US Air Force (USAF) A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jets operated from the dry bed of Rogers Lake in California. The training, held on 27/06, brought together four planes on the dry lake, which is part of the facilities at Edwards Air Force Base. This was one of the places used for the landing of the old Space Shuttles, retired in 2011.
The dry lake exercise is part of the implementation of the USAF's ACE (Agile Combat Employment) doctrine, where planes and their crews operate from locations with adverse conditions and in a dispersed manner.
For training, the 412th Operations Squadron at Edwards Air Force Base received four A-10C ground-attack jets, also called Warthogs, from the 355th Wing at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona. A small team from the 821st Contingency Response Squadron, Travis Air Force Base, California, also participated in the ACE exercise.
“ACE is the fastest way to get things done. You have an airfield manager who can and aircraft and talk to aircraft from the ground so you can have a 10, 15, 20 man crew doing the work of 100 or 150 men, with a much smaller footprint”, said Sergeant Jordan Whitworth of the 412th Squadron.
“So we can land on a lake bed or a flat area in the middle of nowhere, set up, start landing in a few hours and take off before anyone notices that we were there.”
Recently, A-10 planes also participated in another ACE training, landing and taking off from a road alongside other special operations planes.
Adverse threats to Air Force forward base operations can negate US power projection, overwhelm traditional defense doctrines, impose prohibitive losses, and lead to the failure of t missions. To address these challenges, ACE moves operations from centralized physical infrastructure to a network of smaller, dispersed sites or t bases.
The dry bed of Rogers Lake was the center of attention during training. The lake bed is Edwards AFB's most prominent natural landmark and, at approximately 168,3 square kilometers, is visible thousands of feet from the sky.
Dry lake hardened clay is capable of withstanding about 250 psi. In this way, the bed served as a runway for Special Buses and US experimental aircraft such as the Bell X-1, the first supersonic aircraft, and the hypersonic North American X-15, the fastest rocket aircraft in the world. Lake Rogers hosted 23 Space Shuttle landings.
Even so, the military assessed the conditions of the dry bed before the operation with the A-10C. “We landed the four A-10s from various approaches to that we have the ability to integrate with fighter and attack squadrons”, said Sergeant Denver Davis of the 821st Response Squadron.
“Edwards gives us the perfect opportunity to use a dry lake bed that is already being used for a test facility.. We can implement these concepts in a secure environment with nearby facilities.”
