Air Force basic training now includes a task that would have been unthinkable for a recruit ten years ago: walk up to a fighter, hang a missile on it, and do it as a team you organised yourself.

The Air Base Training Range at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland is nearly finished. A retired F-16 Fighting Falcon arrived in April 2026 and trainees have been working on it since. Two retired C-130H Hercules landed at Kelly Field on 25 August and will join it on the finished tarmac, the 37th Training Wing hopes, around December.

The aircraft are on what one officer called their third life. Both types came from maintainer training at Sheppard Air Force Base before that. One of the Hercules, tail 96-7325, was the very last H-model built, delivered in 1997 with 10,980 hours on it by the end, and it dropped paratroopers over Normandy for the 82nd anniversary of D-Day in June before being retired to a training pad in Texas.

Forty-five minutes to rearm a fighter

The exercise is deliberately unscripted. Trainees are given a rearm mission, sort themselves into small teams, plan it, brief the plan back to their military training instructors and then execute. Two containerised stations hold mock AIM-9 Sidewinders and 2.75-inch APKWS rockets. The session runs 45 minutes and the grading is not about whether the missile ends up on the rail. It is about teamwork, communication, delegation and whether anyone gave or took feedback.

The training rounds are unweighted, which has not stopped instructors enforcing the real handling rules. A Sidewinder takes three people to lift. A rocket takes two. Tech. Sgt. Johnny Ngo of the 322nd Training Squadron put the point plainly to Air and Space Forces Magazine: these are training rounds, they are not weighted. The procedure is drilled anyway, because the procedure is the lesson.

When the range is complete it will hold 16 containerised stations, two of each, covering eight tasks. Arming fighters is only one. The others are refuelling, casualty transfer and evacuation, cargo loading, post-attack repair, marshalling, aircraft familiarisation and airbase entry control. Read that list again and it describes, fairly precisely, what an air base does on a bad day.

Why basic training changed

The driver is Agile Combat Employment, the doctrine that disperses aircraft across many small locations rather than concentrating them on a handful of large, well-mapped bases. It only works if the people who happen to be at the dispersal site can do jobs outside their own speciality. The Air Force calls that a multi-capable airman, and 2nd Air Force has reduced the underlying idea to an acronym: DOGS, for defend, operate, generate and sustain airpower.

The change has been incremental and is now nearly a decade deep. PACER FORGE replaced the old BEAST Week field exercise in 2022 and was extended from 36 hours to 57 in March 2025. BMT 2.0 followed in October 2025 with smaller teams and more physical training, and BMT 3.0 arrived in April 2026 bringing the airbase range with it. Davidson has described the whole sequence as the most significant transformation of basic military training since 1950.

The generational contrast is not subtle. Tech. Sgt. Jeremy Hudson, now an instructor with the 322nd Training Squadron, went through basic in 2014.

An overview of what recruits now go through at Air Force basic military training.

Was kommt als Nächstes?

The current range cost roughly 30 million dollars across two budget years. The ambition is considerably larger: a four-quadrant version, each quadrant with its own F-16 and pair of C-130s, plus an entirely separate expeditionary range built around two intersecting dirt airstrips, a towable fuselage and a hangar. Both are targeted at 2031, and a follow-on construction request roughly twice the size of the first is hoped for in the 2028 budget.

The urgency is not theoretical. On 8 September Iranian ballistic missiles struck Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, badly damaging an A-10 and causing lighter damage to around eight F-15Es. Three US soldiers had been killed at the same base in July. Basic training has also begun deliberately disrupting trainees’ sleep, a change reported in late August, after the air campaign against Iran exposed how hard young airmen found the operational tempo.

None of which makes a mock Sidewinder on a retired F-16 into combat experience. But it does mean that a trainee leaving Lackland has at least handled the object, in a team, under time pressure, before anyone asks them to do it somewhere that matters.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine; US Air Force Air Education and Training Command; 37th Training Wing; DVIDS.