Coming Soon to Air Force Basic Training: Mock Airfields Complete with F-16, C-130s

Second Air Force officials plan to inject more realism in Basic Military Training this year by building two mock airfields where Airmen will get hands-on training with real combat aircraft.

By October, BMT officials at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas, hope to complete the first airbase training range outfitted with a mock concrete runway, two C-130 Hercules Aircraft, and an F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft, they told Air & Space Forces Magazine. Trainees will practice basic airfield support skills such as arming and refueling aircraft, repairing bomb-damaged runways, and loading casualties into a cargo aircraft for evacuation.

A second, more expeditionary airbase training range that features dirt airstrips and possibly additional aircraft is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year. It will be designed to add a new level of realism for Airmen going through PACER FORGE, the final field exercise introduced in 2022 that simulates operations at makeshift airbases that trainees might experience conducting agile combat employment operations.

The effort is part of the next phase of the 2nd Air Force’s sweeping transformation of basic training. The new phase, known as BMT 3.0, is scheduled to begin in April and follows on the launch of BMT 2.0 last October, which added more physical fitness training and an emphasis on teaching young Airmen how to operate in small teams to keep an air base operational during a war with a peer adversary such as China. BMT 3.0 will add additional training curriculum but mainly will focus on creating a realistic training environment to convert trainees into multi-capable Airmen, 2nd Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Wolfe Davidson told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

“This is about providing that basic context of what it takes to sustain airpower; we call it DOGS—defend, operate, generate, and sustain airpower,” Davidson said. “That is the basic concept of how Airmen fight from an airfield.”

In BMT 2.0, “we started with going to smaller teams, trying to do more practical events, less classroom work,” Davidson added. “Those practical events will only increase with 3.0 … but some of those events, you can’t do until you actually get the training range; you can’t actually put bombs on an airplane unless you have an airplane.”

A large portion of the $30 million investment, spread between the fiscal 2025 and 2026 defense budgets, will go toward building a training range that resembles a permanent airbase that’s a little larger than a football field on Lackland located near the drill pads where BMT is conducted, Davidson said.

“We are moving really fast to put this thing up, but we have a longer-term plan which would be a military construction effort to formalize that base and make it more permanent, about twice as large and have more training environments,” Davidson said, adding that he doesn’t anticipate the long-term effort “going over $100 million,” a funding request that he hopes put into a fiscal 2028 request.

The permanent airbase training range will be outfitted with an F-16 and two C-130s that were being used to train maintainers at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, said Maj. Chris Sweeney, director of logistics, infrastructure, and force protection for the 2nd Air Force. These low-functioning aircraft are on “their third life,” he said.

“Their flying days are over,” Sweeney said. “They’ve been transferred for training purposes for us to use.”

The F-16 will be the first to arrive in April along with two containerized training modules that will be used for familiarizing Airmen with how to arm a fighter aircraft, Sweeney said. “The armament stations and the F-16 are the proof-of-concept for us to get some of the bugs worked out of the curriculum, to get the instructors some repetitions, and then also to get that excitement spread throughout the Air Force that we’re doing something we’ve never done.”

Construction of the short concrete runway, electrical work, and the rest of the tarmac will begin in the May-June timeframe before the two C-130s and the rest of the training stations arrive in late summer, Sweeney said.

The plan is to have 16 containerized training stations on the permanent mock airbase that train eight key tasks:

Arming fighter aircraft
Refueling
Casualty transfer and evacuation
Cargo loading
Post-attack and repair
Aircraft marshaling
Aircraft familiarization
Airbase entry control

“We’ll have two of every station to maximize how many students we can push through,” Sweeney said. “These are meant to be 45-minute familiarization sessions. The point is that we will evaluate them on those soft skills like teamwork, interpersonal communication, delegation, feedback, and analysis.”

Trainees will get hands-on experience loading inert AIM-9 missiles on the F-16’s wingtips, Sweeney said, adding that they will also be able to load the “under-wing rocket pods with with the individual rockets, and then load the chaff and flare buckets on the sides of the aircraft.”

The fueling stations will feature a weighted hose, so Airmen get the feel of dragging a heavy hose over to the aircraft and attaching it with a universal coupling adapter, Sweeney said.

For the post-attack and repair station, Airmen will assess simulated bomb damage to the runway and go through the steps of patch it.

“Our plan for that is to have mats that roll out over the concrete that have different damage printed on the mats,” Sweeney said. “Then they’ll go back to the container and based on what they assess, they will go with their guidebook of this is what we observed, these are the items we need, and they’ll retrieve those items.”

One option is to have Airmen use Air Force AM2 Matting, a ruggedized Lego-like system that clips together and provides a hard shell over the ground, meant to distribute the weight, Sweeney said.

“If you think in the crawl, walk, run aspect—this is the walk, because they’ve gotten the crawl as a small lecture,” Sweeney said, adding that the run portion will take place at the expeditionary airbase training range during PACER FORGE “where it’s a multi-day scenario, and … that post-attack repair will involve filling in holes with a mixture and it’ll be far more intensive.”

Currently, the simulated airbase at PACER FORGE consists of some hard structures that allow Airmen to practice skills such as perimeter defense. The new expeditionary airbase training range will have two dirt assault strips, but 2nd Air Force officials have not decided on the type of aircraft that would be out at the site. Trainees will leave the fixed-airbase approach and “they’ll go to a dirt, expeditionary-type environment,” Davidson said.

“We call this going from the drill pad to the airfield, meaning you’ll come into BMT and you start out on the drill pad, just like all the services do, but … then you need to transition to apply them to the Air Force mission of generating airpower,” Davidson said. “We don’t have those training environments yet. That’s what we’re transitioning to as we develop those environments here over the next year.”

Even as Airmen go onto learn their Air Force specialty, the training they receive at these new airbase training ranges will instill an “understanding that ‘hey, I’m an Airman, and I am tied to the mission because I know what we do in the Air Force. I know how we defend, operate, generate and sustain air power, and I accept my role in the execution of that mission.”