Hundreds of airmen and a fleet of B-1B Lancer bombers will be temporarily relocating from Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota to Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota starting this month.
An estimated 800 airmen and 17 B-1B Lancers from the South Dakota base are cleared to relocate approximately 500 miles northeast for about 10 months. The move follows legal and environmental approval for Ellsworth to begin runway construction for the new B-21 Raider bomber — slated to be housed there in the next couple of years.
“The runway construction at Ellsworth is a key milestone in ensuring we’re ready to receive the B-21 Raider,” Col. Derek Oakley, the commander of the 28th Bomb Wing, said in a news release this week. “This project illustrates the U.S. Air Force‘s commitment to our nation’s newest long-range strike bomber and to the surrounding community.”
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Grand Forks Air Force Base is currently home to the 319th Reconnaissance Wing, which operates the RQ-4B Global Hawk drone. While the North Dakota installation no longer supports the nuclear mission, the base used to house Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well as B-52 Stratofortress and B-1B Lancer bombers, from the mid- to late-20th century.
Retired Air Force Col. Mark Gunzinger, a former B-52 bomber command pilot and director of future concepts and capability assessments for the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Military.com in an interview Friday that relocations like this are good for training purposes, but are often difficult on a service member’s dependents.
“From an operational perspective, it’s good experience to operate from different air bases frequently, rather than just your home air base,” Gunzinger said, but added, “It’s never an easy thing to do, even if you’re trained to deploy periodically and your family is used to it. Doing that for an extended period of time is usually rough on families.”
This isn’t the first time this year the B-1Bs from South Dakota have been shuffled around.
In January, just weeks after a Lancer crash at Ellsworth, 250 airmen and an undisclosed number of bombers were relocated from Ellsworth to Dyess Air Force Base in Texas due, in part, to extensive damage to the runway from the incident. In this week’s news release, the Air Force revealed that those South Dakota Lancers moved to Texas were later used in military operations overseas.
“Earlier this year, several of Ellsworth’s bombers relocated to Dyess AFB,” the news release said. “While there, they were tasked and conducted strikes in Iraq and Syria against Iranian-backed militant groups.”
The Department of Defense will eventually replace the B-1B Lancer with the B-21 Raider. Ellsworth was chosen in 2021 as the first base to house the new bomber. Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and Dyess Air Force Base were announced in September as the second and third bases that will house the B-21.
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