Air Force officials are reviving a deployment scheme introduced in the mid-1990s and abandoned three years ago. But while the original Air Expeditionary Wing concept quickly assembled airmen and aircraft from across the service to deploy for conflicts, AEW 2.0 aims to give the team up to 18 months to train together.
“AEW 2.0 builds upon successes and lessons learned from previous [Unit of Action] evolutions,” an Air Force spokesperson told Defense One on Friday evening. “It also accounts for dynamic operational requirements and aligns with senior leader priorities.”
The move, announced in a Friday-evening press release, is the latest Trump-administration shift away from Biden-era efforts to orient the force to confront China.
Set to launch in October, AEW 2.0 reflects the Trump administration’s Western Hemisphere focus, the spokesperson said, by striking “the balance in preserving capacity to fulfill the in-garrison mission and defend the homeland while the [Unit of Action] trains and deploys.”
The new AEW 2.0 concept will keep some existing ideas, like keeping deliberately teamed groups together for training and deployment.
“A key strength of this unit of action model is the deliberate training and teaming that improves collaboration and readiness across the service,” said Lt. Gen. Case Cunningham, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for operations, in the news release. “It’s imperative we continue empowering wings and commanders with necessary resources and guidance to be the agile, decisive force our nation demands.”
But the concept discards the Biden-era plan to run deployed forces with a leadership structure called the A-staff.” Air Force officials said last month they would keep the existing group-level organization “to minimize change-fatigue to airmen and enable commanders to concentrate on readiness, lethality, and mission accomplishment.”
The AEW 2.0 concept will work within the service’s 24-month deployment cycle known as AFFORGEN. The schedule, which was established in 2022, has been criticized by commanders and government watchdogs for leaving bases overworked and understaffed. In November 2024, the Government Accountability Office reported that major commanders had torched the service’s AFFORGEN-related guidance as “policy by PowerPoint presentations and emails,” described it as a “concept ahead of Air Force processes,” and claimed it moved at the “speed of change faster than speed of communication.”
In the press release, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach praised the AEW revival as “the next step in evolving our readiness.” More than a decade ago, Wilsbach led the 9th Air and Space Expeditionary Task Force in Afghanistan.
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