US Air Force’s Massive REFORPAC Exercise in 2025 Will See Units from Across the Country Converging on the Pacific | Aviation

REFORPAC and future large-scale exercises are being ‘evolved to generate readiness at the mission-level, rather than at the task-level.’

The U.S. Air Force will send units from across the country to the western Pacific in the summer of 2025 for an exercise designed to practice the way the service will mobilize and deploy in mass for a potential war with China. Called REFORPAC (Return of Forces to Pacific), the 14-day exercise will see units from Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the continental United States converging in the Pacific, Air Force chief General David Allvin said during a Hudson Institute event on Aug. 17.

The name is derived from the Cold War-era REFORGER (Return of Forces to Germany) in which the U.S. practiced transporting vast number of troops and material across the Atlantic during confrontations with the Soviet Union.

Allvin touched upon how the US and NATO were ready for a conventional war with a peer adversary then – a habit that was lost after the USSR disintegrated in 1991. The “Unipolar era” and the global war on terror for nearly three decades saw a different military environment, with the Air Force reorienting towards that purpose.

After 1991, the United States’ need for massive and sudden…