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Exercise Bamboo Eagle

8 min read

Exercise Bamboo Eagle

Bamboo Eagle is the U.S. Air Force Warfare Center’s large-force exercise that takes the fighter force off the Nevada ranges and pushes it into a dispersed, maritime scenario spanning the western United States and the Pacific. It was created in January 2024 as a follow-on phase to Red_Flag and has grown into a roughly 10,000-person event flying 150 to 175 aircraft from more than a dozen operating locations. Its subject is not air combat maneuvering but command and control, agile combat employment, and the logistics of generating sorties from airfields the Air Force does not own.

FieldValue
TypeJoint and coalition large-force exercise
SponsorUSAFWC (U.S. Air Force Warfare Center), under Air_Combat_Command
LocationNellis_Air_Force_Base, Nevada, plus dispersed operating locations across California, the eastern Pacific, Hawaii, Guam and the continental United States
FrequencyMore than once per fiscal year, each iteration paired to a Red Flag cycle
First heldJanuary 2024 (Bamboo Eagle 24-1)
Typical scaleRoughly 10,000 personnel and 150 to 175 aircraft; United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada

Overview

Bamboo Eagle exists to stress the parts of an air campaign that Red Flag does not touch. Red Flag concentrates force over the Nevada Test and Training Range and grades tactical execution. Bamboo Eagle takes the same aircrews immediately afterward, scatters them across civilian and joint airfields hundreds of miles apart, degrades their communications, and asks whether the command and control architecture, the tanker plan and the maintenance tail can still produce sorties. The U.S. Air Force Warfare Center describes the design goal as advanced training in a disaggregated, multi-domain scenario. In practice it is the service’s principal test of agile combat employment at operational scale, and it is where the Air Force finds out whether its distributed command and control concept survives contact with distance, jamming and short-notice tasking.

History

The first Bamboo Eagle ran for eight days beginning in late January 2024, starting as Red Flag 24-1 ended. Maj. Gen. Case Cunningham, then commander of the Air Force Warfare Center at Nellis, oversaw it, and the 3rd Air Expeditionary Wing provided command and control. That inaugural event drew more than 3,000 U.S. personnel, roughly 150 aircraft from more than 20 units, and over 300 personnel from the Royal_Air_Force and the Royal_Australian_Air_Force. Operating locations included Naval Air Station North Island, Beale Air Force Base, Edwards Air Force Base and Travis Air Force Base in California. What distinguished it from Red Flag was the deliberate addition of maritime warfare and agile combat employment, neither of which had been a standing feature of the Nevada exercise.

The event scaled quickly. By Bamboo Eagle 25-1 in February 2025 the participant count had passed 10,000 and the aircraft count 175, with operations spread across California, Hawaii, Guam and Florida, and with the Royal_Canadian_Air_Force joining for the first time. Iteration numbers follow the fiscal year and the Red Flag cycle they attach to, so the Air Force has run more than one Bamboo Eagle in a given fiscal year since 2024.

In summer 2025 Bamboo Eagle was folded into the Department of the Air Force’s Department-Level Exercise series, a month-long block of Indo-Pacific exercises that also included Resolute Force Pacific, Resolute Space, Mobility Guardian 2025 and Emerald Warrior. Bamboo Eagle 25-3 was the closing phase of that series, which Air Combat Command called the first exercise of its kind in a generation. Bamboo Eagle 26-1, in February 2026, was again the final component of the Department-Level Exercise series.

The name has been stable since 2024. There has been no renaming or merger, and the fiscal-year iteration numbering has held from 24-1 through 26-1.

What happens

Aircrews and support units arrive at Nellis for Red Flag, then immediately deploy forward. Forces disperse to a hub-and-spoke network of operating locations, some of them civilian fields such as Santa Maria Public Airport in California, others joint or Navy installations such as Naval Air Station North Island and Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans. From those sites they generate around-the-clock sorties across long distances while the exercise control team degrades communications, injects logistics shortfalls and issues short-notice tasking.

The recurring training objectives are consistent across iterations. Units practice re-arming and refueling aircraft at austere locations with the small multi-capable teams that agile combat employment assumes. Bomber and fighter formations integrate: Bamboo Eagle 25-1 paired B-2 and B-52 aircraft with fighters and ran F-35 offensive and defensive counter-air work on long-range Pacific profiles. Command and control is exercised from an air operations center down through expeditionary wings, with air task forces certifying against the scenario. Bamboo Eagle 25-3 leaned heavily on the Distributed Mission Operations Center to run a synthetic battlespace alongside the live fly, letting the joint force rehearse decentralized execution across multiple continents.

The exercise is also instrumented. During Bamboo Eagle 26-1 the 605th Test and Evaluation Squadron assessed command and control readiness by measuring how long it took to execute a kill chain and how data links performed under load. That is a test activity rather than a training activity, and it is one reason the event matters beyond the participating wings.

Why it matters

Bamboo Eagle is where the Air Force finds out whether its two central operating bets hold. The first is agile combat employment, the concept of dispersing airpower across many small locations so that a missile salvo cannot shut down a campaign. The second is distributed command and control, the assumption that commanders can push authority down and hold tempo when the network is degraded. Both are asserted in doctrine and in budget justification. Bamboo Eagle is where they are measured.

For an industry reader the relevant question is what gets evaluated. Bamboo Eagle grades command and control systems, tactical data links, mission planning tools, expeditionary logistics and sustainment equipment, and the timelines they produce under stress. Nellis test squadrons collect that data. The exercise is not an acquisition event and it does not confer a program of record. It is an operational training and assessment venue whose findings feed Air Combat Command requirements work, tactics development and follow-on test planning. Participation signals that a capability is mature enough to be handed to operational units in a contested scenario rather than demonstrated under test-range conditions.

The coalition dimension carries its own weight. The steady widening of the participant list, from the United Kingdom and Australia in 2024 to Canada in 2025, tracks the Air Force’s push to make allied command and control interoperable rather than merely deconflicted.

Participants

Recent iterations

  • Bamboo Eagle 24-1, January to February 2024. The inaugural event. Eight days, more than 3,000 U.S. personnel, roughly 150 aircraft from more than 20 units, and over 300 British and Australian personnel. Established maritime warfare and agile combat employment as the exercise’s distinguishing content. (Air & Space Forces Magazine)
  • Bamboo Eagle 25-1, February 8 to 15, 2025. Followed Red Flag 25-1, which had begun January 27. More than 175 aircraft and over 10,000 personnel operating from California, Hawaii, Guam and Florida. The Royal Canadian Air Force participated for the first time. The Royal Australian Air Force contributed roughly 430 personnel and 18 aircraft, its largest deployment to Nellis since it first attended Red Flag in 1980. (Air & Space Forces Magazine, Aerospace Global News)
  • Bamboo Eagle 25-3, late July to August 9, 2025. The closing phase of the Air Force’s first Department-Level Exercise series, run across multiple continents. Units operated from sites including Camp Robinson, Arkansas, and Naval Base Ventura County, Point Mugu, California. The 505th Command and Control Wing used the Distributed Mission Operations Center to run tactical and operational command and control in a synthetic battlespace alongside the live fly. (DVIDS)
  • Bamboo Eagle 26-1, February 11 to 21, 2026. Roughly 10,000 personnel, about 9,000 of them American and roughly 1,000 from the United Kingdom and Australia, with approximately 150 aircraft operating from 15 locations including Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii and Hurlburt Field in Florida. The 605th Test and Evaluation Squadron measured kill chain execution time and data link performance. The 21st Air Task Force earned its final certification through the exercise. (Air & Space Forces Magazine)

Sources

  1. Air & Space Forces Magazine, “First ‘Bamboo Eagle’ Exercise Builds on Red Flag, Adds Multi-Domain Elements,” January 30, 2024. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/first-bamboo-eagle-exercise-builds-on-red-flag/
  2. Air & Space Forces Magazine, “Bamboo Eagle: 175 Aircraft Fan Out for Agile Combat Exercise,” February 2025. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/bamboo-eaglemore-than-175-aircraft-agile-combat/
  3. Air & Space Forces Magazine, “Massive Bamboo Eagle Exercise Returns, with Focus on C2,” February 2026. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-bamboo-eagle-exercise-c2-nervous-system/
  4. Aerospace Global News, “Exercise Bamboo Eagle: an ACE adjunct to Red Flag,” 2025. https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/exercise-bamboo-eagle-an-ace-adjunct-to-red-flag/
  5. Defence Industry Europe, “U.S. Air Force completes large-scale military exercise Bamboo Eagle 25-1,” February 2025. https://defence-industry.eu/u-s-air-force-completes-large-scale-military-exercise-bamboo-eagle-25-1/
  6. DVIDS, “Bamboo Eagle” feature hub, imagery, video and unit reporting for iterations 25-1 through 26-1. https://www.dvidshub.net/feature/BENAFB

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