Don't Put the Air Wing in One Basket: What Agile Combat Employment Demands of Airfield Master Planners

 

By Nathaniel Pyron

Field notes

I'm Nathaniel Pyron, a military urban planner specializing in military master planning with an airport and airfield focus. Most of the master plans I work on assume a central fact: the aircraft live here, the mission lives here, the plan is about making "here" work. A strategy the Air Force has been maturing for years is now quietly rewriting that assumption — and with it, a lot of what I draw on the site plan.

It's called Agile Combat Employment — ACE for short. The idea is plain: stop concentrating the air wing on a handful of big bases and start spreading it across many smaller, dispersed locations, so no adversary can knock out a wing with a single strike. Pacific Air Forces has been integrating ACE elements into most training exercises across the Asia-Pacific for the past several years. For planners, the consequence is just as plain: the master plan's unit of design is no longer one big installation. It's a network of airfields, some of them barely airfields at all.

From main operating base to hub-and-spoke

The classic airfield master plan is a deep dive into one installation: runway, aprons, hangars, fuel, munitions, utilities, family housing, all of it sized for the force stationed there. ACE turns that into a hub-and-spoke problem. A handful of main operating bases — Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, Kadena, Osan, Hickam — anchor the network, and dozens of dispersal sites spread across the Pacific serve as the spokes: allied airfields, civilian airports, and old World War II strips being brought back to life.

The scale of the construction program behind this is striking. At Andersen alone, budget documents show roughly $1.3 billion across three years for the airfield and its dispersal infrastructure — and that includes Northwest Field, an austere WWII strip just north of the main base, which fiscal year 2025 funding began converting from a training strip into an operational dispersal base. About 120 miles north of Guam, the rehabilitation of North Field on Tinian Island — once one of the largest air bases of the Pacific War — has been underway since 2021, with a $409 million construction contract awarded to complete the work and reporting of an $800 million broader upgrade plan for the Northern Mariana Islands. Other Pacific airfields are in the program too: Saipan, Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia, Peleliu and Angaur in Palau.

These aren't bases in the old sense. They are places where aircraft can land, refuel, rearm, and leave — fast.

What the planner draws differently

When the mission is dispersal, the planning priorities change. Nathaniel Pyron's own planning work on airfields has always been about more than the runway itself, but ACE stretches that instinct across a whole theater. Five things matter more than they used to:

1. Airfield surfaces, not just the runway. A fighter that diverts to a partner airfield needs pavement that can take its weight and arresting-gear-compatible surfaces. Rapid airfield damage repair kits — the expeditionary pavement patches and matting that let a cratered strip reopen in hours — are now master-plan line items, not contingency afterthoughts.

2. Fuel and munitions at the edge. Dispersal only works if the aircraft can actually be turned around. That means planning for fuel storage, hydrant systems or expeditionary fuel bladders, and munitions handling areas at places that were never designed for either.

3. Waivers, permits, and host agreements. Every new spoke in the network needs airfield criteria compliance — the same safety surfaces and clearance requirements I write about in installation plans — negotiated with a host nation, a territorial government, or a civilian airport authority. The paperwork is the project as much as the concrete.

4. Bare-base habitability. A dispersal field needs to house and feed the airmen who move with the aircraft. Expeditionary shelters, water, power, medical — the livability half of military urban planning, compressed into a kit that fits in a cargo hold.

5. Reversibility. The most interesting planning question is philosophical: how do you design an airfield that can go hot in days, then go quiet for months, without degrading? The answer is in how we phase utilities, protect pavements from jungle and salt air when idle, and write the maintenance plans that keep a dormant strip deployable.

Exercises are the rehearsal for the drawings

The planners don't have to imagine how this works — the force has been rehearsing it. In 2019, an exercise called Resilient Typhoon saw aircraft gathered at Andersen rapidly disperse to airfields on Guam, Tinian, Saipan, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau. In 2024, Marine F/A-18 Hornets conducted ACE dispersal operations at Tinian International Airport alongside the Air Force and partners from Australia, Japan, Canada, South Korea, and France. Each exercise surfaces friction the drawings didn't predict — a taxiway that's too narrow, a fuel connection that doesn't reach — and each one lands back on the planner's desk as a revision.

That's the rhythm of this work now: draw, exercise, revise. The master plan is a living document because the mission keeps moving.

The Pacific lens

Working out of Honolulu, at Pacific Air Forces' doorstep — the command is headquartered at Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam with some 45,000 uniformed and civilian personnel — this doesn't feel like a distant strategy. The Strategic Triangle of Hawaii, Guam, and Alaska, plus the Japanese and Korean bases, is the geography I plan inside. The master planner's job here is to make sure the theater's airfields, from the flagship bases to the half-forgotten strips, form a system that can absorb the first blow and keep flying.

Nathaniel Pyron believes the measure of an airfield master plan is shifting. It used to be: can this base do its job? Now it's: can this base do its job, and can its neighbors do it too, at a moment's notice? One runway was never a strategy. ACE is the Pentagon's recognition of that — and the planner's assignment for the next decade.

About the author

Nathaniel Pyron (goes by Nate) is a military urban planner specializing in military master planning with an airport and airfield focus, based in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has served with the United States Marine Corps for the last 3 years as a community planner, based at Camp Blaz and Darwin, Australia, and studied urban planning at Arizona State University, School of Urban Planning. His LinkedIn title is "Urban Planner (Land Use & Airspace)."