From the AFT:
“The Air Force evacuated
124,000 people from Afghanistan, but its work still isn’t done”
(U.S. Air Force Capt. Shelby
Chapman, 86th Airlift Wing Public Affairs Mission Partner Support chief,
comforts a child at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, Sept. 7, 2021. Chapman leads
the community engagement team for Operation Allies Refuge.)
When the last American C-17 transport jet went
wheels-up on the final departure out of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International
Airport Aug. 30. America’s longest war culminated with the largest humanitarian
airlift evacuation of civilians ever led by the U.S. But the work is far from
over. The U.S. Air Force is now pivoting from orchestrating the massive exodus
of over 124,000 Afghans and Americans from a country once again under Taliban
rule, to a quieter role helping even more people leave on commercial and
privately organized flights. Airmen are also working through other next steps
of a frantic aid effort: caring for themselves and their aircraft after a
traumatic month, treating illness and delivering babies among the refugees,
distributing aid for basic needs, and running multiple vaccination campaigns. “It
was a relief to see [landing] gear in the well on the last airplane,” Air
Mobility Command boss Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost told reporters at the Air Force
Association’s annual Air, Space, Cyber conference here. “But it also had a
moment of, ‘OK, this was this event. There’s more to do.’ We have a lot of
refugees in the pipeline. … We’ve got to continue.” Lined up on the runway at
the Kabul airport Monday night were the five last C-17s to leave the country
after a chaotic and deadly airlift evacuation that marked the end of America’s
involvement in the Afghanistan war.
Nearly 800 civilian and military
aircraft from more than 30 nations carried travelers to safety between Aug.
14-30, according to AMC. More than 500 crews on over 250 Air Force mobility
aircraft took part in the evacuation, including about 110 of the Air Force’s
enormous C-17s. As Operation Allies Refuge began Aug. 14, the number of C-17s
at the Kabul airport rose nearly eight-fold, from six to 46 airframes, in just
two days. On a typical day, the Air Force has nearly 70 C-17s dispatched around
the globe. During the Kabul evacuation, the service sent 60 Globemasters into
U.S. Central Command and U.S. European Command alone — and averaged 113 per day
at the height of the operation. They ferried people from Afghanistan to Al
Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, and several other
locations before arriving at Ramstein Air Base in Germany and then the United
States. Refueling tanker; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance;
strike; and command and control aircraft assisted along the way. “Al Udeid, Ali
Al Salem and Ramstein are three of the four busiest military airfields in
CENTCOM and [U.S. European Command],” AMC said. “What we did was the equivalent
of increasing passenger and aircraft flow at our nation’s three busiest
airports by 200-600 percent (think pre-COVID holiday travel levels) for three
weeks.”
Evacuation was a multistep
process: Refugees would get off one plane in Qatar, for instance, before
hopping onto another one to continue their journey to Germany and then to the
U.S. — more than 8,000 miles in total. Those distances meant longer-than-usual
days on duty for airmen. Despite that, airmen sought permission to forgo rest
and keep working, said Brig. Gen. Daniel DeVoe, who runs the Tanker Airlift
Control Center at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. Military aircraft took off
from Kabul once every 34 minutes; maintainers at Al Udeid and Ali Al Salem
serviced and repaired aircraft even as the summer heat spiked to about 115
degrees Fahrenheit. “I expected more aircraft to break than did,” DeVoe said.
“That is a testament to those maintainers and the work that they could do to
keep those aircraft flying.” Now the pace has slowed, allowing airmen to settle
into more predictable routines helping the refugees temporarily housed at their
bases. The Air Force is ramping up C-5 Galaxy operations and calling on more
civilian and commercial flights so its C-17 Globemaster III crews and airframes
can recharge. “We want to make sure we tidy up the airplanes and get them the
service that they need and get the crews the rest and recovery and, frankly,
the additional training on other missions that they weren’t focused on,” Van
Ovost said. Commercial U.S. aircraft had handled more than 420 flights during
and after the formal airlift operation as of Sept. 13, two weeks after
America’s involvement there ended Aug. 30, the Air Force said. That included
200 flights headed to the United States, about 190 within the U.S. and around
30 to Ramstein.
U.S. Air Force airmen taking part
in Operation Allies Refuge at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, have worked around
the clock to ensure evacuees have medical service, food, water and shelter
before they depart for the United States. Airlines either volunteered for those
missions or participated under the Civil Reserve Air Fleet program, which let
the Pentagon call on 18 planes from six airlines — American Airlines, Atlas
Air, Delta Airlines, Omni Air, Hawaiian Airlines and United Airlines — to ferry
evacuees between and within countries en route to their final destinations. Other
airlines have joined in, such as Afghanistan’s Kam Air, which flew a group of
about 400 refugees, including 114 American citizens, legal permanent residents
and Afghan citizens from Mazar-i-Sharif in Northern Afghanistan to Doha, Qatarm
Sept. 17. Airmen at Ramstein converted one of their hangars, AMC’s largest
outside of the continental U.S., into a makeshift international terminal with
nine gates for remaining Americans, permanent U.S. residents, Special Immigrant
Visa applicants and holders, and their families.
Troops have become airport
staffers, checking that passengers and luggage are safe, caring for and feeding
more than 25,000 passengers, and working with onsite staffers from the
Departments of State and Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, Transportation
Security Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It’s unclear
how much longer that effort will continue or how many people are still trying
to leave the country. “Our lily pads are still engaged right now,” Van Ovost
said. “There will be some sort of drawdown, but there will be an ability,
working with [the] Department of State, to process additional personnel, just
like we would with any other nation.” Meanwhile, airmen have returned home from
the trauma of watching tens of thousands of people scramble for their lives
amid Taliban obstruction and Islamic State suicide bombers who attacked the
airport. A federal investigation into human remains that were discovered in the
wheel well of a C-17 mobbed by desperate Afghans is still underway. “The most
important thing for us was to take care of the crew and ensure that they had
the support services necessary at Al Udeid to be able to process what happened,
get interviewed, and the most important thing for them was to get back into the
fight,” Van Ovost said. Commanders have offered programs to help returning
airmen decompress and encouraged them to take advantage of initiatives like
True North, which embeds mental health professionals and religious support
teams into units. Col. Adrienne Williams, commander of the 521st Air Mobility
Operations Wing at Germany’s Ramstein Air Base, said the wing’s welfare
director went to Al Udeid to personally check in on airmen on the flightline. “At
the height, we had 46 C-17s on the ramp, and [maintainers] were out there
turning the jets to make sure that they could get into [Hamid Karzai
International Airport],” Williams said. “She was on the line with them and
basically looking in their eyes, making sure that they were OK. It was amazing
that they were, and that they knew what impact they were making for saving all
these lives.”
^ The Air Force (as well as the
other Branches of the US Military) have worked tirelessly for over a month to evacuate
American Citizens, Western Citizens and Afghan Citizens out of Afghanistan and
then to process, feed, house and care for everyone. Biden created the chaos and
death and the US Air Force (and other Branches) have had to burden everything
else. ^
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