Courtesy Photo | Members of the Washington Air National Guard on the shooting range at Camp Rilea,...... read more read more
CAMP MURRAY, Wash.—When the Washington Air National Guard’s 194th Wing was activated on August 30, 2006, it was the first non-flying wing in the entire Air National Guard. Originally designated the 194th Regional Support Wing, the formation of the wing brought together units and missions already in service and made way for emerging cyberspace operations and intelligence missions.
The 141st Air Refueling Wing based at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane had been the state’s only wing since its formation in 1976, though its squadrons had a much longer lineage. The Wing’s 116th Air Refueling Squadron had roots back to the early days of Army aviation during World War I, and the 141st was activated as a Fighter Group in 1956.
Meanwhile, the Washington Air National Guard stood up the 143rd Air Control and Warning Squadron at Boeing Field in Seattle in 1948, shortly after the creation of the Air Force as a separate military service. The 252nd Combat Communications Group was formed in 1953, composed of western Washington units like the 143rd at Boeing Field and the 262nd Combat Communications Squadron in Bellingham, as well as the 242nd Airways and Communication Service Operation Flight at Geiger Field in Spokane on the east side of the state. One of a handful of combat communications groups in the nation, the 252nd held strategic importance for west coast defense during the Cold War. Its administrative and financial needs were met through an entity called Operating Location Bravo Alpha (OLBA).
As the Cold War came to an end, a new mission came to the Washington Air National Guard with the arrival of the 111th Air Support Operations Center on Camp Murray. To support the administrative needs of the 252nd Combat Communications Group and the new ASOC and make way for an expanded close air support mission, Assistant Adjutant General for Air Timothy Lowenberg created Detachment 1 within the headquarters of the Washington Air National Guard, restructuring some of the functions previously performed by the OLBA. At the recommendation of Director of the Air National Guard Maj. Gen. Philip G. Killey, Lowenberg hired Col. Frank Scoggins out of the Air National Guard/Air Force Reserve Test Center in Tucson, Arizona to lead the new detachment in 1990, according to Scoggins. Scoggins was a former F-4 pilot with extensive combat experience in the Vietnam War.
“When Scoggins got on board, he was the kind of commander who looked for opportunities, and one of the opportunities was growing close air support,” said retired Brig. Gen. John Tuohy, then an officer in the 111th ASOC. A small Close Air Support detachment was formed on the McChord Field flight line, hosting visiting aircrews and helping with aircraft maintenance needs (for more information, see https://www.dvidshub.net/news/216360/close-air-support-detachment-operated-mcchord-25-years). With Air Force interest in growing close air support to Army units at Fort Lewis, plans came together for a new Air Guard F-16 mission at McChord Air Force Base, according to Scoggins.
Planning for the F-16 Wing came to a halt during the Gulf War when General Merrill McPeak became Chief of Staff of the Air Force and decided to place an active duty A-10 mission at McChord instead, said Scoggins.
Even so, the close air support mission remained and grew within the Washington Air National Guard. In 1992, the 111th gained a sister unit on Camp Murray when the 116th Air Support Operations Squadron was formed with a Tactical Air Control Party mission.
Meanwhile, the 252nd Combat Communications Group, with decades of Cold War service, faced an uncertain future by the end of the 1990s. “Combat Communications at the end of the Cold War no longer had the same mission,” said Scoggins. “The Air Force started talking about taking down some of their combat communications, because we were no longer set up to take our wings over to Europe to fight in the event of a big clash with the Soviet Union.”
“Coming out of the Cold War, the structure of large combat communications units didn’t make sense,” said Tuohy. “That’s not how we went to war.” At the same time, a new field of warfare was quickly emerging within the Air Force: cyberspace. Scoggins said that he became aware of the growing need for military specialization in the cyber arena, and key leaders at the national level asked Scoggins whether the Washington Air National Guard would be able to take on a network warfare mission.
Scoggins as well as Lowenberg knew that the Air Guard needed to make changes in a new era, and they knew that Washington could position itself for success in the realm of cyberspace operations, Tuohy said. “We had some open doors we could get into,” said Scoggins. “There was Gen. Richard Myers, who had been commander of the Pacific Air Forces and went to be the head of NORAD and the whole space mission. He listened to our briefing that we went forward with. Later, Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright, who was a good acquaintance of mine—we had flown a lot together—became the head of Air Intelligence Agency. We also went up and talked with the NSA folks, where we had some contacts. All of them were desperate for some help getting into the cyber field.”
Air Force and National Guard leaders welcomed Washington’s proposal for a network warfare unit. “It was not a hard sell, because we had something the Air Force needed, and Guard leadership was visionary enough to go along with that,” said Scoggins.
An expiration of the 262nd Combat Communications Squadron’s facility lease from the Port of Bellingham placed it first among combat communications units to convert to a new mission, said Scoggins.
Thus, the next big step in the Washington Air Guard’s evolution was the transition of the 262nd Combat Communications Squadron into an Information Warfare Aggressor Squadron in 2002. The transition from a combat communications mission to a cyberspace operations mission was “uncomfortable,” said Tuohy. The 262nd had been a fixture in Bellingham for almost four decades. “They were proud and had every reason to be,” said Scoggins. “They did their job very well.”
“They had the highest esprit de corps, always 100 percent manned, fully integrated into the community,” said Tuohy. “They were premier in their field. To take that flag down and say we’re closing it, we’re going to give people a chance to retire, relocate or leave, and we’ll come up with severance packages, Frank Scoggins brokered the deals at the Bureau and brokered them with the unit and he made it happen.”
According to Brig. Gen. Jill Lannan, then a lieutenant colonel who commanded the 262nd Information Warfare Aggressor Squadron from 2002 to 2007, Scoggins "saw the sunset missions in combat comm [and] knew we were ideally located to transition into Cyber.” As a preliminary step into the cyber field, Scoggins formed an Information Warfare Team led by Col. Robert Ezelle to “test the concept,” said Lannan.
The 262nd relocated to McChord Air Force Base. As it turned out, some members of the 262nd welcomed the change and stuck with their unit, said Tuohy. “They wanted something new to do and they knew that computers and cyber was the cutting edge,” he said.
Scoggins credited then-Lt. Col. Zonna Crayne, a Microsoft Corporation employee in her civilian work, with helping to recruit personnel out of Microsoft to fill drill-status positions in the re-missioned 262nd, and he said that then-Lt. Col. Jill Lannan “brought that squadron together and set things in motion for other things to follow.”
The 262nd remained part of the 252nd Combat Communications Group, but more changes lay ahead.
Proposing a new wing
While the 252nd Group and the air support operations units enjoyed relative autonomy without a Wing structure, there were also disadvantages and “missed opportunities,” according to Tuohy. “You have O6-level advocacy at a Wing level where commanders come together and start talking about issues, and if you’re not at the table with your Wing commander, you can get left out.”
“Information didn’t flow well throughout the organization,” said Brig. Gen. Gent Welsh, who was detachment commander of the 256th Combat Communications Squadron at Fairchild Air Force Base from 1997 to 2005, and then commander of the 242nd Combat Communications Squadron, also at Fairchild.
There were also consequences when it came to the Washington Air National Guard’s ability to secure resources at the level of the National Guard Bureau and the Department of Defense. “We were not organized like the rest of the Air Force and it was hard to get traction at the national level,” said Lannan.
To better organize the Washington Air National Guard, Scoggins developed a unique proposal to unify the 252nd, the air support operations units, and Detachment 1 into a wing structure. “I was an early advocate saying we have all the ingredients of a wing with operational missions,” said Scoggins. “It made no sense not to have a Wing structure when in fact we had people doing more operational things than many wings have around the Air National Guard.”
Scoggins had to persuade the National Guard Bureau to go along with his vision. “That was met with significant resistance at the Guard Bureau at the staff level, because they didn’t want to create any more units,” said Scoggins.
Reception to the proposal was further complicated by the fact that the proposed wing would not fly aircraft. “One of the biggest obstacles was getting NGB to buy into the fact that this non-flying wing could be a wing,” said Tuohy. “It didn’t run that way. All states had flying wings. They were like, ‘What are you flying?’ ‘Well we’re not flying anything.’ We have 1,000 airmen.” Scoggins argued that a wing could take on the basics of a wing structure including two groups with full operational missions, a medical group, and a mission support group, Tuohy recounted.
“We went through several iterations and multiple concepts of action of what this Wing should look like,” said Lannan.
When it came to finding a model for such a military organization, it was the Army rather than the Air Force that proved most useful. “We’re more like the Army’s troop command,” said Tuohy. “It was eclectic. Anything that didn’t fit elsewhere went into this army structure called a troop command.”
Beyond that, the Base Relocation and Closure process was underway, resulting in unit conversions and changes all over the country. It provided an opportunity for Scoggins to make his case to the NGB one more time. “There were other Air Force wings out there that were losing their airplanes, converting to some different missions – and they remained a wing, and I and others were back at the Pentagon saying, ‘Wait a minute, you have these wings that were losing airplanes, getting different missions, were smaller than Detachment 1, with less operational stuff going on than Detachment 1.’ The obvious answer was, ‘Why are they a Wing now and we’re not?’ That’s what ended up tipping the scales, maybe along with some personal relationships, with leadership seeing the light of what was happening.”
Tuohy credited Lowenberg and Scoggins with convincing the right leaders at the National Guard Bureau and the Air Force to go along with their proposal. “General Lowenberg could pull it off because of his incredible intellect, the way he was the TAG’s TAG,” said Tuohy. “And General Scoggins, who was the ultimate F4 Vietnam warrior, who knew all of the key players who were running the Air Force and running the Guard Bureau—he flew with them [in Vietnam]. They all shared that experience. The average general out of unit X, state Y couldn’t do it, but he could get stuff done. He had that magic touch.”
Standing up the 194th Regional Support Wing
In 2005, Scoggins called on Tuohy, then commander of the Washington National Guard Joint Force Headquarters, to become the first commander for the new wing.
There were financial and personnel challenges in starting the new wing, Tuohy recalled. The National Guard Bureau gave the go-ahead for the wing’s formation on the condition that it not draw any additional federal resources. Costs for a Wing headquarters had to come from existing resources. “As you can imagine, that also created some frustration for the units saying, ‘What does this mean?’” Tuohy said. “Well, it meant if we had unfunded positions or positions that were vacant because we don’t tend to fill them, we’re taking them. The next huge hurdle was getting manpower back at NGB to rewrite documents and to take positions away and add them to an actual Wing headquarters structure. That took time. The last hurdle was financial. They said you aren’t getting what you need, so you have to carve it out of your budget. That was partially done as well. Those were some of the early challenges of what it meant to stand up a wing from really nothing.” As a result, Tuohy had to carefully limit spending among units, he recalled.
One of the first things the Wing needed to develop was an emblem. “I remember the joy of our folks getting together” to work on a design concept, said Tuohy. Soon, the team presented Tuohy with a picture of a phoenix rising from ashes. Tuohy recognized that the figure fit the new wing well, he said. “I said, ‘That’s kind of what we are. We’ve taken this disparate group of disassociated units, brought us all together, and we’ve grown out of the ashes this new structure.’ The phoenix became the emblem of that transition and what we stood for.”
The Bureau assigned the wing as the 194th as well as a unique designation as a “Regional Support Wing.” “How they came up with Regional Support Wing—beyond me!” said Tuohy.
“That was an organization that didn’t really exist anywhere else in the Air Force at the time and left the Wing a bit vulnerable to relevance questions and cuts in the future,” said Welsh.
Activating the Wing
The 194th Regional Support Wing was officially activated on August 30, 2006.
Tuohy credited 252nd Combat Communications Group Commander Col. Mike Stewart with “doing a lot of heavy lifting to get things started” since he had experience with managing organizational finances and was able to bring that skillset into the new wing.
Tuohy tapped Lt. Col. Joe Walsh to be the first commander of the new 194th Air Support Operations Group, with Lt. Col. John Dowling as the first detachment commander. The ASOG took on the small 116th Weather Flight, located on McChord Air Force Base, as a third unit. Lannan stood up the 194th Mission Support Group. The existing Detachment 1 medical unit was transitioned into the 194th Medical Group. And a Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair unit (RED HORSE) came into the wing structure as the 248th Civil Engineer Flight.
Continuing the transition of combat communications units into the cyberspace mission, Tuohy repurposed the 60-year old 143rd Combat Communications Squadron into an information operations squadron and relocated it from Boeing Field to Camp Murray. The Wing was also able to create a new intelligence unit in the 194th Intelligence Squadron and repurpose the 256th Combat Communications Squadron into an intelligence squadron. The Wing was able to benefit from assignments like these “because of the good reputation we had for being able to take on new missions,” said Scoggins.
Tuohy said that units had to prioritize their budgets according to Wing priorities like safety and mission capability. Tuohy chaired the budget roundtable, but he said, “It was really those group commanders coming to the table as honest brokers and making the tough call, which they never had to do before, and they did it well. Once everybody got a chance to fight for what they thought was right and what they needed, it went fine.”
Forming a sense of Wing identity was a major priority for Tuohy as commander. “Being a big wing, we had more people than the 141st flying wing,” said Tuohy. “We got to realize we were a pretty large bunch. We had more squadron, we had a more diverse group headquarters, certainly more diverse units. Unity was a big message early on.” Tuohy convened group and squadron commanders for 6:00 a.m. meetings on drill Saturdays, “so we could get the message down about what we’re focusing on,” he said.
One way that 194th RSW Airmen came to understand their identity within the Wing was through training opportunities and transfer of personnel among units. “We started getting the TACP to swap people in and out with the 111th,” said Tuohy. “We would parlay that with the combat comm guys—we would take them out to the field because they could do combat com real well. Cyber was starting to grow, so they were doing a lot of aggressor warfare type stuff and looking at security vulnerabilities, both physical security as well as the cyber aspect. It was really kind of fun to have that shared vision of one team, one fight. We’re the most unusual bunch out there, very disparate, very different in a lot of ways, but in that difference we found a lot of common training opportunities that we leveraged, and it was really successful.”
Eventually, a sense of identity took shape among the Airmen of the new Wing, said Tuohy. People came to see that “we are a Wing, we’re going to train as a Wing, we’re going to leverage each other to our advantage, and we’re going to share resources at times.”
Wing members started new traditions, and Tuohy was a firm believer that “food and festivity” were keys to “bringing people together.” The Wing hosted an annual summer picnic and an annual holiday function with unit recognitions and a year in review slideshow and invited spouses to attend. “Those were fun and exciting days,” said Tuohy.
They were also days of intense deployment to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other overseas locations, especially for the ASOG. “Combat was ugly and it was constant,” said Tuohy. “And we had more than a few people deployed. Some of that was managing those expectations for families, making sure we had the family center set up– that people could reach out if there were issues with pay or religious type issues, they could have a structure to turn to.” When ASOG members came home highly decorated for their service in the Middle East, it “helped cement our image back at the Guard Bureau, for sure, and in the Air Force,” said Scoggins.
“Not going away”
Soon after its activation, the Wing dedicated a large new building on Camp Murray with space for multiple units and Wing staff. Scoggins recalled “the first time that we walked into the new building after it was complete. The Wing had a home.”
It took some time for the Wing emblem to appear on the wall of emblems at NGB. “When we’d go back to NGB, we’d go down the hall and see all these unit emblems up, and it would be like, ‘Where is the 194th?’ Tuohy recalled. “It took a while for them to finally realize I guess they’re not going away, they are the real deal, they’ve been around for a few years. To finally see the phoenix emblem for the 194th up on their wall really brought a smile to my face.”
Toward the end of his Wing command, Tuohy got a call from someone in the California Air National Guard asking for a copy of the 194th RSW manpower document as the California Guard assessed how they might start a similar wing. He gladly shared the document and offered his advice and fair warnings about the challenges of starting a non-flying Wing, he said. In 2015, the California Air National Guard brought together its military intelligence, space, cyberspace, and combat communications capabilities under the umbrella of the 195th Wing.
By that time, the Base Realignment and Closure process had resulted in the repurposing of three flying wings with non-flying intelligence missions. In 2008, the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s 102nd Fighter Wing, the Kansas Air National Guard’s 184th Air Refueling Wing, and the Indiana Air National Guard’s 181st Fighter Wing were redesignated as intelligence wings.
According to Tuohy, Scoggins “pioneered something that hadn’t been done.” In the end, the work paid off, said Lannan, who later became the wing’s commander and then the first woman general officer in the Washington Air National Guard. “Ultimately, we ended up with what we have today,” she said, “but it was a long journey with many changes and a lot of hard work!”
Looking back on the formation of the 194th Wing, Scoggins reflects, “I wanted to get a wing structure. I wanted to transition to some missions that were the future, instead of stuff that was starting to fade. But it has exceeded my wildest dreams due to the professionalism and can-do attitude of the people who took on the task of making it happen.”
| Date Taken: | 08.08.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 08.08.2021 15:21 |
| Story ID: | 402558 |
| Location: | CAMP MURRAY, WASHINGTON, US |
| Web Views: | 854 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, 194th Wing was Air Guard’s first non-flying wing in 2006, by Capt. Hans Zeiger, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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