HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii -- The A3/12 Aviation Management branch of Headquarters, Pacific Air Forces A3/6, Directorate of Air and Cyberspace Operations, recently executed exercise Toxic Pineapple II alongside the 15th Wing at Hickam Air Force Base, Aug. 29 to Sept. 1.
The exercise simulated a deployed environment, allowing participants to partake in scenarios that required them to set up and run an aircrew contamination control area. For the first time, exercise Toxic Pineapple II included participants from the Joint Force, whereas the 15th Wing specifically designed the previous iteration of Toxic Pineapple for aircrew flight equipment Airmen at Hickam.
“Toxic Pineapple started out very small, and it grew, so we'd like to keep this going,” explained U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Theodore Fioto, PACAF A312 command manager of AFE and lead project officer for Toxic Pineapple II. “In the future we'd like to incorporate more of our Allies and partners, such as the Japanese Air Self Defense Force, the Republic of Korea Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force into this.”
With the joint team mindset instilled as an inherent characteristic of exercise Toxic Pineapple II, Airmen and Marines saw firsthand examples of how their sister-service counterparts would execute a CBRN decontamination line for aircrew.
“I've been in for almost 23 years and I didn't previously know the Marines’ procedures,” Fioto said. “I think having an understanding of what they’re going to do is critical because we might all one day be in the same location where we need that extra personnel to either have Marines get into an Air Force CBRN decontamination line or have Airmen get into a Marine Corps decontamination line.”
Moving forward, in terms of real-world response to a CBRN attack within the U.S. Indo-Pacific command area of responsibility, service members at all levels have a responsibility to meet the expectation to support a joint force capability. Exercises such as Toxic Pineapple II help participants expedite the learning curve that comes with working alongside a joint team.
“There’s not a world that exists where we’re not working together to accomplish a goal or a mission,” outlined U.S. Marine Corps Chief Warrant Officer 3 Jonathan Silva, Marine Air Group 39, Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California. “Joint interoperability across every service with the understanding that we have different types of aircraft is important. We will support our sister services and they will do the same for us.”
Toxic Pineapple II gave participants a realistic training environment that emulated real-world events requiring service members to utilize their CBRN gear and expertise to respond to a wide range of contaminating agents they could face during an attack.
Overall, exercise Toxic Pineapple II allowed professionals from a wide range of aircrew-related career fields across services to identify specific procedural gaps and best practices that not only enhance joint missions but also help the participants understand various logistic and operational impacts that are vital to continued CBRN defense maneuvers.
“We have all of the subject matter experts and functional managers that come in and explain their side of what would happen in a real-world scenario, and we can put that puzzle together,” Fioto expressed. “If our Air Force pilots or our Marine pilots fly into a scenario that’s going to put them into an austere CBRN environment, they know that they have someone in the backfield that’s going to support them. They have a lot of confidence that we're going to protect them, that their equipment is going to work, and their tactics, techniques and procedures we have out there will safeguard them from that environment to get them back into the flight.”