Army engineers prepare a mock bomb crater for cement during a rapid airfield damage repair exercise at Marine Corps Training Area Bellows, Hawaii, on Sept. 17, 2026. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)
MARINE CORPS TRAINING AREA BELLOWS, Hawaii — A group of Army, Marine Corps and Air Force engineers spent the week in Hawaii honing a joint-force approach to rapidly repairing airfields damaged by war or disaster.
“What we wanted to do is merge all of our tactics, our techniques and our procedures — merge those so that we could work together to do these things not just on our own to our own standard, but together so that everyone’s on the same page,” Capt. Luke Eckstein, commander of the 523rd Engineer Support Company, 130th Engineer Brigade, said Thursday at this training area on Oahu.
Also joining were personnel from Marine Wing Support Squadron 174 and the Air Force’s 647th Civil Engineering Squadron.
“We’re not a finished product,” Eckstein said, “but this training with some willing partners from both of those services has really set us on the right path.”
The austere runway near Eckstein is a gravel strip with patches of grass punching throughout. Three spots were marked to indicate mock craters that, in a real conflict, could have been made by mortars, artillery or aerial bombing.
Soldiers and Marines work with quick-setting cement during a rapid airfield damage repair exercise at Marine Corps Training Area Bellows, Hawaii, on Sept. 17, 2026. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)
Repairs, however, were replicated on a large slab of concrete beside the runway, not on it.
There, scrums of Marines, soldiers and airmen were busily preparing roughly 6-foot by 6-foot “craters” in the slab for repair with a quick-drying cement that sets in about two hours.
The speedy repair of tiny airfields is essential to the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept. It utilizes a hub-and-spoke system of established bases and remote airfields and prepositioned equipment that allows quick and unpredictable deployment of air assets.
The concept, or course, requires that those airfields be usable in time of conflict. The training this week worked at cross-training engineers from each service to bring some uniformity into the process, Eckstein said.
“The Marine Corps does something different,” he said. “The Air Force does something different. We do something different.”
Even the terminology and acronyms can vary by service, he said.
The Pentagon recognizes the need to standardize procedures for airfield repair, said Lt. Col. Nick Saccone, a member of the Joint Staff’s engineer division who was observing the Hawaii training.
“What I’m going to do is carry on the lessons learned from here,” he said. “Then I’m going to feed it into joint doctrine so at the combatant command level, a commander can look down and see any engineer force and send them to any airfield and repair to a standard that’s acceptable to any senior airfield authority.”
The actual repair is the culmination of an exercise that begins with getting the teams onto the airfield, whether by land, helicopter or amphibious vessel.
Those teams, which include explosive ordnance techs, assess the damage and maintain security.
This week’s exercise had called for an Army prototype amphibious vessel to land on the beach adjoining the airfield to deliver teams and equipment, but choppy surf prevented that.
Eckstein, who oversaw a smaller version of this training last year, said he envisions an iteration next year in which they “roll our joint engineer package consisting of Marines, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Army” off an amphib and use agreed-upon procedures “blessed by our higher powers that be.”
“That’s the dream,” he said.
