself as a vital part of our national security policy, and we obviously have treaties and arrangements with allies around the world. We have to make certain that we have some level of interoperability and compatibility with the forces. So on occasions when we can, we practice with them.

We recently sent a brigade task force of the 3rd MID [formerly the 24th MID] over to Egypt for Operation Bright Star with upwards of five thousand plus soldiers training with the Egyptians. We also just finished having a battalion from the same division training with the Kuwaitis in Operation Intrinsic Action-96, and the 10th Mountain also did one in Oman. For Royal Dragon, we’ll have over seven thou-sandBritish troops taking part, plus a Gurkha battalion, and soldiers from the 82nd Airborne, the 10th Mountain, and the 3rd Mechanized Infantry divisions. In addition, the Royal Navy is contributing over thirty naval vessels, including a carrier battle group built around HMS Illustrious [R 06] which will operate off the Carolina coast with our naval forces. I might also add that while all this is going on, we’ll still have a brigade each from the 82nd and 101st Airborne on eighteen-hour alert, ready to go just in case. If we’re going to maintain our [fighting] edge, and the American people expect us to do just that, we have got to practice our craft. That means getting out in the field and honing our skills. We have got to make certain that our soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen are practicing and staying ready.

For all their capability and skill, the soldiers of the XVIII Airborne Corps have paid a high price in personal sacrifice and emotional strain. High OpTempos over the past decade, as well as force and budget reductions, have stretched our forces to the breaking point in places. Given their large number of overseas and combat deployments and a rigorous exercise schedule, they arguably have the toughest routine of any corps in the Army. Let’s hear General Keane’s thoughts on the quality of life for his soldiers, as well as some other challenges that he is facing.

Tom Clancy: All these operations, both real and exercises, have placed a high strain on your personnel and equipment. Could you tell us your view of the high OpTempos that you have been experiencing these last few years?

General Keane: Well, to be sure we cannot control the world, nor would we as a nation think of doing that. We’re here to respond to the NCAs, and we will respond in the fashion that they expect. We are busier in the last six years, to be sure, than we were previously in the Cold War. But there are some things that we can do to moderate the effects of these high OpTempos.

Despite all the operational requirements, we are in control of most of the time of our soldiers. So we try