07/20/2011: This video was made during a Second Line of Defense visit to the Contingency Response Wing at McGuire AFB. The CRW is one of two unique wings that provide the USAF and the joint force with an ability to insert force globally. Col. Chris Patterson the commander of the wing explains.
Credit: SLD 2011
I’m Colonel Chris Patterson, the commander of the 6th 21st contingency response wing, which is one of two wings underneath the 21 Expeditionary Mobility Taskforce.And our core competency is all about deploying versatile airmen to solve problems in complex environments. We are a bunch of mobility airmen who travel the world to enable global mobility. And it’s all about mobilizing the fight, providing relief, and advancing the peace.
SLD: You are really a very flexible and modular force.
Col. Patterson: Absolutely. And we talk about versatile airmen, but really, when we talk about versatile airmen, we just mean our airmen do more than one thing in any time that they deploy. Because we are exactly as you said, we’re small, we’re agile; we’re very expeditionary.In order to accomplish our mission, we need to have folks that can do more than one thing. But primarily, we would be there to either open an airbase, or to allow increased capacity at an existing airbase.