Photo By Senior Airman Anneliese Kaiser | U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Taivion Coston, crew chief assigned to the 74th...... read more read more
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Operation Agile Spartan is a biannual exercise held in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, pulling a small team of Airmen from various agencies of a main operating base and sending them to austere locations to stage operations.
Operation Agile Spartan highlights the U.S. Air Force's readiness to execute and generate decentralized combat airpower anywhere, anytime.
“The exercise started back at our main operating base with the movement of cargo and personnel,” said Capt. John Flannigan, 74th Fighter Squadron pilot and detachment commander for one forward location. “We arrived at our forward-deployed location and we set up operations to include structures, communications capabilities, and maintenance operations to start accepting aircraft.”
The A-10 Thunderbolt II is ideal for Agile Combat Employment due to its ability to land anywhere and its streamlined serviceability needs.
“If we can’t land at our primary base we can land anywhere else,” said an A-10 pilot assigned to the operation. “Whatever base support services that they want to push forward, we can operate out of anywhere. If we have all of our assets centralized it makes it easier for the enemy to target, versus if we have multiple locations that we operate under a smaller presence, and that makes us less of an ideal target and more of a diverse and spread out target.”
Diversifying the target area and protecting important defense assets is the big picture mission of Agile Spartan.
“The A-10s’ role in ACE is focused on being able to continuously provide air support in times when we can’t be co-located with the main operating base,” Flannigan said. “By forward deploying and running the operations from a contingency-supported location, we are able to continue generating sorties to provide combat airpower across the AOR.”
A variety of Airmen from maintenance, weapons, communications, civil engineering, operations, logistics, intel, fuels, fire crash reduction and more were employed to train together in support of ACE.
“The camaraderie built in this small group of people all working to get the same task done is like no other,” said Senior Airman Taivion Coston, 74th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron crew chief. “It’s very rewarding knowing that the hours of training we put into this exercise are going to support the real world missions.”
Building up and tearing down operations in the span of a week can be challenging, yet teams were employed to quickly generate air power to prepare for the fight should it be real world.
“This was a good opportunity for folks to see how this process all fits together in generating air power and to execute the mission as a whole,” Flannigan said. “It’s taken a lot of teamwork across multiple base agencies to make this a success and we were able to work through the challenges and figure out the best way to overcome them.”
| Date Taken: | 02.02.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 02.07.2025 12:11 |
| Story ID: | 490327 |
| Location: | (UNDISCLOSED LOCATION) |
| Web Views: | 138 |
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This work, Agile Spartan brings the thunder, employing A-10 Thunderbolt II, by SrA Anneliese Kaiser, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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