Air Combat Command in the “near future” will demonstrate the ability to rapidly deploy personnel recovery airmen and assets abroad, similar to its recently developed capability to rapidly deploy combat aircraft, ACC boss Gen. Hawk Carlisle said Monday at ASC15. ACC’s personnel recovery airmen are a “low density/high demand” community that has been constantly deployed to support operations in Central Command, Carlisle said. To respond to this need, ACC is developing a way to use mobility aircraft such as C-17s and C-5s to carry personnel recovery assets, such as HH-60G Pave Hawks, to a forward deployed base on short notice. The goal is to be able to forward deploy personnel recovery airmen in a matter of hours, not weeks, Carlisle said. The demonstration is based on the Rapid Raptor package, which was developed in 2013 in Pacific Air Forces, where a group of F-22s and a C-17 with equipment could forward deploy Raptors on short notice. This model was demonstrated in the Pacific, and just recently was used to deploy Raptors to Eastern Europe as part of a theater security package.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III chaired a China-focused military briefing Oct. 27, part of a biweekly series of briefings with senior military commanders about China’s growing threat in the wake of an orbital hypersonic weapon test that elicited public worries from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “What we…