By Ken Pole | April 11, 2013 Estimated reading time 9 minutes, 37 seconds.
The Royal Canadian Air Force officer who headed up the aviation element of the latest Rim of the Pacific Exercise considers RIMPAC a huge learning experience for all 22 participating countries. Every two years, at the invitation of the United States Navy, the armed forces of an increasing number of countries congregate around Hawaii to strut their stuff. It’s effectively as close to actual combat as it gets.
Canada and Australia have been involved with the U.S. since the first RIMPAC in 1971, but the latest exercise saw non-U.S. officers in key command positions for the first time. Mike Hood, a Brigadier General when he oversaw the Combined Forces Air Component Command at RIMPAC 2012, has since been promoted to Major General and named Deputy Commander of the RCAF. He also has been appointed Director of Staff within the Strategic Joint Staff, which determines training requirements and priorities for all commands within the Canadian Armed Forces.
Every time we go to an exercise like this, we embed people who do nothing but capture lessons learned, Hood explained during an exclusive Canadian Skies interview. Whether it’s tactics, techniques or procedures that need to be amended . . . we analyze them and they’ll come into the training feedback. That’s always going on.
Hood received his Air Combat Systems Officer wings in 1988 and spent most of his flying career on Lockheed Martin CC-130 Hercules in tactical airlift roles, including commanding 8 Wing Trenton. He acknowledged that how we do things today differs significantly from when I started flying. Aircraft and systems and technologies have evolved — and aircrew training with them.
Some 1,400 Canadians were among the 25,000 personnel who participated in the 23rd RIMPAC, which involved more than 200 aircraft, 42 surface ships and six submarines, as well as land forces. Vice-Admiral Gerald Beaman, commander of the U.S. Third Fleet, based in San Diego, Calif., had overarching command. Hood’s naval counterpart was Commodore Stu Mayer of the Royal Australian Navy.
The opportunity to work in a very large coalition . . . confirmed to us some of the challenges that we face in coalitions and why we value opportunities such as RIMPAC, Hood said. We will all have made personal relationships, having experiences with officers from any one of those 22 countries, so that the next time that we’re called upon to go and operate, we’ll have a benchmark from operating together.
The world’s largest maritime exercise, RIMPAC offers an environment which sharply contrasts with the high-altitude experiences the RCAF has had in Afghanistan or during desert operations in the Middle East.
There are some things that can’t be replicated any other way, Hood said. We do accomplish smaller portions in regular exercises we’ll have, mostly with the U.S. Navy, but to have that level of complexity all tied up in its own package is unique.
Canada’s presence at RIMPAC included a Victoria-class submarine, two ships with Sikorsky CH-124 Sea King helicopters, seven Boeing CF-188 Hornets, four recently-upgraded Lockheed Martin CP-140 Aurora long-range surveillance platforms, and two tankers — an Airbus CC-150 Polaris and a CC-130 — which were available throughout the exercise to all participants requiring air-to-air refuelling.
As for the Hornets, Hood said that by rotating crews throughout the five exercises, the RCAF was able to augment high readiness training for several squadrons. The beauty of RIMPAC is the ˜crawl, walk, run’ phase. You get an opportunity to practise every facet of the role of the fighter. In addition to dropping various ordnance, the Canadians were able to go up against General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcons and Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors deployed by the U.S. Air Force, and Boeing FF/A-18 Hornets operating from the U.S. Navy nuclear carrier Nimitz.
Given Canadians’ excellence in various international top gun competitions, it begged the question of how well they did at RIMPAC. Hood hesitated when asked, eventually saying that while individual squadrons may keep score, it wouldn’t be a fair assessment because the first group of RCAF pilots were new to their squadrons, fresh from operational training.
We weren’t sending, in all cases, our top-line guys, he said. We were trying to get everyone experience.
Reticence aside, he did say that they did themselves proud. Among other things, they flew one-on-one and four-on-four sorties. That gives pilots a pretty good workout, leading up to the higher end parts of the exercise, where we bring in electronic warfare and more complex scenarios. That included ship protection, and escorting USAF Boeing C-17 Globemasters doing air drops and Boeing B-52 bombers doing mine-laying.
The mission load was such that all Canadian air assets were flying simultaneously many times during RIMPAC. They weren’t always working as uniquely Canadian; it was a coalition, combined forces, Hood said. As a component commander, I had about 230 odd aircraft at any one time but there is no doubt in my mind that all the Canadians would have been involved in certain scenarios, particularly at the end of the exercise when we were really at the high end, the last four days of essentially free-play warfighting. The training . . . is second to none in the world for what it can offer.
Besides the three original RIMPAC participants, the latest exercise involved Chile, Colombia, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Tonga and the United Kingdom.
Asked whether there was any friction because of command structures and cultural differences, he acknowledged that any time you have a staff and you’re in a very high-end environment, friction was inevitable, but it was just one more challenge to address. I had roughly 160 people in the combined operations centre and only half were Canadians, with a big group of Americans and a mélange of other nationalities, he said. I had American colonels working for me who treated me no differently from a U.S. one-star (general). That’s a real strength.
While it’s obviously early to be discussing RIMPAC 2014, which is still more than a year away, Hood expects it will be even better and will remain an important pillar in the readiness of the RCAF as it moves into the future. It was such a professionally rewarding experience that I would go back in any capacity . . . but I’m sure that’s not in the cards, he said with a grin.
As a Canadian, having the opportunity to command an air element in an extremely complex and large exercise is a unique opportunity and is certainly a highlight of my career to this point.
