ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam -- The 621st Contingency Response Group arrived at Andersen Air Base, Guam, July 1, 2023, for Air Mobility Command’s Mobility Guardian 23 exercise.
MG23 allows Airmen from across Air Mobility Command to enhance readiness alongside six Allies and partners through testing agile combat employment, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief capabilities in contested, degraded, and operationally limited environments spanning over 3,000 miles.
“The greatest benefit of this exercise is working alongside coalition partners, and the integration is phenomenal,” said Col Daniel Mollis, 621st CRG commander.
From the moment Airmen arrived at Andersen, ensuring the base was prepared to receive more Airmen and coalition partners, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Japan and New Zealand, was the top priority.
“We immediately began integrating with our allies and partners to understand their flight schedules and how they operate so we could partner with them to ensure success,” said Mollis. “Over the next few days, we continued to receive forces with the population of the forward operating base doubling almost every day.”
In addition to flight schedules and flight line operations, different countries were able to integrate to bolster capabilities for MG23.
Airmen honed their readiness skills and enhanced interoperability in operationally limited environments alongside allies and partners in mission sets including airlift, aerial refueling, aeromedical refueling, aeromedical evacuation, air mobility support through the Global Air Mobility Support Mission and Global Command and Control.
“Some of our coalition partners beat us here or arrived first as we were setting up operations,” said Mollis. “The interoperability from the time that they hit the ground was amazing. We integrated New Zealand Air Force porters into our port teams, and they are alongside the U.S. Air Force downloading and uploading aircraft. Also, for the first time, the 621st CRG executed an engine running onload of a British A400.”
The 621st CRG, based out of Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, is responsible for training and rapidly deploying personnel to open airfields and establish, expand, sustain, and coordinate air mobility operations. From wartime taskings to disaster relief, the 621st extends AMC’s reach in deploying people and equipment around the globe until expeditionary forces arrive and establish command operations.