Tactical communicators move into 60th AMW

  • Published
  • By Maj. Reggie Ash
  • 60th Communications Squadron commander
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  Change is a word with which all Airmen are very familiar. With recent Force Shaping and many projected position deletions in the support community, there still are a few "safe" areas to work. 

As communications squadrons are hit hard with cuts, our newly assigned Theater Deployable Communications teams are not. I'll explain why.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of Air Force personnel use telephones, computers, radios and the supporting infrastructure. These capabilities allow each of us to do our jobs. 

Everyone expects there to be a phone and a computer on their desk. They expect those devices to work reliably all day, every day. 

The communications infrastructure on Travis is a robust network of wires, fiber-optic cable, telephone switches, network devices, public address systems, land mobile and ground-to-air radio systems. This is no surprise for a large military installation.
Theater Deployable Communications are just as the name suggests - a deployable version of those communications capabilities on which we so much rely. They provide the same telephone, network and radio capabilities to a deployed location that we use here at home. 

From the secure telephone that a deployed commander uses to call in a situation report at a newly established airfield, to the radios that security teams use to coordinate base defense, to the network link that any Airman uses at an austere location, its Theater Deployable Communications they're using. 

The 60th Communications Squadron recently acquired two robust suites of equipment worth $12 million and two 23-person teams to operate them from the 15th Air Mobility Operations Squadron. 

This realignment brings the core purpose of Air Force Communications to the 60th Air Mobility Wing: supporting the Air Force mission with robust communications.
The teams are aligned under a new Contingency Systems Flight. This flight is tasked with a 24-hour response time, and after deployed, must setup initial capabilities within hours, and expand to support 1,200 or more personnel within days. 

The Contingency Systems Flight is already in top gear in the few months after arriving, having conducted a local training event, supported a test of upgrades to the DoD-wide communications reach-back infrastructure known as Teleport, and deployed to Exercise Eagle Flag to test the Air Force's ability to swiftly establish a functional air base from a bare airstrip. 

As the 60th Communications Squadron continues its mission to provide world-class communications support to Travis, we stand ready to deploy world-wide in support of any contingency. 

We will continue to work with the same spirit and motivation born and cultivated into the deployable communicators in the 15th Expeditionary Mobility Task Force.
The next time you are working far from the United States and pick up a phone, use a computer, or key a radio, it may be courtesy of Travis communicators.