The fuel truck rolling up to the line of F-22 Raptors at Tsuiki Air Base in late October was Army green, and so were the people driving it. During exercise Keen Sword 27, petroleum specialists from the US Army’s 593rd Corps Sustainment Command pumped fuel into US Air Force fighters at the Fukuoka Prefecture base on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, a job well outside an Army fueller’s usual brief.

The Army calls it a “historic first”. Its account, published on 9 November and picked up by Defence Industry Europe a day later, describes a modest piece of ramp work with a big idea behind it: if fighters are going to scatter across the Pacific in a war, whoever has the fuel and a truck nearby may have to fill them up.

Green Trucks on a Grey Flight Line

According to the Army story by Staff Sgt. Jameson Harris, the soldiers worked alongside Air Force maintainers, positioning their vehicles near the jets, coordinating refuelling procedures and delivering fuel for scheduled flight operations. Army photos show the hardware: M978 tankers, D1 nozzles and the static reel that bonds truck to aircraft so a stray spark cannot find its way into the fuel.

Each day began with fuel quality surveillance before a drop was distributed. During transfers, the soldiers watched differential pressures, flow rates and static electricity, and limited-visibility operations meant working the equipment by feel rather than by sight.

None of it was improvised. Before deploying, the fuellers trained at McChord Airfield in Washington so they could refuel fixed-wing fighters while meeting the Air Force’s safety and operational requirements. Chief Warrant Officer 3 Johnny Frambo, the command’s senior petroleum systems technician, put it plainly: “Refueling fighter jets isn’t something they get to do every day, but they took the training and experience they already had and applied it to a completely different environment.”

The Air Force side seems to have been pleased. “They are consummate professionals,” said Master Sgt. Robert Momsen, production superintendent with the 525th Expeditionary Aircraft Maintenance Unit. “Bringing the 593rd fuelers and our maintainers together has been seamless.”

A “Historic First”, in the Army’s Words

The headline phrase comes from Col. Erin Miller, who commands the 593rd Corps Sustainment Command.

Read in context, the first is Army soldiers refuelling F-22s with Army equipment. The Army does not say whether it means first ever, first in the Pacific or first for the command, and Afterburner found no earlier public report of Army fuellers servicing Raptors. Until someone produces one, treat the label as the Army’s own claim, not a settled record.

Why Fuel Is the Pacific Problem

The point is bigger than one ramp in Kyushu. Under Empleo de combate ágil, the US Air Force plans to spread its jets across many smaller airfields instead of parking them on a handful of large bases that make easy missile targets. Every extra airfield, though, needs fuel and people qualified to put it into an aircraft, and the Air Force’s own fuels specialists cannot be everywhere at once.

The Army already runs fuel distribution units of its own. If its fuellers can be trained to Air Force standards, as the 593rd was at McChord, the pool of people who can turn a fighter around at a dispersed site gets larger, and the joint force gets more places a jet can land, top up and launch again.

Hot-pit refuelling, in which a fighter takes on fuel with an engine still running, is the other staple of fast turns at dispersed bases. The Army’s account does not say the Tsuiki work went that far; it describes scheduled refuelling in support of flight operations, which is the sensible place to start.

Keen Sword 27 in Context

Keen Sword is a biennial, joint and bilateral field training exercise between US forces and the Japan Self-Defense Forces. This edition involved about 45,000 Japanese personnel, with Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the Philippines also taking part, according to Defence Industry Europe, and it wrapped up on 29 October after 11 days of training.

The Raptors at Tsuiki belonged to the 525th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska. Air & Space Forces Magazine reports that the squadron is part of a rotation of fighters through Kadena on Okinawa, which is waiting for permanently assigned F-15EX Eagle II jets.

For now, the Army fuellers have gone home with a story most soldiers in their trade cannot tell. Whether it becomes routine will show up in the next Pacific exercise, and in whose trucks are parked next to the jets.

Sources: US Army (army.mil), DVIDS, Defence Industry Europe, Air & Space Forces Magazine, 19FortyFive.

Header photo: U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Jameson Harris