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The mission Balikatan is the largest multinational exercise here in the Philippines where we work with our Philippine partners to ensure that it are strengthening each other's military, ensuring that our technological upgrades are compatible, and we conduct exercises together to ensure that fact. We adapt to the environment that we find ourselves here through robust mission planning with deep focus on contingencies. Some of those are how do we execute extended distances with limited common structure in such a way that if a communication node or our pace plan fails, we have the ability for our pilots to make on-the-spot calls and decisions that enable the overall operation to continue.
Other considerations we have to work through as such as our maintenance posture, our fuel considerations, and the ability to integrate all assets at the decisive point. The ability for the collective team to come together both US and Filipino, the ability for us to plan, rehearse, and execute such a long duration operation with multiple helicopters converging at the decisive point all at once in order to enable a another aircraft carrying a HIMARS within minutes has been phenomenal. Task Force Saber is currently modernizing its helicopter fleet through mounting of external fuel tanks like you see behind me. Additionally, we've been installing new equipment on
our Black Hawks in order to enable us to have greater mission command nodes or even Wi-Fi in the aircraft to enable the ground force commander to see the battlefield before they arrive.
