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Travis Airmen's readiness tested during exercise Crisis Look

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Charles Rivezzo
  • 60th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  Members of all three wings at Travis Air Force Base, California, participated in exercise Crisis Look 16-01 from Feb. 1 to 6 as part of an effort to assess the installation's ability to deploy a large body of personnel on short notice.

Crisis Look was designed to evaluate the level of compliance with and success in executing the Installation Deployment Plan, according to wing inspectors.

"The IDP is the installation's guideline for deploying Airmen when called upon to support combatant commanders around the world," said Maj. Virgil Steele, 60th Air Mobility Wing deputy inspector general. "In this inspection, we evaluated the multitude of agency actions necessary to prepare and deploy our Airmen with little notice."

As the western seaboard's mobility hub, Travis' mission is to be prepared for any type of contingency and to project rapid global mobility on a moment's notice, a skill set tested during Crisis Look.

Throughout the weeklong exercise, the installation processed more than 500 personnel and more than 500 short tons of cargo for deployment, utilizing 10 aircraft to load cargo and personnel onto.

"Deployments of this size combined with short timelines are rare," Steele said. "But it's important that we stress our resources and Airmen at an appropriate level in order to evaluate our effectiveness to provide mobility ready deployers to the (combatant commands)."

To ensure the realism of the exercise, two separate scenarios were played out simultaneously to mimic each wing's distinct mission set.

The 60th Air Mobility Wing and 349th Air Mobility Wing scenario was focused on tasking Airmen - postured for a real-world deployment in the near future - to the Air Force Central Command area of responsibility, which mirrors the type of deployments mobility air forces has engaged in for the past decade.

Meanwhile, the 621st Contingency Response Wing's scenario was fashioned around a no-notice deployment tasking to multiple locations, a cornerstone capability that their alert forces execute on a continuous basis.

In addition to evaluating the installation's ability to successfully execute the specified scenarios, wing inspectors also focused on identifying areas of improvement and noted that continuous process improvement is the overarching goal of these types of exercises.

"These inspections are an opportunity for our wing to critically analyze our processes in a stressful environment," Steele said. "Regardless of how well-written a base plan may be, it's only when Airmen have to act in a stressful and demanding environment that the plan gets truly tested and improvements can be made.

"These inspections aid in validating the effectiveness of our plans and provide an opportunity to assess ourselves and improve our overall level of compliance."

Although the formal inspector general report is still pending, Steele said they discovered many opportunities in which the installation can improve its deployment process.

"There's always room for improvement," he said. "The corrective action plans we develop today will aid the installation in preparing the next IDP."