Photo By Mary Andom | A participant votes on key components of exercise planning during the 2024 African...... read more read more
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Twelve African partner nations participated in the 2024 African Partnership Flight co-hosted by the Tunisian air force and U.S. Air Forces Africa, July 15-19 in Tunis, Tunisia.
The African Partnership Flight is a biannual force development, educational, and interoperability workshop to help strengthen U.S. strategic partnerships by sharing ideas to enhance regional cooperation and interoperability.
The APF is an opportunity to open dialogue to develop multilateral coordination on the continent, enhance intra-theatre military capacity, and interoperability, said Col. Kristin M. Cullinan, Association of African Air Forces secretary general.
“This week has been a building block to foster meaningful collaboration among African partner nations,” said Cullinan. “The African Partnership Flight is a vehicle to advance the AAAF and related partners toward operationalization.”
The engagement was conducted with members of the Association of African Air Forces, a voluntary, non-political organization focusing on collaborative, multilateral engagements to promote African-led air power solutions among 29 African member nations in collaboration with the United States Air Force.
During the 2024 African Air Chiefs Symposium, AAAF members voted to implement the AAAF exercise series, a tactical means by which the Association operationalizes its goals of developing each African Air Force capacity, capability, and interoperability.
“As an African-led organization, AAAF is striving to be innovative, proactive, and taking initiative in identifying and seizing opportunities that will help the association grow to greater heights through effective operationalization,” said Col. Wingstone Nyika, Zambia Air Force AAAF co-secretary general.
Utilizing a three-year exercise cycle, a tabletop exercise will be executed in 2025 to solidify strategies, followed by a flying exercise in 2026. This exercise series will focus on response to a Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief scenario.
Airmen assigned to the 818th Mobility Support Advisory Squadron laid the groundwork for the APF by introducing HA/DR concepts to facilitate conversations among African air forces on cross-continental lessons learned.
“The APF has been very fruitful for me because the association has been in existence for a while and the goals seemed so far away,” said Lt Col. Dorcas Badu-Yeboah, AAAF Liaison Officer from the Ghana Air Force. “Through varying opinions and different perspectives of participants, this week we now have a clearer scope, a unified purpose, and defined objectives to work with to operationalize the Association.”
Subject matter experts from the USAF and TAF leveraged real-world HA/DR examples to discuss the importance of airspace deconfliction, medical response and airfield security.
For 1st Lt. Safwen Rabaoui, a TAF Joint Terminal Attack Controller operator, the APF provided valuable insight on the exercise planning process from generation to execution.
“This is my first time attending an African Partnership Flight and it has been very beneficial to share experiences and knowledge with other African Air Forces,” said Rabaoui. “It is important to have interoperability.
This means training together, using resources efficiently and implementing collective solutions, so when a disaster does happen, we can save lives together.”
The following nations participated in the APF: Botswana, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Madagascar, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, United States and Zambia.
| Date Taken: | 08.05.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 08.09.2024 07:00 |
| Story ID: | 478059 |
| Location: | TUNIS, TN |
| Web Views: | 55 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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