ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam -- The 354th Fighter Wing stood up as the 354th Air Expeditionary Wing (AEW) during exercise Resolute Force Pacific (REFORPAC) 2025 from July 10 - August 8, 2025.
The intent of the exercise was to enhance interoperability between Allied and partnered multi-national air forces while working in Agile Combat Employment (ACE) conditions, relying on the launching, recovering, and maintaining aircraft from dispersed locations throughout the Indo-Pacific.
“Interoperability is key to any joint and coalition operations. That's what makes the 354th AEW such an effective combat unit. We are able to integrate with our allies, partners, and the joint force nearly seamlessly as we share common systems and tactics,” said U.S. Air Force Col. Matthew “Scout” Johnston, 354th AEW commander. “All our jets share information, our pilots speak the same tactical language, and we know how to operate together. Nearly every day our F-35 pilots are flying with the E-3 airborne warning and control system, F-18G Growler which is a great jamming and suppression platform, along with F-22s, F-16s, and other assets.”
Operations utilizing ACE require a higher degree of interoperability in the critical activities of command and control, engineering, logistics, base defense, intelligence-sharing, and other functional areas that precede and follow the delivery of fires. This is where the 355th Fighter Squadron, or for REFORPAC, the 355th Mission Generation Force Element (MGFE) comes into play.
“I’ve really enjoyed stepping outside my normal role as a fighter squadron commander,” said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Erik “Speedy” Gonsalves, 355th MGFE commander. “As the commander for the 355 MGFE I now have all the supporting functions like personnel, security forces, maintenance, civil engineering, and communications under my command. That allows me to emphasize their contributions to and the importance of the generation and execution of our Air Tasking Order missions because we get everyone on the same page with the same objective, which is to generate air power, fly ATO missions, recover jets, and generate them again.”
Pilots with the 354th AEW utilized the F-35A Lightning II’s fifth-generation advanced sensor suite and weapons to simulate suppressing enemy air defenses and conducting offensive counter-air missions.
“The F-35 is critical to our national defense strategy and to what we're doing out here in this exercise,” Gonsalves said. “The F-35 is unique in the sense that it does a variety of different mission sets very well. Monday will be a defensive counter air day, Tuesday we're doing offensive counter air, Wednesday we're doing Maritime Strike, Thursday we're doing defensive counter air again. The ability for us to flex between different mission sets opens options for the Combined Forces Air Component Commander to task us with any mission set with confidence that we can go out there and execute effectively.”
According to Gonsalves, flying missions in the exercise are unique because once a pilot flies out of Guam they are looking at much smaller, remote, and austere airfields.
“Flying out of a remote place like Guam is critical to building confidence in our skill sets as combat ready flight leads or wingmen,” Gonsalves said. “It’s confidence building for all of us when we go out and fly 700 miles over the Pacific Ocean, meet a tanker at a point in space at a specific time down to the second, then execute the mission on time, and subsequently fly the 700 miles back, all while picking around thunderstorms and adverse weather. That puts a lot of critical decision making in the hands of these young fighter pilots that are out there ultimately increasing their overall airmanship and making us a more ready and lethal force.”
By working closely with joint forces and Allies and partners, exercise REFORPAC was designed to deliver Air Force capabilities to the Indo-Pacific region and demonstrate the ability to command and control agile combat employment operations across more than six time zones.
“I think any time we're operating in the Second Island Chain it is very reflective of where we may have to operate in major combat operations in the Pacific,” said Johnston. “It's a challenging place to operate from but if you can operate effectively here, you really can operate anywhere in the world.”