Air Force Special Tactics has a number of different missions, including helping to seize airfields, conducting reconnaissance, providing combat medicine, conducting personnel recovery operations, and even doing tactical weather forecasting. Many of these capabilities were recently exercised during Emerald Warrior this August, during a five-day event held on and around the island of St. Croix.
"Our Airmen exercised their unique skillsets to parachute into contested territory, establish airfield operations, control aircraft, respond to search-and-rescue scenarios, manage notional medical evacuations, and conduct reconnaissance and targeting operations on a very tight timeline," explained an unnamed Special Tactics officer in a military press release.
The first part of the exercise involved six Special Tactics airmen parachuting into the ocean with an inflatable boat, while an additional 11 teammates jumped onto a nearby airfield. They combined forces to assault and seize the airfield for follow-on operations.
During another training mission, the airmen had to travel 75 nautical miles across open ocean to recon an adjacent island occupied by a simulated military adversary. After that, there were two scenarios that tested the unit's search and rescue capabilities. "This was a particularly demanding scenario designed to test both the rescue capabilities and the survival skills of our Airmen on the open ocean," one of the exercise planners commented.
During the 32-hour-long exercise, the Special Tactics airmen searched the ocean for survivors of a simulated plane crash in the ocean. Once they were located, the airmen parachuted into the ocean, and helped to have them hoisted up into and rescued by helicopters.
This latest Emerald Warrior exercise had been in the planning phase for a full year running up to its execution in August.