I am a combat engineer officer assigned to Marine Wing Support Squadron 273, Marine Air Control Group 28, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. Our squadron has an important mission in support of Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations and Distributed Maritime Operations.
Our squadron mission is to “provide limited aviation ground support to enable a composite Marine Aircraft Group [MAG] and supporting or attached elements of the Marine Air Control Group to conduct expeditionary operations.”
MWSS 273 conducts provides six main six activities of aviation ground support to the MAG. We’re charged with establishing and supporting contingency airfields through forward aviation combat engineering; conducting airfield operations; establishing forward arming and refueling points; and conducting airfield damage repair and aircraft salvage and recovery after attack.
We train with allies and partners. Last year we exercised with the Finnish Coastal Forces and Swedish Marines in their respective archipelagos. Their extreme littoral operating environments provided us with a challenging and realistic environment to establish small units distributed among the many rocky islands along the coastline of the Baltic Sea to practice delivering logistics in a contested environment.
For example, as part of Exercise Archipelago Endeavor 2024, we operated from the Swedish Naval Base at Berga and established a Forward Arming and Refueling Point (FARP). Our FARP was established to permit rotary winged aircraft to receive fuel and return to the frontlines instead of traveling to the rear, allowing our aircraft to stay in the fight. If needed, we could configure out FARP to also support fixed wing aircraft, vehicles and watercraft as appropriate.
For AE 24, our FARP included a fuel expert and fuelers, air controllers, a comms specialist, a two-person crash crew, a range safety officer and leadership. Our FARP is scalable, so we only bring what we need. We can tailor the size of the team and the equipment we bring to the mission. One of our objectives on this deployment was to see how best to assign personnel, and see just how limited our teams can be and still complete the job safely. Because we were not delivering ordnance at AE 24, for example, we didn’t need ammo handlers.
While operating in the Baltic Sea region, we were very much aware of our proximity to Russia’s naval bases at St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad. But we could easily picture ourselves operating in the Indo-PACOM area of operations, where our skills and DMO capabilities would be just as vital.