Tyndall Air Force Base Hurricane Michael Recovery Industry Day #3: Tyndall State of the Installation

Briefed by: Col. Brian Laidlaw, 325th Fighter Wing Commander

Industry Day is a collaborative effort where senior military and business leaders come together to discuss innovations and the future of Tyndall Air Force Base and the impact to the community. We realize there is no better way to rebuild Tyndall AFB without a partnership that includes both the local community and Industry. This is our third Industry Day in what we hope will be a series of exchanges to help identify innovative ways to move forward as we rebuild Tyndall together. On behalf of the Air Force we are pleased that you have taken time away from your busy schedules to assist us with the rebuild at one of the Air Force’s most important bases in its inventory.

Industry Day was held at Florida State University – Panama City’s Holley Academic Center, Panama City, Florida

Transcript

And now it’s time for our first presentation. I’d like to welcome Colonel Brian Laidlaw, 325th Fighter Wing Commander at Tyndall Air Force Base. Colonel Laidlaw actually rode out the hurricane on Tyndall Air Force Base that day, on October 10, 2018, and has been leading the massive recovery effort that began the next day. Welcome Colonel Laidlaw. (audience applauds)

Thanks Don, and thanks everyone for being here. Great video, by the way. The folks who put that together from our PMO office, I think that does a real good job of kicking off a lot of what we’ve done over the last year and a lot of what we hope to accomplish here in the future. So I’d like to start by saying on behalf of the more than 4,000 men and women who call Tyndall Air Force Base home, thank you in advance, all of you who came here today, showing an interest in being a part of our team. I’d like to give you an update on where we are today and highlight a few strategic advantages we enjoy on this soon-to-be 80-year-old installation. Over the last 10 months, our Airmen have implemented countless innovative temporary fixes to bring missions back online, consistent with our secretary’s guidance. By the numbers, as you heard in the video that we just played, today at Tyndall we’re doing nearly all of our pre-storm missions. We’re doing it with about 80% of our people and we’re doing it in only half of our facilities, because that’s all that survived the storm. As we repair the buildings still standing then rebuild the facilities we’ve lost, we have an opportunity to get it right. Our message is simple. The base is strategically important, and we have an opportunity in the next few years to rebuild not the disparate base that we had, but a resilient, integrated, and efficient base that we need for the future. Our Airmen are doing their missions for now, but they’re doing so with temporary solutions that simply will not last forever. And that is why we need your help. Go ahead and go to the next slide, please. So this is the reason we are here. As everyone knows, Bay County, Florida took a direct hit from Hurricane Michael on the 10th of October, 2018. As you can see in the picture behind me, the 15 mile wide eye passed directly over the base. At landfall, we had 484 buildings on base. The storm destroyed half of them. The other half are in varying degrees of disrepair and need to be fixed. Today, we’re gonna show you how we plan to fix them. But before we do that, I would like to tell you just a little bit about why. Why are we going to do it? Go to the next slide, please. Tyndall is a strategically important base to our nation’s national defense. As you heard in the video, it sits on 29,000 acres, and I think those 29,000 acres have unlimited future growth potential. As our missions have grown throughout our history and will continue to grow in the future, we must ensure compatible growth with our surrounding community. We do not have the encroachment challenges that some other bases have. Our first protection from encroachment is the land itself. Of those 29,000 acres, 70% of them are uninhabited, and we maintain them in their natural state. Our second layer of protection is our 129 miles of coastline and our water boundaries on three sides. The third layer of protection, as you heard from Mr. Neubauer, is a fiercely protective local community who is committed to working together toward mutually beneficial, long-term solutions. As you can see in the picture behind me, one of the things that makes Tyndall unique are our three distinct runway environments, none of which are in close proximity to any heavily populated areas. The first runway complex, which is on your left, back behind me, is where we conduct the majority of our manned flight operations. The middle runway complex, as you move towards Mexico Beach, is our drone runway. That is where we launch all of our remotely piloted aircraft. One of the things that makes that airstrip unique is we can launch remotely piloted aircraft off of that runway and fly them directly into our vast range complex, which is right along our southern border. At no point in time do those aircraft ever leave military controlled, restricted airspace. The third of our three runway environments is the one you see to the far right, the one closest to Mexico Beach. That’s our Silver Flag complex. Now we don’t fly aircraft off of that runway. Instead, our civil engineers, they detonate live munitions on that runway to see how quickly they can repair them as they practice their tactics, their techniques, and their procedures before they deploy downrange to fight our nation’s wars. So our geography is unique, and it is a significant mission enabler, but it’s not our only mission enabler. Please go to the next slide. The ranges that surround Tyndall Air Force Base are simply some of the best ranges anywhere in the Department of Defense. We have protected overland ranges to the north and to the east. That’s where we conduct all of our Air Control Squadron Air Battle Manager schoolhouse training sorties, and a good number of our fighter sorties as well. To the south, we have overwater ranges that extend all the way to Key West, if needed. These ranges are protected by congressional moratorium east of the military mission line, depicted in the picture on the bottom right of the chart, as you look at it from your seat. Both the Air Force and the Navy routinely use this range for long-range testing of our munitions and will continue to do so into the future. This vast range enables our Combat Archer exercise which is where the Air Force does, it’s air-to-air missile shots. Tyndall’s geography also enables the unique Checkered Flag exercise, which is a high-end fourth and fifth generation fighter integration effort. Tyndall is depicted by the star that you see in the chart on the top left. It is geographically situated right in the middle of a lotta key bases where we bring fighters and tankers from all over the southeast to join us for this large exercise. We commonly fly fighters in from places like New Orleans to the west, Jacksonville to the east, Montgomery to the north, Fort Walton Beach also to our west. Tankers fly up from Tampa. If you look on the map, which is up here, right in the middle of all of those cities sits the star. And that’s Tyndall Air Force Base. So when we do these large exercises, all of those aircraft can fly from their home station and meet off the coast of Tyndall in that tremendous range complex that we have. That makes Tyndall the perfect, centrally located air base to host unique and important exercises like that that are key to the readiness of our nation’s Air Force. So yes, Tyndall is strategically important. Please go to the next slide. But this is the exciting part, and this is why we’re here. Let’s talk a little bit about Tyndall’s future. As you’ve heard many times before, the Air Force intends to bed down up to three squadrons of F-35’s at Tyndall starting in 2023. F-35’s are the aircraft you see in the top left of this chart. Additionally, Tyndall remains the preferred alternative as the future home of 24 MQ-9 remotely piloted aircraft. Those are the aircraft in the bottom left behind me. Our community support is another strategic advantage that sets Tyndall apart. And we have the hardware to prove it. As Mister Neubauer alluded to earlier, but I think he sold himself short ’cause this was a pretty big accomplishment, the Association of Defense Communities named Bay County as one of five members of its 2019 class of Great American Defense Communities. Communities like Bay County do not win awards of this magnitude by having just one good year. This award, I would contend, was 80 years in the making, and marks the tremendous relationship that we have. Just last month, local officials welcomed the Office of Economic Adjustment to Bay County and kicked off a joint land use study, or as we call it, a JLUSE. This JLUSE will protect both the base and the local community and ensure compatible long-term growth, both on and off the base. The state of Florida is part of our plan as well. The state of Florida will break ground soon on an overpass project to connect the north and the south sides of our base for the first time ever. This level of proactive local support, combined with the base’s unique geometry and ranges, are strategic advantages, and they are the key to our future. These are just some of the reasons why we are committed to rebuilding what Hurricane Michael destroyed. Please go to the next slide. So I’m gonna finish with this slide. The Fighter Wing and our mission partners on base met or exceeded all of the Secretary of the Air Force’s mission restoration timelines. For example, Secretary Wilson told us to have F-22’s flying over the Gulf of Mexico prior to Thanksgiving, about a month after the storm. We did. The Secretary of the Air Force told us to restart our F-22 training program as quickly as possible. We did. In fact, we are flying more F-22 sorties today, per week today, than we were prior to the storm. We do all of our operational flights out of Eglin, just down to the west, where we have about 2/3 of our maintainers. On Tyndall, we conduct 100% of all of our simulators, all of our F-22 academics, and all of our deep stealth maintenance, which is a requirement for these aircraft. As you work your way through the pictures, the second one you see there is RED HORSE, our RED HORSE Det 1. RED HORSE is home to the Air Force’s unique Silver Flag training site. From this training site, this year, our RED HORSE cadre intend to graduate more than 3,000 students for our Combat Air Forces. Moving left to right, the WEG, or the Weapons Evaluation Group. They are home to the Air Force’s Weapon System Evaluation Program. They fly a mix of manned and unmanned F-16’s, as you see depicted in the picture behind me, and they conduct all the Air Force’s air-to-air and air-to-grounds weapons testing. The next picture is AFCEC, the Air Force Civil Engineering Center. They oversee the Air Force’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal, Fire, and Emergency Management programs. AFCEC conducts research and development for our Air Force’s civil engineers and also for the Department of Homeland Security. They are home to the Air Force’s Airfield Pavement Evaluation Team, which is currently on the ground in the Bahamas. Next we have 1st Air Force and the 601st AOC. They are home to America’s Air Operations Center. In this building on the base, they conduct theater security cooperation programs with Canada, Mexico, and the Bahamas. They’re home to the Air Force’s Rescue Coordination Center, which directly contributed to saving 550 lives last year. From that America’s Air Operations Center on Tyndall our Airmen conduct 24/7 command and control for the more than 3,000 homeland defense sorties that we launch across the country every single year. Lastly, you have the ACS, or the Air Control Squadron, the 337th. They’re home to the Air Force’s only Air Battle Manager schoolhouse. They’ve increased their graduate numbers by 200% in the last two years, because our Air Force depends on them to do that, and our Combat Air Forces need those controllers. So yes, we are getting the mission done. We’re getting the mission done with a mix of permanent and temporary solutions. Those are some of the pictures you see along the bottom of the chart. The storm destroyed all but three of the 11 dorms that we had on base. You can see in the background, in the picture right behind me, one of those dorms. If you look closely, you’ll notice that that dorm is missing half of its roof. That forced us to send Airmen to live in the tents, that’s what’s in the foreground of the picture. That was our initial temporary solution. I’m happy to report that we do not have any Airmen living in tents today. Instead, those Airmen have moved into their intermediate solution, which are these pictures back over here on the bottom left-hand corner. These are the modular, temporary living quarters where our Airmen will live for the next several years until we have the opportunity to rebuild the dorms that we lost. If you drive around Tyndall Air Force Base today, you’re gonna see temporary roofs and sprung shelters all over our base. So yes, we are doing nearly all of our missions, and yes, we’re doing it with about 80% of our people. But we’re doing it in only half of our facilities. Our Airmen are resilient and they are getting the job done, but our temporary solutions are just that. They are temporary. Our partners in the PMO are gonna show you how we intend to transition from short-term fixes to permanent solutions. So as the installation commander, and on behalf of all of the men and women who call Tyndall Air Force Base home, thank you. Sincerely. Thank you for coming today and listening. I personally look forward to welcoming all of you to be a part of our team. Thank you very much. (audience applauds)