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The Royal Canadian Air Force’s Air Expeditionary Wing (AEW) 1401 has been launched into its year-long period of high readiness.
The 2 Expeditionary Readiness Centre (2 ERC) from 2 Wing Bagotville, Quebec, facilitated the final exercise that confirmed the AEW’s high readiness during Exercise Maple Resolve 1401 held in Cold Lake, Alta., in May 2014.
Exercise Maple Resolve 1401 was the Canadian Armed Forces’ largest annual exercise; it prepared and confirmed the RCAF and Canadian Army’s task forces for high readiness.
“The 2 ERC’s role in this exercise is ‘observer, controller and trainer’ (OCT),” said Lieutenant-Colonel Martin Houle, 2 ERC’s commanding officer and the lead OCT for the air component of Maple Resolve in Cold Lake.
“We facilitated the training activities of the Air Expeditionary Wing, with the intent of helping achieve their goal: to be ready to deploy and support essential air operations nearly anywhere in the world when called upon by the Government of Canada.”
The OCT organization comprised 13 air expeditionary experts from the 2 ERC, one from 2 Air Expeditionary Squadron at Bagotville, one from the Deployment Readiness Training and Standards Evaluation Team, located at 8 Wing Trenton, and a coordinator from the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre, located at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright, Alberta.
“As ‘observers’ we monitored what was happening during the exercise and made recommendations to the wing on what good practices should be sustained and also helped them identify areas of improvement,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Houle.
“As ‘controllers’ we assist exercise controllers to focus the scenario on the training objectives, and as ‘trainers’ we shared with the primary training audience the knowledge that the 2 ERC has acquired throughout the years.”
One of the new concepts that was assessed during the exercise involved integrating a force protection company from the Canadian Army – with the employment of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Regiment as auxiliary defence force – into the AEW.
“We’ve observed a lot of positive things to sustain and took notes of areas to work on,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Houle.
Providing the OCT support to Maple Resolve is just one of the many functions of the 2 ERC. As a readiness centre of the Royal Canadian Air Force, they develop standard operating procedures and contribute to developing the Air Force’s expeditionary capability doctrine.
“We do our utmost to capture the best practices and lessons learned over the years concerning the expeditionary capability of the RCAF and have that information published and available to everyone in the RCAF,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Houle.
The 2 ERC, a beneficiary of the Air Force Expeditionary Capability project, works closely with the Canadian Forces Aerospace Warfare Centre at Trenton to capture the lessons learned in the development and employment of RCAF’s expeditionary capability. The 2 ERC also provides individual and collective training for all 2 Wing’s units.
