Speed is a Decision Advantage: How the 48th Maintenance Group is Advancing Speed

 Submitted By: Maj Christopher McLeod, SMSgt Nicholas Cruz, and SMSgt Matthew Mains

Speed is a Decision Advantage

June 24, 2025, was a clear summer day in Finland. During ATLANTIC TRIDENT 2025, the 492nd and 495th Fighter Generation Squadrons (FGSs) executed hot pit refueling across five different NATO fighter Mission Design Series (MDS) with minimal familiarization training. In a single day, maintainers successfully refueled forty-eight dissimilar aircraft, validating a United States Air Forces Europe (USAFE) proof of concept for cross servicing during allied Agile Combat Employment (ACE) operations. However, despite tactical success, we exposed a critical operational vulnerability.

After the first four aircraft landed, more than twenty jets stacked up on the taxiway waiting for fuel. The hot pit process, while faster than a standard turn, was still too slow for combat operations. As the queue grew, what became visible was not efficiency but vulnerability. Aircraft from multiple allied nations sat exposed on the ground alongside maintainers working in predictable patterns, making them easy targets for small unmanned aerial system threats. The tactical reality was unmistakable. The operation worked, but it did not move fast enough to survive in a contested environment.

For more than twenty years, the enterprise has optimized maintenance and logistics for safety, predictability, and procedural compliance within permissive environments. While this approach produced safe sorties, reliable aircraft, and disciplined Airmen, it did not foster speed as a competitive advantage or cultivate leaders with the authority and training required to adapt in contested environments.

In a contested fight, time becomes an adversary. Every minute an aircraft or maintainer remains exposed on the ground compresses decision space and removes options from commanders. The Combat Air Force’s Logistics Tactics Conference (LOGTAC) 2025 articulated a truth that many logisticians already understood intuitively. Speed itself is a decision advantage, and it must be deliberately designed into mission generation rather than treated as a byproduct of efficiency. Mission generation effects that arrive late remove options from commanders, compress decision space, and impact operational speed.

At Royal Air Force (RAF) Lakenheath, the 48th Maintenance Group (MXG) is confronting this reality directly by relearning a skill the enterprise allowed to atrophy; deliberate risk acceptance in pursuit of combat-relevant mission generation capability. This effort is led through the technical expertise of tactical logisticians who understand the operational value of minutes under threat conditions, not staff processes.

U.S. Air Force SrA Coleman Demmitt, 492nd Fighter Generation Squadron weapons load crew member, looks out at a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle during Exercise Ocean Sky 25 at Gando Air Base, Spain, Oct. 22, 2025. Aircraft maintainers and crew chiefs supported this annual exercise, ensuring mission-ready aircraft and enabling seamless operations among Allied and partner nations. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Emili Koonce)

Forging Combat Relevance

Hot pit refueling is not a new capability. What is new is the recognition that legacy hot pit procedures were designed for an environment that will not exist in today’s armed conflict. They maximize safety in benign conditions but are poorly suited for contingency operations where exposure, predictability, and tempo drive risk.

In December 2025, 48 MXG initiated a LOGTAC-aligned effort to deliberately compress ground refueling timelines for both F-15E and F-35 aircraft. The objective was not to erode safety standards but to reduce the greater risk, an aircraft’s time on ground, by critically examining safety standards and deliberately choosing where risk belonged in the process. We identified which steps mitigated catastrophic risk and then deliberately challenged every other aspect of the process to better support all domain combat power pulse concepts, realistic threat response, and the mission generation ‘plays’ developed during LOGTAC.

Operating under a signed Mission Type Order (MTO) from the group commander, a cross-functional team composed of maintenance group, logistics readiness squadron, operations group, and wing staff members conducted a disciplined examination of each step in the hot pit sequence. The resulting contingency construct reduces F-15 hot pit timelines to twelve minutes and F-35 timelines to fifteen minutes; measured from taxi-in to taxi-out. This represents approximately a 60% reduction in stationary ground exposure.

Achieving these timelines required eliminating the cursory element, restructuring inspection flow, and accepting moderate risk based on probability and severity rather than defaulting to compliance-driven risk avoidance. Every deviation was deliberate, reviewed, and owned. The construct was then exercised and institutionalized during large-force events such as POINT BLANK 2026, where the 48th Fighter Wing simultaneously operated across three locations in the United Kingdom while supporting multiple days of allied defensive counter air operations.

Executing contingency hot pits across all three locations within the Mission Capability Crew (MCC) construct not only enabled sustained sortie generation but also reduced risk to maintainers by shortening exposure to potential missile and drone threats. This is a small example of what becomes possible when minutes are deliberately reclaimed. When applied at scale and practiced routinely, these gains create meaningful decision advantage in contested environments, leading to relevant operational speed impacts.

Mission Type Orders Enabling Tactical Leadership

The most important aspect of this effort is cultural rather than procedural. Instead of issuing prescriptive instructions, the group relied on written MTOs to establish commander intent, end state, and acceptable risk boundaries. The group deliberately pushed down execution design to the squadrons and sections that operate on the flightline daily.

CGOs, SNCOs, and NCOs led the redesign. They rewrote local checklists, researched technical order authorities, coordinated waivers, and embedded risk directly into execution rather than layering additional controls to mitigate every theoretical hazard. Quality Assurance functioned as validators of operational reality rather than compliance enforcement, establishing time standards and ensuring deviations were intentional and defensible.

This is disciplined decentralization in practice. Speed cannot be directed into existence through staff coordination. It must be engineered by professionals who understand the system at its most granular level and who must overcome the consequences of execution.

U.S. Airmen from the 48th Fighter Wing conduct refueling hot-pit operations on an F-35 Lightning II aircraft in support of Exercise Point Blank 26 at RAF Leeming, England, Jan. 26, 2026. Airmen accomplished hot-pits, allowing aircraft to refuel with engines running, enhancing Agile Combat Employment capabilities and the ability to respond swiftly to emerging threats. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Elizabeth Davis)

Accepting Risk

Risk acceptance in our community is often discussed but rarely actioned, but we know risk acceptance is an operational imperative for future success. With that in mind, each contingency hot pit checklist developed by the group is paired with a formal risk acceptance package using Department of the Air Force Form 4437. These packages were built by subject matter experts, reviewed by safety professionals, and presented to the appropriate risk acceptance authority with a clear articulation of probability, severity, and duration.

This matters because risk was accepted at the appropriate level, which enabled Airmen to practice new operations before those checklists are required in contingency operations. By forcing risk into the open and deliberately owning it, the organization created space to move faster with a shared understanding of potential negative outcomes.

That process is essential in preparing for a contested environment. It will be the bedrock for developing mission generation “acceptable levels of risk” that can be trained, exercised, and institutionalized. Over time, it builds a common framework for understanding tactical risk to force relative to risk to mission and enables commanders to make informed tradeoffs in complex operational environments.

Cross MDS Capability

 Speed does not stop at the hot pit. In parallel with hot pit experimentation, 48 MXG is building mission ready Airmen capable of executing the MCC construct across MDS rather than remaining confined to a single platform. Maintainers are deliberately trained to cross-service both F-35 and F-15 aircraft, enabling teams to operate based on effects rather than being limited by what jet lands at your location. Cross-MDS servicing reframes the operational question from who owns the aircraft to what must be accomplished to generate combat power now. It expands options for commanders executing ACE operations and increases resilience at Main Operating Bases (MOBs).

The 492 FGS and 493 FGS are leading the refinement of this capability. Following four months of deliberate training and internal exercises both at home station and deployed, these units demonstrated sustained sortie generation across multiple locations during POINT BLANK 26. The 493 FGS operated from three locations simultaneously while executing the MCC construct across the entire squadron, proving both scalability and resilience in sustained operations. Their 12 MCCs generated sorties across two weeks of sustained operations, including in place of traditional cellular constructs while executing dispersed generation from the MOB.

This work is being led by CGOs, SNCOs, and NCOs who are closest to execution, closest to friction, and best positioned to identify where speed can be gained without incurring unacceptable risk.

Why Tactical Logisticians Matter

These efforts didn’t originate from USAFE. They were initiated, refined, and executed by tactical logisticians in forums like LOGTAC and through disciplined experimentation on the flightline. Tactical logisticians understand that logistics is not a supporting function in modern warfare. It is the decisive element of competition and conflict.

CGOs and SNCOs are uniquely positioned to drive this change. They possess the operational proximity to understand reality and the experience to translate that reality into actionable execution. When empowered through mission command concepts like MTOs and supported by commanders willing to trust decentralized execution, CGOs and SNCOs become the “engines of our success”.

LOGTAC provided the framework. The 48 MXG and our most tactical logisticians are cementing the Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) through experimentation and regular implementation into our exercises

Conclusion

The work underway at RAF Lakenheath is not about hot pits or MCC. It is about restoring the role of commanders, CGOs, and SNCOs as decision makers rather than compliance managers. It is about building mission generation speed that is repeatable, defensible, and executable under threat. It is about applied judgment, ownership, and the willingness to accept risk at all levels of the logistics enterprise.

In the next fight, logistics will not be judged by compliance and efficiency. We will be judged by whether we generated options fast enough to matter. That fight will be won or lost by tactical logisticians who are trusted to lead.

About the Authors

Maj Christopher McLeod is the 492 FGS Commander at RAF Lakenheath, United Kingdom (USAFE).

SMSgt Nicholas Cruz is the 493 FGS Sortie Support Flight Chief at RAF Lakenheath, United Kingdom (USAFE). 

SMSgt Matthew Mains is the 48 MXG Chief of Maintenance Tactics at RAF Lakenheath, United Kingdom (USAFE).