Photo By Staff Sgt. Tryphena Mayhugh | Master Sgt. LeTrice-Autumn Tate, 22nd Force Support Squadron career development...... read more read more
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MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, Kan. – This June, the 22nd Force Support Squadron implemented a new weeklong professional development course called Foundations that culminates with a unique learning experience for its participants – a war board game called Kingfish ACE.
The wargame was created by Col. Troy Pierce, 715th Air Mobility Operations Group commander, while he was attending the Marine Corps War College at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. He named it after the callsign given to the Tactical Airlift Control Elements when successfully opening airfields dating back to Vietnam.
Chief Master Sgt. Laura Hoover, former 22nd Air Refueling Wing command chief, played the game during her Chief Leadership Course and saw the potential for McConnell Airmen. She reached out to anyone at McConnell who had ever played and found Tech. Sgt. Ryder Nush, 22nd Logistics Readiness Squadron logistics planner, who had experienced Kingfish ACE last year during the Rapid Global Mobility Course (RGMC) at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey.
“[She] was asking anyone who has attended that course to come together and develop this game and bring it to McConnell to make a local version,” said Nush, who is now the Kingfish ACE game master for the wing. “We contacted the instructors from [RGMC] to help us establish it, what their advice was on tweaking the rules and their overall advice to get us started, especially the little tips and tricks they’ve learned along the way to develop their own game.”
Kingfish ACE was created as an educational board game focused on exploring agile combat employment concepts to achieve mission generation within complex expeditionary environments while utilizing multiple learning styles, such as visual, auditory and kinesthetic.
Contestants have to successfully hit adversarial targets while defending their assets, which includes setting up forward operating bases (FOB) and contingency locations (CL), mission planning, and palletization to move cargo and other assets.
“We got rid of a lot of things that overcomplicated it so we could concentrate it onto what we could accomplish [in one afternoon],” Nush said. “Also, adding the tanker aspect and what that adds to bouncing around the Pacific Air Forces area of responsibility.”
At the start of the game, the class is divided into four-person teams and a captain is selected, an opportunity the instructors sometimes use to help a quiet student come out of their shell, said Master Sgt. Ismael Diaz, 22nd Force Support Squadron wing development advisor. The teams then roll a die ranging from one to three to determine their operational capabilities, one being the least amount and three the most.
“Let’s say for maintenance personnel, if you roll a one, you might be getting a small maintenance team, but if you roll a three, you get all the support,” Diaz said. “As you roll the dice, you want that person with the hot hand. If they’re rolling ones, swap them out.”
Once the teams have determined their capabilities, it’s time to mission plan. With the landscape of the Great Power Competition shifting, the size of the Pacific Ocean and tyranny of distance make this a vital skill for the students to learn.
“The biggest thing I think people learn is the aircraft limitations for how to load plan,” Nush said. “You can’t just all of the sudden pick everything up from one base and it magically gets to the destination. That it takes a lot of planning to figure out what’s needed at the location, what can actually fit and what the travel limitations are for those aircraft.”
Each team receives two C-130J Super Hercules, two C-17 Globemaster IIIs, one C-5 Galaxy, eight fighter aircraft and 12 bombs. While the C-130s and C-17s can land anywhere, the C-5s are limited due to their size, which is indicated on the map with red dots. An aim of Kingfish ACE is to showcase how the ACE maneuvers are critical to generating combat power and surviving within threat timelines.
“They have to be in that mindset to utilize all of their resources,” Diaz said. “I have played myself, and for some reason we just stuck with our C-17s and kept using them, until someone was like, ‘Why don’t we use our other aircraft?’ It is very easy to go down that rabbit hole and not see the bigger picture, because we introduce a bunch of different stress levels during the game.”
One of those stress levels is time constraint. The game is broken into 12 time blocks with the first five lasting 10 minutes and the final seven dropping down to five. If the game has progressed quickly enough and the players are enjoying themselves, sometimes the instructors will continue to 15 rounds.
“The time, we’ve gone back and forth between having that displayed or not displayed, but we think it introduces more friendly stress if they don’t see the time and we yell it out, and it puts them in a little bit of a panic mode,” Diaz said.
Once the players attack from their main operating base, FOB or CL, that installation is attacked at the end of the next round and is no longer functional, so they have to plan where their aircraft can land after their mission is complete. The gameplay helps to bridge between theory and dynamic real-world decisions, allowing the participants to see the consequences of their actions.
“They just need to know what to be prepared for, especially with what’s going on in the world today in the military,” said Tech. Sgt. Leilanie Kenley, 22nd FSS noncommissioned officer in charge of professional development.
The instructors encourage creative problem-solving during the game, and students are allowed to present various scenarios, such as air refueling or dropping a massive ordnance air blast bomb.
“If they don’t have any more fighter aircraft, but they have a couple bombs left over, can they drop one out of a C-130 or C-17?” Diaz said. “Absolutely. And we will continue to give them points for that until they have utilized all their aircraft. The only thing we won’t allow is a kamikaze. Nush calls this the ‘secret menu,’ and if they come up with those ideas, we’ll give them the points.”
The first iteration of Kingfish ACE at McConnell was a struggle for the instructors, since it was also new to them as well. But with each class they became more proficient and thought of new ideas on how to improve the gameplay.
“The first one, everyone was a little green into it,” Diaz said. “We were on edge, and I didn’t like this because I didn’t know, I was a little confused, and I hate not being the expert. We have leaps and bounds of learning that we have done with every course, and it’s more for the students.”
“Feedback is very critical,” he continued. “We felt like something was missing, and that was the feedback we got from the students. Then Nush [decided to add fighters], and as soon as we did that, it turned 100% and they loved it. As soon as the first team gets that first kill, everyone wants to get in on that. They loved that they were now going on the offense and attacking. What we’re doing actually means something.”
There are three tiers to the Foundations course, one for junior enlisted, noncommissioned officers (NCO) and senior NCOs (SNCO), that is tailored to their level. Before the game, the junior enlisted go over the Air Force mission and mission command, while the NCOs focus on strategic priorities and joint, interagency, intergovernmental and multinational environments. For the SNCOs, they have to put together a mission-type order briefing, which communicates a commander’s intent and overall goals for a mission.
“It being all three tiers, it’s fun to see how each tier comes at the game,” Nush said. “Airmen following the rules, kind of being timid at first, but finally growing out of their limitations and asking those questions if they can call for a tanker to get to this location. NCOs are that good middle, they have experience, they start figuring it out, those are a lot of fun. The SNCOs, they start asking all of the questions and sometimes they get a little too complicated with what they’re doing and stretch things a little too much.”
If the instructors see that one team is catching on too quickly, they can step in and prevent them from moving too far ahead of their opponents.
“If we see a team advancing too quickly, we’ll throw a risk card at them,” Diaz said. “That will either hinder their aircraft, or they’ll lose aircraft, people, munitions, fighters, all that kind of stuff, to allow the other teams time to come together.”
On the last day of class, Diaz hammers home the importance of having an ACE mindset when he tells the story of a short tasking he had while working in maintenance. The equipment provided at the location wasn’t suited for refueling C-17s, taking 12 hours per aircraft and causing them to drop missions. That was, until someone had the idea to rent a fuel truck from a nearby airport.
“It’s the out-of-the-box thinking that sets us up for success,” he said. “Do I have all the assets that I need, do I have all the tools, the people, the security, anything I need to make the mission happen? I think that is laying the foundation with Kingfish ACE.”
The first step in the Air Force Force Generation (AFFORGEN) model is to prepare, and that is what the Foundations course and Kingfish ACE strives to do for McConnell Airmen.
“The last day we hit them with mission readiness,” Kenley said. “We talk about AFFORGEN, we talk about ACE and all those concepts, and that’s when we started dropping little hints, like you guys should remember this, we’re going to be playing the game tomorrow. I think it ties in at the very end, and they really do enjoy having that fun aspect while they’re still learning and applying what they did in class.”
The professional development center recently completed its seventh iteration of Foundations and the Kingfish ACE game, with the final class of 2024 scheduled for Dec. 16-20. Starting January 1, 2025, the course will be a prerequisite for Airmen, NCOs and SNCOs before they attend their respective professional development education classes.
“Nush has been so key and critical to the development, we couldn’t have done it without him,” Diaz said. “I can’t give him enough credit with what he has done, and he’s evolved it to really fit McConnell’s mission to help them grow and get them ready for what we do here. Not just in the Air Force, but here specifically at McConnell. He really brings it home for Kingfish ACE.”
With each new iteration, the 22nd FSS professional development team hones Kingfish ACE to provide a tool that builds critical thinking and fosters a mission mindset while increasing education, highlighting consequences of decisions and using multiple learning styles to prepare McConnell Airmen for the future.
| Date Taken: | 12.06.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 12.16.2024 10:51 |
| Story ID: | 487201 |
| Location: | MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, KANSAS, US |
| Web Views: | 45 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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