U.S. Air Africa (AFAFRICA), along with the Kenyan Air Force, hosts the 9th annual African Air Chief’s Symposium (AACS) in Nairobi, Kenya, August 26-29th 2019. More than 40 Air Force delegates from 38 partner nations are participating in the event. This year’s AACS includes a variety of engagement opportunities for participating nations to identify key challenges confronting African Air Chief’s, strengthen partner networks, discuss inter-operable policies and procedures for personnel recovery and share best practices for enhancing partner capabilities.

Transcript

Yes, my name is Major Eric Anchor, I am from the Massachusetts Air National Guard, here working in UsAFE Air Forces Africa, to help conduct the African Partnership Flight in Kenya. Today we had a panel for the African Partnership Flight, to allow the various African Air Chiefs from across the continent, who are here attending the African Air Chief’s Symposium, to ask questions about the African Partnership Flight, and personnel recovery, which is what this particular African Partnership Flight was about. This panel about the African Partnership Flight in Kenya, was an opportunity for the different Air Chiefs from around the continent to ask questions that are particular to their environments, and their forces, and their inventories, and their operations, and their needs. So every different African nation would have different goals for an African Partnership Flight. This African Partnership Flight in Kenya, was about personnel recovery because that is what the Kenyans wanted to work on. We allow each nation to have their own objectives for an African Partnership Flight, so this allowed them to give us information about what their needs might be, and also see that we can meet those needs through an African Partnership Flight. As much as the African Partnership Flight is about capabilities and sharing knowledge, it’s also about building strong relationships with and between the African partner nations. So them being able to share here in this panel with their different requirement software and APF, allows them to communicate with us what they need, but also communicate with each other what they need. And so that’s how we kinda get from them, we want to encourage them to do an African Partnership Flight, and we want them to know that we can shape it towards what they need to do. Other African Partnership Flights have focused on safety, and various operations that take place in the military. So it’s not limited to personnel recovery, that’s what the Kenyans wanted to work on, and any nation that wants to have a Partnership Flight, can shape it to meet their needs, their terrain, their personnel, their forces. Yeah so Brigadier Omenda is the base commander of the Laikipia Air Base, which is where the African Partnership Flight was held, we built a tent schoolhouse, and had a round-robin class schedule, where everybody took every single course, and they all surrounded personnel recovery. Colonel Ongadi was also a coordinator, he was a coordinator. So Brigadier Omenda was the host, and helped us planned some of the big events, and Colonel Ongadi allowed us to have access to the base, and access to other various logistical pieces within the Kenyan Air Force. The complexity of conducting tactical military operations on the continent is vast. There are several different kinds of terrains, all the different nations have different forces, different capabilities. There were questions asked during the panel today, about operating during the day versus during at night. These are all things that have to be taken into consideration, when you’re trying to conduct tactical military operations, and what this African Air Chief’s Symposium, and that African Partnership panel allowed us to do is just another attempt to kinda get everything out in front of us. So that we can see all these crazy moving parts: military working with civilians, civilian and military communications working together, civilian and military rescue operations working together, setting up rescue centers that are complex and have multiple people from multiple agencies in them to keep them going. There’s a lot of complexity in dealing, and there’s a lot complexity in working and conducting operations on the African continent, and so trying to get all of that out in front of both the US and all the other African nations is a challenge, and that’s what something like this symposium and this panel allowed us to do today.