445th AW participates in Ultimate Caduceus exercise

  • Published
  • By Master Sgt. Patrick O’Reilly
  • 445th Airlift Wing Public Affairs

Eighty members of the 445th Airlift Wing participated in U.S. Transportation Command’s (USTRANSCOM) week-long aeromedical and global patient movement exercise called Ultimate Caduceus, April 26-30, 2021.

Ultimate Caduceus is an annual patient movement exercise designed to test the ability of USTRANSCOM to provide medical evacuation. USTRANSCOM is a unified, functional combatant command which provides support to the 10 other U.S. combatant commands, the military services, defense agencies and other government organizations.

More than 240 personnel participated in the field training exercise. The exercise simulated bringing injured troops from overseas, triaging them to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and then moving them to longer-term and advanced care centers known as Federal Coordinating Centers (FCC).FCCs were used to treat aeromedical evacuation patients during Hurricanes Irma and Maria.

The participating units in the exercise included the 445th AW, 88th Air Base Wing, Air Force Materiel Command and the 711th Human Performance Wing from Wright-Patterson AFB; USTRANSCOM and Air Mobility Command located at Scott AFB, Illinois; 305th Air Mobility Wing, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey; the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); and several local hospitals.

Medical personnel received hands-on experience for possible real-world events and were able to interface with key agencies.

During the exercise, personnel scrambled to put up tents, set up and utilized medical equipment, promptly loaded and unloaded patients on a C-17 Globemaster III aircraft, carried litters and performed triage in order to prepare for the possible challenges of the future.

“The exercise provided all participating agencies with insights to enhance our Aeromedical Evacuation, Critical Care Air Transport Team, medical staging capabilities and interoperability for Global Patient Movement,” said Mr. Jeffrey Hoffer, USTRANSCOM training and readiness joint exercises branch chief and Ultimate Caduceus program manager.

According to the USTRANSCOM website, using a hub (in this case, Wright-Patterson AFB) and spoke (final definitive care destination(s)) system, the Continental United States (CONUS) patient distribution process can manage current workload. Contingency planning and patient movement exercises continue to refine and advance the interagency effort that would be required to accommodate a larger number of ill and injured service members coming back from a large-scale conflict or contingency.

“The exercise is intended to simulate a peer or near-peer encounter where we have a large number of casualties that need to be redistributed throughout the United States because the system becomes overwhelmed where any single point in the U.S. cannot handle the number of casualties. Therefore, they need to be moved across the country to other medical facilities whether it’s DOD (Department of Defense), VA (Veterans Affairs) or civilian counter agencies,” said Chief Master Sgt. Scott Luff, chief enlisted manager for the 445th Aeromedical Staging Squadron.

Key players participating in this year’s exercise noted that this year’s large joint exercise had some challenges. The largest challenge of the exercise was to realistically replicate a near-peer contested environment to stress and challenge medical teams executing CONUS patient distribution in support of large-scale overseas military contingency operations, said Hoffer.

Lt. Col. Jennifer Cowie, community readiness policy analyst at Headquarters Air Force, echoed those challenges.

“We were moving a lot larger patient load than we were used to and doing that mind shift from what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years post911 to a mass casualty movement,” Cowie said.

Ultimate Caduceus concluded April 30, 2021 with lessons learned and feedback that can be used for future real-world scenarios.

“The exercise went extremely well with a high-volume of simulated combat patients being regulated by Theater Patient Movement Requirements Centers and distributed to a CONUS DOD Military Health System facility, a VA Medical Center, or a participating National Disaster Medical System bed via the hub and spoke method,” said Hoffer. “The training audience was comprised of active duty, Reserve and civilian medical professionals seamlessly integrating and executing the demanding mission profiles.”

“It was a high-paced tempo, and we were sprinting the entire time. I think overall, our crews learned a lot, had good attitudes and everyone came away learning something not only about themselves but about the mission and how about to integrate with all the partners. Our crews thought this was great in preparation to upcoming deployments. They were happy. It was a good twist to what we were used to seeing,” said Cowie.