ROBINS AIR FORCE BASE, Ga. — More than 69,000 men and women across the country serve in the Air Force Reserve. Their headquarters are right here in Central Georgia at Robins Air Force Base.
"On average, we have about 45 missions flying around the world at any one time," said Lt. Col Thomas Albrecht, a Battle Watch Chief at the Force Generation Center. "If anything goes wrong with those missions, the crew or the pilot will call in and we'll basically turn our 3,000 mile screwdriver and fix the problem."
Albrecht says some problems require a little more heavy lifting and that is the job of the Crisis Action Team.
"A hurricane might be a crisis we manage, but right now we've got COVID going on, we've got Operation Allies Welcome, supporting the Afghans that have come over here," he said.
In the Crisis Action room, senior Air Force Reserve leaders make decisions you often later hear about in the news.
"Once COVID started around January, February 2020, within 24 hours we had, I want to say, it was about 100 personnel in New York City supporting the hospitals there," said Albrecht.
You may remember images of U.S. troops helping Afghans out of Kabul. Some of them served with the Reserve, and their mission was crafted at Robins.
"We already had the units lined up of who was going to be supporting. We had them over there, they flew back and they did their job professionally and just how they were trained to dom" he said.
Along with fighting on the front lines with members of the active duty military, the Air Force Reserve also manages the Hurricane Hunters, firefighting missions, and several other unique missions.
"Working on the Deep Freeze mission, which is supporting the National Science Foundation, so they fly teams of scientists down to the South Pole and back to New Zealand," he said.
With missions spanning every inch of the globe, Albrecht says the Force Generation Center allows senior Reserve leaders to manage all of it in one spot.
Tracking all those missions every day helps the Reserve prove just how valuable its missions are, which in turn helps secure funding from Congress during budget talks.