Dangerous Game: Lessons from the April 2024 Drone Attack in Israel
September 23, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Tobias Naegele:
Good morning. In a century of flight, it might seem like most of the firsts have already happened and that all the new things have already been conquered. But this morning we get a chance to talk to some of today’s Airmen, who only recently took off into the face of the unknown and took on something that nobody had seen before. So let’s start with a brief video introduction. It’s a trailer for the film, “A Dangerous Game.”
Trailer:
>> The radar just lit up. >> At standby, I won’t be able to talk to you. We’re one minute to impact. >> Launch to survive and defend the base. >> At that point, we were in an hour long fight, just trying to kill whatever we could. >> I get the green light to take off. So this is another normal night mission, just like any other. >> We were out there for a couple hours with no real calm about anything having actually happened. So we thought, all right, maybe it’s like off. >> Bordes gets the first lock in. Boy, he does exactly what he was taught and shot within about 20 seconds to get in that lock. >> I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna be the first one in my formation and I’m by far the least experienced. I’m gonna give someone else a chance to tell me not to before I do it. So I was like, hey, we’re targeted. No one said anything. I was like, all right, we get a little closer. >> Yep, there goes the missile. All right, boys, here we go. That’s a drop. And then radar gets another and another. It fills. It’s all attack drones. >> I would just say drone there and then shoot. Missile would come off the rail. Drone destroyed next eight engagements and then it was like, wow, that happened fast. >> The ground is on fire right now. You could see every single one of the drones where they hit. >> And that just took about 45 minutes to shoot all of the missiles that we could off of that force ship before we had to come home out of missiles and try and get some more to go back up. >> 300 weapons were fired at a target man. Six of them hit. No one died. >> This is way, way bigger than me just shooting missiles at drones. This is defense of our coalition partners. We got to be part of a thing that was meaningful and had an impact.
Tobias Naegele:
The whole film is 36 minutes. It’s absolutely worth watching. I wouldn’t watch it right before you go to bed because it is actually kind of thrilling. And we’re fortunate today to have Lieutenant Colonel Timothy “Diesel” Causey, the 494th Fighter Squadron Commander. And we got Ben “Irish” Coffey, the Wing A staff director. So you guys deployed. This event took place April of 2024. You had been there for a little while, but not that long. You knew you were going to face something. What had you done in preparation? And then we’ll get to what happened that day.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
Great, I’ll take the first question on that. Thanks for having us, I appreciate it. Thank you guys for coming out. And then to the 30 VS squadron for the video. Please check it out, it is awesome. They did a really good job. There’s one of them in the room. He asked me not to embarrass him, so I won’t say his name. For us, so we actually, I’ll give you kind of a road to war on us getting out there, which might take a little bit more. And then save Irish from having to talk too much, which would be good. >> For us, so we actually go out in October.
Tobias Naegele:
Rank has its privileges.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
Yeah, that’s right. So we actually went out in October. We thought that this deployment was going to be more of a partner nation integration and training. We actually had a TDY set up for three weeks after we arrived. So I got into theater early October, and on October 7th, Hamas goes into Israel. And so I called Voodoo Culver, the squadron commander, and was just like, hey, brother, we gotta get some jets in here. And so within about six, seven days, we had a three ship fly in. And we did the first integrated combat turn, so ICT. So we bring in a three ship, we shut one of them down. The other one, we take all the travel pods off, we put munitions up. And it was the first cross co-com, so leaving USAFE, getting into CENTCOM, and then flying a combat mission. We did it, it took about an hour and a half to refuel the jet and get weapons on. That’s gonna be a huge cornerstone for what ends up. We practice it a couple times, but it’s a huge cornerstone for what happens on April 13th. Because later we actually have to use that technique to continue to feed the fight and get aircraft up. And that was a lot of communication and teamwork between us and maintenance in setting up for that portion. Leading up to training for it, we kind of thought like, hey, you’re always preparing for war. But we also thought this was gonna be more of partner nation integration. I called the DO at the time who was down range and asked him, hey, what is the thing that you did that most helped out the squadron? And he was like, hey, you need to get counter US training. Find a company that can fly a drone, people can get reps. And so I talked with the OG at the time who’s in the room and asked him for a bunch of money, which is always the OG’s favorite thing when you ask him for a ton of money. And he took some risk on us, gave us some trust, gave us the money to actually go execute. So we got everybody in the squadron about two reps up in Scotland, a month or so before we deployed, which is really, really big. Because that gave everybody that initial chair fly, that pacing, the timing. And it leads to Irish’s first kind of counter UAS brief. So he sets up a brief that gives us kind of the TTPs, the tactics, techniques, and procedures that then after the shoot down start happening and after action reports, gets into his first paper. And so it kind of ends up being this war is a learning competition. So whoever is making corrections, learning from their errors, debriefing, and then iterative process through that is who’s gonna win the war, right? And so we basically enter in October the beginning of our learning competition as we go through this process.
Tobias Naegele:
All right, so April 13th, you get mission orders. Action. Irish, tell us kind of what your response is. Just sort of walk us through, cuz there’s an emotional response, but there’s also the trained, like, we’re really doing something now.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
Yeah, Tobias, definitely correct. You get those mission orders. It’s everything that I was trained for in weapon school. And a huge shout out to the weapon school as an institution, the training that they put into you to become a mission commander, to be able to run into that role. Had an extraordinary team, I could go on forever. Rod Appleton, Thud Fernandez, King Welton, all patches that were focused on this mission set. And I was just a person that was called the mission commander as we’re going through, and for about a week or so, we were going back and forth, changing the plan, what is the most likely course of action? What is the most dangerous? What can we really expect to face as we start going towards April 13th? And we’re trying to balance all of those. And it’s kind of funny, your brain, you can be told to your face so many times, this is what you’re gonna see, this is what you can expect. And you don’t really believe it until you actually see it firsthand on a sensor. And we had gone through engagements, usually smaller scale, one or two drones at one time. And when you’re being told you’re gonna face a wave of almost 200 low altitude threats, there’s a little bit of disbelief in the back of your mind. But that doesn’t stop you from preparing and getting the squadrons ready to go, vetting the plan, and going through that whole process. And my mission planning philosophy was our plan needs to be flexible, scalable, and repeatable. If we have those three things, this plan can work in any AOR, in any environment, and be able to be used again in the future. And that was super important, cuz you don’t know, is this a one-off, is this multi-day? You just don’t have the assumptions to be able to declare what you think is going to happen. And I remember turning the corner, we’re airborne, and I hear the comm from Diesel, drone there, he saw it in the video. Says it a lot, it’s his favorite phrase, but drone there. And it kinda clicked that this is real. And I start sanitizing down to the east, and as I’m doing that
Tobias Naegele:
So sanitizing means
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
Sanitizing, so trying to find the low altitude threats, we call it sanitization. So proving that there’s no enemy aircraft or enemy between you and your defended asset. Especially where sanitization is most difficult in the low environment. So I’m trying to dig out these low altitude drones, and that’s when we start noticing the F-16s in the south have started to engage. The F-15s up in the north, they have started to engage. And Sonic and I, as we’re stepping through, there’s no roads in the area. There’s no civilian population.
Tobias Naegele:
Sonic is your WSO.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
Sonic is my WSO, so weapon systems officer flying with me, and she’s a mission commander with me as well. And these are all drones, and getting 10, 20 plus on your radar at one point. And you have to take a moment, it kinda clicks that, this is real. And as a mission commander, you have your intent. We had General Grynkewich gave us the intent. What did we need to do for success? He had passed down the trust to us to operate and able to get the job done. And for about that one second, take a pause. All right, this is my new environment. We have to win an execution. Just like General Allvin said yesterday, you have to win an execution. And that’s when training pretty much takes over. I had a trust in the paper I’d wrote. I had a trust in my teammates that we’re gonna get the job done.
Tobias Naegele:
You’ve gotta spread out those targets. So you see 20, you can’t take 20 all by yourself.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
No.
Tobias Naegele:
So how do you do that? How do you sort out who takes what? As you’re saying, drone there, drone there.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
Well, you just, whichever one you get first, you shoot. And then let everybody else sort it out. I was number two. He was a mission commander, so he’s gotta figure it out after that.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
Fantastic number two. If there was a drone, he was shooting it.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
There’s a whole tactic and technique procedure that’s based on making sure that we’re not shooting the same thing. And then we use a lot of comm in or between the two airplanes to make sure that we’re not wasting missiles. And yes, there’s a bunch of procedures that we have in effect. One of the things I think it’s really important to talk about to the question you asked him is, we had a lot of trust that was pushed down to us early on. So when we got into AOR, General Grynkewich came out and gave us a brief. And then General Kurilla, the CENTCOM commander, came out and gave us a brief. And then towards the end of the deployment, General France came out and gave us a brief at all. And all three of those generals standing in the squadron with us, talking to the entire squadron and saying, this is my left and right bounds. Here’s my commander’s intent. This is the risk that I need you to take when you have to. And then I need you to make sure that you are not taking too much risk and that’s where you sit. Know your ROE and make smart decisions. And then they backed it up, right? So as we have our first couple shoot downs, we have our first couple strikes. At no point did they ever second guess us. They pushed that trust down to us in risk acceptance. And then they allowed us to execute. And so me and Voodoo as the squadron commander also pushed that down. Which is really important later when Irish and me and Voodoo are now leaving the lane and we have young dudes. They’re now executing. They understood what the job was and they understood where they needed to execute and what risk to take.
Tobias Naegele:
So you actually exhausted your weapons on that first flight?
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
Yes sir, yes sir. We shot in the number two jet. Voodoo and I shoot all eight of our missiles. We should drop the GB 54. That’s a story for the bar later. It’s in the video. But yep, and then they shot all their missiles, had a hung munition. At that point it’s like, hey, we need to get home. We have a plan to reload. And so it’s like, hey, let’s get home, hand the lane off to the people that are behind us that have a couple more weapons that are in our squadron. And then try and get back into the fight later.
Tobias Naegele:
Okay, so let’s talk about that, cuz two things happen, right? You’ve got a problem and you do a hot pit refuel. So Irish, tell your story and then we’ll come back to you.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
Sounds good.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
Perfect, yeah, we’re flowing back. And when we left the lane, this is something that I’m really, really proud of, of who was in the lane when we left. So we had a very experienced two ship flowing home. Weapons school graduates, a squadron commander, a highly qualified mission commander, weapons systems officer in Sonic. And when we left, Apex and Clutch, first assignment, just finished their four ship flight lead. They took over the lane commander role in the middle lane. And they were directing tankers as alert fighters were coming in. They were posturing them, calling out threats, handing off to formations with a better fuel and missile posture to start engaging. Something that I would not expect a four ship flight lead or a multi-ship flight lead to accomplish. But he took it in stride. He realized there was a gap that needed to be filled. And that is the type of Airman that we’re gonna have. And we’re about to spend a lot of time talking about a lot of different Airmen as we tell these stories. We fly back home. I have an emergency with the hung ammunition. You don’t really know what’s wrong with it. Is it armed? Where is it in that arming process? There’s lots of safety mechanisms, but safety mechanisms can fail. So it hasn’t exploded yet, which is good. So I have a lot of faith that it won’t. But as we go through the landing process, I think it’s five, six fire trucks pull up. We have EODs, so explosive ornaments disposals coming out. All the fire chiefs are standing outside and there’s a van pulling up with two of our lieutenants that are gonna come pick Sonic and I and bring them back to the other side of the base. And as we land, they’re all walking up in their bomb suits and looking at the missile and they just give us a thumbs up. We’re like, well, that’s better than a thumbs down, so I guess we can shut down and get out of the aircraft. So we get out, we hand over the aircraft to that team, and they start working through the safing of the weapon and making sure that the aircraft’s gonna be good to go. Sadly, that’s gonna take some time, so I can’t just ICT that aircraft. They’re gonna make sure it’s safely handled and then work to get it back into the line.
Tobias Naegele:
So you’re kind of out of the fight.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
I was out of the fight at that point. So I had done my job, I executed at a tactical level, working the mission command and the flow of forces. I’m out of the fight.
Tobias Naegele:
So pause there for a second.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
Yeah.
Tobias Naegele:
All right, you came in, you’re just gonna turn around and go back out. You practiced that before, but this is kind of cool. You’re actually getting to do it with a little anger. Tell us about that.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
Yeah, so we get into the ICT. My first thought is like Irish and Sonic are out. I’m mission commander now. This is great. I don’t have to listen to anybody. So I immediately tell Voodoo, I was like, hey man, I’m the mission commander. He’s like, yeah, okay. And so we get into the pits and maintenance. We had talked, we’d done a lot of communication. So all of this is a team sport. So we’re up here talking about shooting missiles, shooting down drones, and it’s great. But it is a really long process to get us to that part. One of the biggest portions of that is the fighter generation squadron. So our maintenance squadron supporting us, getting us to the point where we can execute. And so we did a lot of teamwork, especially setting up the ICTs. And so we talked before about where they’re gonna be, what weapons we need, how we wanna actually run that flow. And then talked about the trust and risk between the two units. We had a phenomenal team out there with Chief Westmoreland and Major Kirby and Lieutenant Colonel Sapasi. And so we had this team built and ready to go. And so we get in the pits and everybody’s there. Everything’s ready to go. They’re like, hey, leave both engines on. I’m like, okay, that’s a little bit non-standard. But they’re like, hey, we need to get you airborne as fast as possible. And so we execute because it’s combat, the mission needs to happen now. We execute with a little bit more risk. Maintenance was willing to accept it and they wanted to get us moving, which was fantastic. And so they start loading up the AMRAAM. They look under the jet and they see that the 54 is gone and they just start shaking their nugget. So they get the AMRAAM up, they start loading the AIM-9Xs, and that’s when we actually start to see explosions kind of overhead. And so at that point, alarm red happens and people kind of start shifting and moving around. And so Master Sergeant TJ Adams comes out, he was the lead pro super the night. And he’s just like, you, you and you, go to the bunker. You five, stay here and execute your job. And so in the video, you’ll hear him kind of talk about, he’s thinking people, mission, people, mission. And so there was a ton of Airmen, especially in the maintenance squadron, that accepted personal risk. They didn’t have to be directed to do it. They just accepted that personal risk because they knew that we needed to get back up airborne and defend the base and defend the coalition partners. And so to see those Airmen, those young Airmen without direction, just make it happen was phenomenal. And so TJ Adams, Master Sergeant Adams goes and gets them their gear, gets them a little bit more protected. We get a two-ship airborne and then once we are ready to go, we take off. And so it was 31 minutes from landing to take off from that ICT, which at the time was a record. It was absolutely phenomenal to then have four missiles, a full load of gas, get airborne and get back into the fight. And so we then head up north and then take over the lane again as the mission commander because he was gone, so I had it.
Tobias Naegele:
All right. But now the base is under attack and you decide that you’re going to do something.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
Well, I heard that Diesel was taking over mission command and I wasn’t going to allow it, so I had to do something. I had to do something. No, as we turned the corner in Alarm Red, we see an F-15 on the fighter ramp, still with the full missile load. Initially, Alarm Red, people running to the bunkers, we’re going to go, myself and Sonic, we’re going to go to the bunker and find a phone to call our top threes. And our top threes, extraordinary humans, rifle wigs, there is one point, they’re like potential impacts within a minute. And they’re like, “Well, we’re just going to stay here and we have a job to do.” So they’re coordinating with the MUNs, the MO, the crew chiefs to get these jets back into the fight. So an incredible act to just be like, “Yep, we have a job to do.” But as I’m talking to the top three, I said, “It’s all an airplane, it’s got missiles, can it fly?” “Yes, it can.” “Can it get armed up?” “Yes, you can get armed.” And that’s all I needed to do except for one thing. Senior Airman Freer was in that bunker and I asked, “I need a crew chief. I need a crew chief to get this jet going.” And I’m standing at the entrance of the bunker, you can kind of hear in the background the noises of the explosions overhead. And he stood up and he’s, “I’m a crew chief.” I asked him, “Are you willing to go out there?” And he said, “Absolutely.” “Do we have any crew chiefs MUNs ammo in this room right now? Can you raise your hand?” Can we just get an applause for that team? Absolutely extraordinary. So he comes out, we grab a couple other folks along the way. Sonic takes the bags up and I have to make sure the jet can fly. So I look at it, it’s got two engines and three tires. Good to go. That’s all I need. And of course missiles, so can’t forget about those. But we start starting up. We get the men essential items that we need and I’m clearing Senior Airman Freer, I was like, “Go back to the bunker. Your job is now to survive until you’re needed again.” He said, “No, I’m not leaving. If something happens to you in that aircraft, I’m going to get you out.” So that is just an example of people choosing personal risk over and over and over again. So if you talk about the best fighting force of Airmen in the world, in the world’s best Air Force, there’s just these stories that I actually got to witness firsthand. You always talk about people choosing risk and making great decisions. This is a perfect example of Mish Command as a philosophy and not a position. Senior Airman Freer was a Mish Commander that day in his role and he made an action and he continued to stick with the fight all the way through. And there’s just countless examples of those Airmen doing that job.
Tobias Naegele:
So you’ve deployed again. We could go into the next phase, but I want to make sure that we actually get into the lessons and the rinse, wash, repeat that comes from this. You’ve got to write all this down. You’re documenting it. You’re not documenting it for awards. You both got decorated, but that’s not the point. You’re actually making sure that the next guys and gals are going to learn from what you’re experiencing. They’ll be even better prepared. Talk about the lessons that you handed down and then I’d like to hear about the next time a little bit about you going down range again.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned earlier, war is a learning competition. So how do you actually get ahead of the power curve? How do you make sure that you’re continuing to iterate? One of the biggest things for us is mistakes. So we debrief a ton. We write after action reports and the after action report is always about what mistakes were made so that the next people don’t make that same mistake. Irish did a really good job with the initial counter UAS brief. The December, the early shoot downs is the Iranian aligned militia groups are just kind of shooting the one to five at different fobs. So we get that first shoot down and now we’ve proven those tactics. So we sat down and we wrote an after action report. I made some mistakes that night on that shoot down and so we made sure we captured those and then we also had the entire squadron watch the tape. So everybody sat down and they watched the tape. They got to see what it looked like, what it sounded like, what the pacing was. They got to see the mistake. They got to compare it to the after action report. We then kind of went through, okay, here’s ROE. So now let’s go through some ROE drills on if the drone’s here, if the drone’s here, what does that look like? Those things lead into Irish writing his first counter UAS paper, which then gets disseminated across to all of our partners in coalition to make sure we’re in a really good spot. And so making sure that we actually are learning and then as we get into later December, January and through April as we have more of these shoot downs. By the time we get to April 13th, not everybody had shot drones down that flies that night and shoots, but they had seen what it looked like on multiple different occasions. They saw what the pacing was and what the crew coordination was between the pilot and the WSO. They’ve read the after action reports. They’ve seen the errors that were made here or there. We’ve gone through three versions of his paper and made those additions. And then the same thing. So the Chiefs, the 335th Fighter Squadron out of Seymour is joining us in mid April. And so we also worked with them. Their DO, Bud Lysky, was a really good buddy of mine. We went through the B course in weapons school together. And so we were able to get him early versions of the paper. We were able to tell him like, hey, you guys need to go out and get this counter UAS training. And so we were able to also pass them lessons learned before they came out. Our maintenance, our FGS passed their FGS like, hey, we’re doing more ICTs. You guys need to be looking at this. And they’re like, yep, we’re already working on it. We’re working through. And so it is that communication and collaboration across the board. But it’s also being willing to admit when you make a mistake. You have to, right? We all make mistakes. I mess up every day. But being willing to have that conversation about that mistake, write it down, and then communicate it to the people around you so that they’re at least are knowledgeable about that. And when they see the same situation, they don’t make the same thing. So this continues on, right? And kind of going into like what the most recent deployment was. We left the 335th. The chiefs took the AOR. And so they take that learning competition on. It’s now their– it is now their cross to bear. So they’re iterating on his paper. So his paper goes through a couple more changes. They’re continuing to refine the process. And then they hand it to the next squadron. And then they hand it to the next squadron. And so by the time we get back out there, most recently, we’re out there with another two squadrons. And I told my entire squadron, you are not going to show up and go, we know how to do this. Because that was a year and a half ago. And a lot has changed. And you’re going to show up and you’re going to go, what has changed? And how can I get in the fight? You’re going to ask questions. You’re going to be curious about what the things are and what has shifted. And you’re going to be ready to execute. And that’s really important to get in there and understand that, yeah, we did it a year ago. But we are no longer the most knowledgeable people at this point. At that point, the T-Bolts and Tigers were out there. They owned the ATO. They had the best knowledge. And they had their own after-action reports that we needed to get in and read. But a lot of the things were out there. The ICTs were going a lot better. They actually got it all the way down, I think, to a 25-minute ICT. We’ve changed– you heard the chief talk yesterday about AGR 20 foxes. So there’s some change in how we’re actually getting after this threat and how we’re trying to change and iterate faster and do it more properly. And so it was just getting out there and having those conversations with them.
Tobias Naegele:
Just explain that a little bit for folks who might not have heard that or made the connection of what you’re talking about. So you’ve got a new weapon.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
Yeah, so it’s a rocket with basically the ability to laze it in. And so TEST worked really hard to get that on our platform and get it on our platform very quickly and then give us the tools and techniques to actually execute with it. And the squadrons that were already downrange were working on that. And so we show up and we’re like, teach us. What has changed? How has this changed? How do we execute? And reading through the after-action reports and going through it. From what he talked about yesterday, you can see that story of using those weapons effectively to kind of change how we are targeting and make sure that we’re using the proper weapon for the proper target. And then when you can’t hand it off to the next proper defense in depth, as he then talked about the first US Air Force Coyote basically shooting from the ground up. And so having that, getting out there and just learning as fast as we can.
Tobias Naegele:
All right. So Irish, talk a little bit about the weapons training. You’ve got a lot more ammo effectively the second time because you’ve got what, 42 shots with the new weapon, with the rocket?
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
With the new rockets, yep. We have a lot more capability to use it. But on April 13th, as we- Right.
Tobias Naegele:
You didn’t have that.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
Yep.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
And so the biggest thing for me is as I grew older, so I was the tier one weapons officer and that was my role. But since then, I’ve actually moved on to a new job. I’m working the staff and I’m changing what my primary roles are. So I’ve actually had to hand that over to two weapons officers that work in diesel squadron. So his actual tier one weapons officers, they were the ones that took that data and actually went through the iterations. So I can’t take credit for all the good work they did, but it’s the same iterative process. You have your new weapons officers come in. They work through the problem set, the new tactic. They define the attack cards that show you how to do this attack and they disseminate it through all the instructors and they build that instructor cadre, which now goes through the rest of the squadron. But I do actually really want to talk about weapons systems officers in particular. So the F-15 has gone through a lot of changes. Back before GPS guided weapons, it was a low altitude strike fighter. Obviously that has changed to tank killing in Iraq with laser guided weapons, to scud hunting, to modernization upgrades between EPOS, the Eagle Passive Active Warning Survival System, and ESA radar upgrade with the APG-82, which I think is complete for the most part at this point. A sniper pod upgraded from the lightning pod. But there’s one thing that’s been true in our aircraft since the beginning, and that’s two people. The weapons systems officer is such a task loading share benefit. It’s really hard to put into words. When Diesel and I fly, we rarely talk to each other. When we’re tactically in the moment, I trust him empirically. I know he’s doing his job and he’s trusting me to not hit the ground when I’m 2,000 feet above the drone. When I’m being task saturated by just trying to keep ourselves and our aircraft safe and I’m responsible for 3 to 12 other aircraft at one time, the confliction of shots, if I’m getting task loaded, Diesel can step in and start directing the foreship or start directing a different formation entirely. When I’m popping up and working tankers back and forth, Diesel’s working with command and control giving the after action report, how many drones did we engage, how many are we seeing, and we are task sharing. So when you look at two people and one aircraft and what they can actually accomplish is our most unique and extraordinary capability. The aircraft can change. The aircraft can be upgraded, but the fact that we have a weapons systems officer and a pilot makes me 10 times better as a pilot than I would have been in any single seat aircraft. So it’s a huge testament to the Strike Eagle community, how we’ve built and developed, and what we can actually handle with that two person concept is absolutely eye watering. So I do want to take that moment to talk about the weapons systems officer and why the F-15 Strike Eagle is requested time and time again and why we meet intent over and over again. It’s because we have the people to do it.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
I didn’t pay him to say any of that.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
You should though.
Tobias Naegele:
I mean, you know, there’s a little irony in that we’re moving more and more to single seat fighters. But I won’t go down that road because those aren’t your decisions. And I will make a plug for a panel this afternoon, Chuck DeBellevue, who’s a F-4 WSO, the last ace on active duty will be here giving a presentation, a talk. And I get to spend some time with Chuck again, which is he just wrote a piece in Air & Space Forces magazine that was really tremendous. I want to talk about the friend of mine who’s actually in the Navy said to me a couple of years ago, he said, you know, the thing you have to remember about the military is that we do the same things over and over again, but it’s new people doing it every time. And I really love the imagery. And it’s exactly what you’ve been, what you’re describing. So you kind of take the mantle for a bit and you’re in charge and you actually have to be creative. You don’t really do exactly the same thing because you’ve got to iterate. The other guys get a vote. They participate. So you handle this and you are, when you go back, you’re the, you know, you might not have been that experienced the first time. Now you’re, you’re, you’re, each person moves up, you know, half a step. How do you carry that through? And how do you share that without sounding like the old guy who’s saying, well, you know, in my day we didn’t, you know, we didn’t have WSOs.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
I mean, I always go for the well, back, back in the day we did this portion of it. It’s a, it’s a great technique. And then they stop listening to you so you can say whatever you want after that point. You know, it was really important that we, especially as the, the, the squadron that is getting pulled into the AOR to help out. I was very clear with the squadron up. We do not own the ATO. We are here. We are going to fly. We are going to, the Panthers are going to war, which is what we say all the time. We’re going to do the job, but there are other people out there right now that have more expertise than we do. And so we just have to, we have to lean in and learn from them as much as possible. I think the big lessons learned that we wanted to push from our deployment down that then went through the chiefs and the T-bolts and the Tigers was, you know, mission, mission command or mission type orders and risk acceptance. So in mission command, you need the risk pushed to you. You need the decision making the left and right bounds given to you. And then you just need to be trusted. And so we pushed that. That was one of the lessons that we gave them that we took out of this deployment. The next one was that teamwork and communication of like, this is a team sport and being able to communicate between our squadron and the maintenance squadron was really important. And so that was another thing I brought up when we went back out the door was we need to be communicating with the other squadrons that are already there. We need to be communicating and asking them questions. We need to be telling them what our capabilities are. Our airplanes are a little bit different just because we brought some EPOLs with us. So we’re giving them academics. We’re giving us academics on the AGR-20 Foxes. And so we are communicating and we’re trying to make sure that we’re learning through that portion of it. And then the last thing is just making sure that that learning is happening at all levels. And so it’s really easy, especially for people that like, oh, this is my third or fourth deployment. Like, I’m just going to go do the thing that I always do. Just making sure that they’re actually getting in there and reading and learning as much as possible and challenging them to continue to get better. Otherwise, we’ll continue to make the same mistakes we always do.
Tobias Naegele:
Anything to add, Irish?
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
No, it’s very well said, Diesel.
Tobias Naegele:
In the future, you’ll go on, you’re taking a new job, you’re going to get to do new things. You’re going to bring this experience. You’re now going to have to teach, at some point, other people how to anticipate, I guess, how to anticipate change. Do you imagine a different approach or does it change your perspective on what leadership might be like in the future? I mean, we have gone through generations where mission command was the order of the day. And then we went through a period of time where there was a very long screwdriver making every decision. So, in that sense, we’re going back to the future. That does change the way that you’ve grown up in the institution and you’re going to have to raise people a little bit differently.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
It was an extremely humbling experience having gone through April 13th, the mission planning, the trust. When I was going through the mission commander portion of it, I thought that the task was achieve the mission objective, meet that intent, and that was the goal. I have since learned that I was wrong. That’s just the beginning. That’s the start of my responsibility. So part of this mission type order, decentralized execution, having delegated authorities and trust put into lower and lower echelons of the fighting force, that also increases the responsibility at the back end. And that was something I had to learn and process over time. That yes, we achieved the mission objective on this day, but now there’s an onus on me to share that experience, those lessons learned. I never thought I would be a part of a large-scale combat operation. You never assume you will. It just happened that I did. And now I have a responsibility to share those lessons, not just with the F-15, but with the partners and nations, other communities, our collective alliance that makes us so powerful today so that I’m constantly giving back. This country has given me everything, my family, things I love, and I’m very passionate about it. And now I have to give back, and I have to give back over and over and over again. I can definitely speak for both myself and Diesel that we’re getting older. I’m no longer the best tactical weapons officer. I had to let that go behind me as I continue to move on with my career. But there’s people that are better and stronger and smarter than I ever was, either weapons school grads or the young air crew that we have in the squadron. They are just so talented. And that goes beyond just flying. It’s the Airmen, the Guardians, a lot of people in this room, the ROTC cadets, the people going through their enlisting basic training. Those are the warriors of the future. And it is my responsibility to continue to share my experience, to give them everything I experienced, because they’re the ones that are going to win that next war. I can just provide a small piece of either inspiration or tactical learning or something to help them along the way.
Tobias Naegele:
I don’t know that I have anything that I can say or ask after that. Because I can hear the emotion. I mean, I really feel how powerfully you feel that. And I probably just took all the air out of the room and wrecked it. All of us have certain moments in our lives that will last forever, right? It might be 9/11 or it might be April 13th. And you’ll relive it. And you’ll relive it. The next day, you had to call people. You probably want to tell people you were OK. You probably want to tell people what had happened. I’d like to hear just a little bit of what that was like. Who was the first person you wanted to tell? And what was that conversation like?
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
So we got back. Irish ran a really good debrief across both squadrons, tallying up all the shots and kills and stuff. So we were there actually pretty late. Get out. I texted my wife, told her I was good to go. Going to sleep. That was the first person I wanted to talk to. But just the time changed. It’s like, hey, I’m good. Go to bed. I wake up the next morning to a phone call from Voodoo. It’s like, hey, the president wants to talk to us. I was like, OK, when? And he gives me the time. And I was like, is that in DC or Zulu time? He’s like, I think it’s in DC time. I look. And I was like, boss, that’s in 12 minutes. He’s like, well, you better hurry up and get here. And so we get down there. We had a great conversation with the president, with all of the squadron. We get in there. That’s when Voodoo gives the infamous, hell yeah, Mr. President, in his conversation with him, which was– it was really humbling to have that conversation, to have him reach out and talk to the squadrons the next day about the events. I think most of us hadn’t actually talked to our family at that point, because it was a late night. We did all the debrief. But I know that the first person that I talked to that wasn’t in the squadron was actually the president on that phone call, which is really weird to say out loud.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
It was the exact same for me. I was up, I think, for 48, 50 hours by the time the stuff was done and packaged up appropriately. And it was immediately into that conversation. I think my mom and dad are actually right there. Hi, mom and dad. They actually sent me a text message. So my parents at one point, when I finally get out of the vault and out of the debrief. But it was, ironically, the president of the United States.
Tobias Naegele:
All right. Well, I think you guys were awesome. Thank you so much. I think these guys deserve not just a round of applause for a great presentation, but a couple of true American heroes. Thank you.
Lt. Col. Timothy Causey:
Thank you for the time. Appreciate it.
Maj. Benjamin Coffey:
Thank you.