POPE ARMY AIRFIELD, N.C. —
POPE ARMY AIRFIELD, N.C- As the new calendar year begins, 43rd Air Mobility Operations Group Airmen conducted the first quarterly Battalion Mas Tactical Week (BMTW) of the year from Jan. 26 to Feb. 1, 2025. BMTW 25-02 was a week-long joint exercise between the U.S Air Force and U.S. Army. BMTW allows real-world skills to be practiced in a controlled environment.
Mobility exercises such as BMTWs serve as a training maneuver which helps ensure and recertify the readiness of Airmen in the Air Force Force Generation (AFFORGEN) deployment model. AFFORGEN is a 24-month rotational cycle broken down into four phases that are six months each.
The four cycles are: prepare, ready, available to commit and reset. Prepare is where Airmen complete full spectrum training to improve readiness and training to develop joint interoperability among deploying entities. Ready is where Airmen go to certification events and maintain peak readiness. Available to commit is where rotational deployments that are fully prepared to deploy can do so. Reset is where basic unit training and modernization take place.
Units from across the Air Force come to Pope for BMTWs due to it being a great tool for the prepare phase of AFFORGEN. BMTW 25-02 contained 13 ground trainings including wet wing defueling, combat offloading and outsize cargo loading. These ground training events are married with the flight hours and joint operations with the Army and keeps more than 200 tasked Air Force participants lethal and maintain joint interoperability.
Maj. Michael Totty, 49th Combat Training Squadron assistant director of operations, and director of BMTW, said “BMTW is to give them (participants) reps during their certification event, and then to go on to use those in real-world operation.”
BMTW is part of a larger picture in the Air Force. The former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., implemented AFFORGEN to play a part of “Accelerate Change or Lose.” BMTW plays into the early stages of change. Totty explained, BMTW gives units the opportunity to complete desired learning objectives from Air Mobility Command (AMC). BMTW can be a crawl or walk phase for the learning objectives of AMC to be taken to larger exercises and real-world applications.
BMTW happens multiple times a year. As units go to the next phase of AFFORGEN, different units join Airmen of the 43rd AMOG for BMTWs. Twelve aircraft and their crews were a part of BMTW 25-02 to take the final step of the prepare phase with the 43rd AMOG. Continuing in the infinite cycle of rapid global mobility in a Great Power Competition environment, Airmen from Pope and participating units will take the lessons learned to the next step.
