521st CRS Airmen battle cold in PACIFIC DAGGER
Nearly 100 Airmen from the 521st Contingency Response Squadron practiced their airbase-opening mission during exercise PACIFIC DAGGER at Westover Air Reserve Base, Mass., Feb. 4-8, 2025.
Many historic American military operations in the Pacific were set on steaming jungle islands, but the US Indo-Pacific Command Area of Responsibility includes some cold and snowy places. PACIFIC DAGGER, an exercise designed to test skills needed in an INDOPACOM contingency scenario, included a new desired learning objective for the 521st CRS "Hydras": cold weather operations. The Westover's 439th Airlift Wing "Dogpatch" training area hosted tents, generators, a forklift, and bundled-up Airmen.
"Our mission is simple, but complex. It's to rapidly assess, open, operate, sustain, and defend expeditionary airfields and aerial ports. And the reason we're out here today is we're putting the Hydras through a pretty tough expeditionary test," said Lt. Col. Ryan Frost, commander of the squadron. "We put the whole Contingency Response Element through these cold-weather paces while dealing with difficult force protection condition change injects and chemical and biological attack injects. And our airmen did the test."
PACIFIC DAGGER was the first time the 521st CRS Senior Enlisted Leader, Chief Master Sgt. Mark Erwin, saw a Contingency Response Element in action. "The rate at which people accomplish their tasks, some of which were not inherent to their own Air Force Specialty, that's what really impressed me. We have some professionals in certain AFSC's that are knocking out some technical tasks, but they need extra hands of people pitching in. They looked for the task at hand, and everybody got after it. It was really cool to watch."
Contingency Response Airmen routinely practice responding to chemical & biological threats as well as armed opposing forces. In the wooded winterscape at Westover, the Hydras found themselves scraping freezing rain off their gas masks and knocking ice from their weapons before they could engage the enemy during a firefight.
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Tech. Sgt. David Cope, security forces assessor with the 621st Contingency Response Group, observed and coached the exercise participants. "Any exercise is valuable to be able to practice the 'hub-and-spoke' situation, coordinating with other squadrons to employ real-time intelligence updates. However, the weather puts many of us in a completely new situation. The cold and ice impacts everything from tent zippers to how we operate our generators. The team found out how important toe warmers are, and that [chemical, biological, and radiological] protective clothing also helps protect from the cold."
"When you don't operate in the cold, there are things you don't know," said Erwin. "Coming out here, we're learning and getting that experience, so if we have to deploy somewhere cold, we've got lessons learned to overcome problems. That way we can focus on whatever new problems occur whenever they come up."
