In early October, members for the 819th RED HORSE Squadron at Malmstrom Air Force Base returned from a six-month deployment to Guam.

While there, airmen constructed storage buildings for Agile Combat Employment operations, continued upgrades on the World War II era airfield in Guam and worked with the U.S. Navy’s Seabees to assess and prepare a Tinian Island airfield for paving.

The U.S. military used the airfield on Tinian to stage for operations against Japan during WWII, which was later abandoned for decades. In recent years, military leaders have been working rebuild facilities in the area to support Indo-Pacific operations and in April, the Air Force awarded a $409 million contract for the project expected to take about five years.

Some RED HORSE members return from deployment [2020]

On Tinian, airmen are restoring more than 20 million square feet of degraded WWII pavement so the repaired runway “can serve as a power projection platform,” according to the Air Force.

“Our Airmen at Tinian are successfully expanding our agile combat employment options to enhance deterrence, increase flexibility, and, if needed, rapidly generate combat power,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said in an April release. “They are the pathfinders for advancing our scheme of maneuver in the Indo-Pacific.”

In August 2023, Pacific Air Forces at Anderson AFB in Guam activated the 513th Expeditionary RED HORSE Squadron to advance theater posture and enable resilient basing in the region by setting infrastructure to facilitate Agile Combat Employment operations.

This spring, the 819th from Malmstrom became the second rotation to deploy at the 513 ERHS and assume responsibility for the ongoing projects supporting PACAF Strategy 2030: Evolving Airpower, according to the Air Force.

819th RED HORSE airmen return from six-month deployment [2018]

The 513 ERHS horizontal construction team and their engineering assistant counterparts began excavating materials for a ramp project at Northwest Field on Andersen AFB to test a new design technique that became a first for Air Force civil engineers: using a milling machine equipped with a three-dimensional Trimble grade control system in place of an excavator, dozer or grader to develop a multi-leveled base course profile, according to the Air Force.

The team faced hard-packed soil made mostly of coral and limestone, materials that make excavating with typical construction methods nearly impossible. Rather than crumble into recompactible soil as usual, the material broke apart into large pieces up to six feet wide, requiring additional labor and materials to properly backfill the giant pits created. The soil challenges threatened to hinder progress on Guam and projects at other regional locations such as Tinian Island.

819th RED HORSE, airport partnership creates potential for up to $10 million of development [2017]

RED HORSE airmen addressed the issue by developing a plan to use pavement milling machines equipped with a Trimble three-dimensional grade control system to remove the material to the desired depth as it was ground into smaller useable pieces, according to the Air Force. The method broke down hard soil and created drainage slopes and various cut depths.

RED HORSE airmen performed initial dynamic cone penetrometer tests on the compacted soils to determine its strength, then simulated Tinian runway construction using their milling machine with the Trimble system to grind a test area down to 12 inches, following by testing and evaluating three methods of replacing soil.

Exercise adds realism to training for 819th RED HORSE [2017]

The evaluated those methods with a second dynamic cone penetrometer test:

• replacing the area using only the milled material compacted into four inch layers
• replacing the area with milled material and 10 percent of reclaimed asphalt pavement, compacted into four inch layers
• replacing the area with milled material, 10 percent of reclaimed asphalt pavement and four percent of Portland cement, compacted into four inch layers

Through the testing, the airmen determined that soil strength increased 5, 10 and 15 percent respectively between the first and third method, providing improved strength and reducing the amount of base course material that needed to be purchased and transported from a full depth repair, according to the Air Force.

The work helped develop a realistic design for the Tinian runway, reducing time and resource constrictions due to geographical seclusion, saving about 162,000 tons of material, $7.4 million and nearly 5,000 hours of labor, according to the Air Force.

Photos: U.S. Air Force