Page 40 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2022

40 DEFENCE BUSINESS PITCH BLACK 2022
NOVEMBER 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
with such a variety of mission sets, and doing that all at the same time. Other platforms might need significant configu- ration changes before they can go and tackle different mis- sion sets, whereas this aircraft can do suppression of enemy air defence (SEAD) concurrently with air-to-air missions. There isn’t an aircraft I would rather be flying, it's the most capable jet out there at the moment.”
The USMC F-35Bs were from Marine Air Group 12 (MAG-12), normally based at MCAS Iwakuni in Japan. However, immediately prior to Pitch Black 2022 they exer- cised what Corps refers to as Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) - in this instance, the EABO concept used Tindal as the main base and the RAAF’s bare base at Curtin near Derby in northern WA as its forward deployed (or advanced) base.
“The hub was Tindal in this example, where we float in the headquarters element and all of our forces initially, and
ABOVE: An Indian Air Force Sukhoi Su-30MKI launches from Darwin on a Pitch Black 2022 air combat mission
LEFT: Pitch Black 2022 was the first in the biennial series of air combat exercises to include the F-35 Lightning II
then we executed a spoke operation out to Curtin - which is out in Western Australia, about 800 miles away,” explained Lieutenant Colonel Richard Behrmann, MAG-12’s Opera- tions Officer. “We also had robust reach back to our home base in Iwakuni and what that did is it forced us to develop a Primary Alternate Contingency and Emergency (PACE) plan for communications. That’s actually one of the things we're the most proud of; that we were able to use that ro- bust PACE plan and exercise high frequency radio to trans- mit both data, as well as voice, satellite communication systems, fibre, and a variety of other capabilities that truly embraced the EABO concept.”
The EABO concept itself is still being developed by the Corps - and will continue to evolve into the future - but the Curtin operation was the most comprehensive test so far.
“I can say that this is by far the most robust and in-depth evolution that we've done exercising EABO, and the after- action report that we do is going to have a lot of recommen- dations,” LTCOL Behrmann added.
“Although we have been constantly communicating the reflections that we got out of the EABO exercise before Pitch Black, this was in execution a Marine Corps-only pe- riod of training for us. That said, we did share our concepts with Australia and Singapore (the latter a future operator of the F-35B).” ■
NIGEL PITTAWAY
NIGEL PITTAWAY