By Nathaniel Pyron
In the middle of September 2026, Hurricane Lowell swept past Kauai and the lights went out for more than 36,000 residents. Days later, some 6,800 were still dark. Governor Josh Green requested military assistance, and on September 12–13 the 15th Wing loaded specialized utility vehicles — trucks that had been relocated from California to Hawaii Island after Tropical Cyclone Lala — onto two Hickam-based C-17 Globemaster IIIs and flew them from Hilo to Lihue. On the ground, Defense Department Emergency Preparedness Liaison Officers and 74 National Guard members were waiting to receive them.
I’m Nathaniel Pyron, a military urban planner specializing in military master planning with an airport and airfield focus, and I read that story as a land-use story. Every one of those relief sorties landed on pavement somebody planned. When an island community’s lifeline runs through a runway, disaster response is not a mission that happens to use the airfield — it is a mission the master plan must design for. Nathaniel Pyron’s experience across airfield planning keeps coming back to the same point: the airfield is infrastructure for the worst day, and the worst day is a planning problem, not an improvisation exercise.
The runway is the region’s lifeline
Islands have no highway to the outside world. When Kauai’s grid went down, there was exactly one way to get heavy utility equipment onto the island in hours instead of days: by air. In the Pacific, that math is everywhere — after Typhoon Sinlaku hit this April, C-130Js of the 374th Airlift Wing flew more than 34,640 pounds of food, water, and supplies to Saipan, with Navy MH-60S helicopters from Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 25 staging relief out of Andersen Air Force Base. Relief missions do not trickle in. They surge: airlifters, tankers, helicopters, and contractor freighters all want ramp space, fuel, and maintenance at the same time, and the master planner decides years in advance whether that surge has anywhere to go.
The binding concept in doctrine is maximum on ground — MOG: how many aircraft of what type an airfield can park, service, and turn at once. MOG is not an operations footnote; it is a master-planning constraint, set by apron geometry, fuel hydrant capacity, maintenance bays, and crew facilities. If the master plan commits every square yard of ramp to permanent squadron operations, there is no surge capacity when the mission assignment arrives.
The framework the planner must build for
Defense Support of Civil Authorities is the formal channel: governed by DoD Directive 3025.18, driven by a state governor’s written request, and approved by the Secretary of Defense after weighing cost, appropriateness, risk, readiness, lethality, and legality. FEMA issues the mission assignment; the Defense Coordinating Officer and Emergency Preparedness Liaison Officers run the interface. DoD officials also carry immediate-response authority — when time does not permit approval and lives are at stake, the local commander can act with the resources under his or her control.
Two things in that framework matter enormously to the planner. First, installations can be designated as base support installations — the staging base that houses, feeds, fuels, and maintains the response force. Second, DoD is explicitly not a first responder: except under immediate-response authority, it does not show up until the mission assignment is signed. The airfield has to be ready before the paperwork, because the paperwork always arrives late.
Hawaii rehearses exactly this. Makani Pahili 2026 — held April 30 at Kalaeloa — is the state’s annual hurricane preparedness exercise, led by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, validating how the Hawaii National Guard and its partners interoperate when the real storm comes. The exercise is master-planning in motion: reception, staging, onward movement, and integration — RSOI — rehearsed so that an unfamiliar unit can land, bed down, and work without someone inventing the process on the spot.
The planner’s five moves
The planner’s five moves:
1. Designate the disaster footprint in the installation development plan. HA/DR staging areas belong on the constraints-and-opportunities map like everything else: a reception area for inbound units, a civilian-access route that never crosses the flight line, a cargo marshaling yard with heavy-vehicle access, and a separate rotary-wing area so helicopter surge does not strangle fixed-wing operations.
2. Protect surge capacity on the ramp. Size aprons for MOG plus the storm: reserve transient ramp and fuel capacity in the plan, and treat it as untouchable the way explosive arcs and clear zones are. A ramp at 100 percent utilization is a ramp with zero disaster capacity.
3. Build the base-support-installation package. If your installation is the likely staging base, plan the whole package: billeting and feeding for inbound personnel, maintenance space for unfamiliar aircraft, communications for joint operations — and remember DSCA support is reimbursable, so the cost-capture plan matters too.
4. Plan the airfield’s own recovery. The staging base must survive the storm first. Airfield damage assessment and repair teams, debris-clearance priorities for runways and taxiways, hardened fuel and water reserves, and backup power for airfield lighting are the difference between a lifeline that opens in hours and one that opens in days.
5. Write the disaster scenario into every plan update. Master plans are updated on a cycle; so are storms. Fold a hurricane, a wildfire, or an earthquake scenario into the update, exercise it like Makani Pahili does, and let the exercise write the corrections back into the plan.
The takeaway
I spent three years as a civilian community planner working with the U.S. Marine Corps at Camp Blaz and Darwin, Australia, and the lesson that carried over to every airfield plan I have touched since is this: plan for the mission that has not been assigned yet. On September 12, two C-17s proved that the distance between a powerless island and its recovery is a runway. The planner’s job is to make sure that runway — and the ramp, the fuel, the staging ground, and the billeting around it — is already there when the call comes.
About the author
Nathaniel Pyron is a military urban planner specializing in military master planning with an airport/airfield focus. A U.S. Navy veteran who served in 1995, he later spent three years as a civilian community planner working with the U.S. Marine Corps at Camp Blaz and Darwin, Australia. He studied at the Arizona State University School of Urban Planning, class of 2007, and is an active LEED AP BD+C. Based in Honolulu, Hawaii, he writes about installation planning, airfield land use, and where military readiness meets community design. His LinkedIn title is Urban Planner (Land Use & Airspace).
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