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127th Wing deploys to Exercise Spartan

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Chelsea E. FitzPatrick
  • 127th Wing Public Affairs

More than 700 members of the 127th Wing, based at Selfridge Air National Guard Base, are participating in a large-scale readiness exercise beginning this week, traveling north to the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center here, in support of Exercise Spartan.

“Exercise Spartan is our opportunity to practice our warfighting excellence,” said Brig. Gen. Rolf E. Mammen, 127th Wing and Selfridge Air National Guard Base commander. “This is what we are training every day to accomplish.

Spanning over two weeks and executed in multiple phases, the first of which includes personnel deployment out-processing, troop and equipment movement from home station to Alpena CRTC. The second phase is notionally executing combat operations in a contested, degraded and operationally-limited environment and the third will return everyone back to homestation.

“This is a big deal, where we’re going to be executing combat capability, not only under the eyes of our own local inspector general’s office, but the Air Combat Command and Air Mobility Command’s inspector generals will be here as well to observe our operation from start to finish,” Mammen said.

Where the first priority is executing combat capability, the second priority for members participating in Exercise Spartan, is to learn. According to Mammen, the point isn’t to execute without making mistakes, but to learn from those mistakes for the future.

“I do not expect perfection, in fact, I anticipate we will make mistakes along the way,” Mammen said. “But the key there is that we learn from those mistakes and make it better each time.”

The final objective for Exercise Spartan is that everyone practices safety particularly in hot weather.

“We’re going to be working hard and these are going to be some long days,” said Chief Master Sgt. Richard Gordon. “We want to look after ourselves and our Wingmen.”

After the exercise is complete, all inspector general team members inspecting the exercise will complete and submit reports, grading the 127th Wing unit as a whole, providing insight for further training focus.