449th AEG Airmen Test Readiness During Exercise Pale Serpent

The 449th Air Expeditionary Group (449th AEG) is a U.S. Air Force unit based at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and assigned to Third Air Force under U.S. Air Forces in Europe–Air Forces Africa. It is the Air Force component for operations in the Horn of Africa, flying missions for U.S. Africa Command and Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa. Its mission is to control and provide Air Force capabilities in the region—including airlift, combat search and rescue, medical support, and aeromedical evacuation—to support U.S. and coalition operations and respond to emergencies across East Africa.

Camp Lemonnier is a U.S. Naval Expeditionary Base next to Djibouti–Ambouli International Airport in Djibouti City. It is the main hub for U.S. Africa Command in the region and the headquarters of Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa (CJTF‑HOA), making it the largest U.S. military base in Africa. The U.S. military is present in Djibouti because its location near the Bab el‑Mandeb Strait gives rapid access to East Africa, the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula, allowing the U.S. to conduct counter‑terrorism, crisis‑response, maritime security and partner‑training operations across the Horn of Africa and nearby countries such as Somalia and Yemen.

Exercise Pale Serpent is a recurring joint U.S. military training event held in Djibouti, primarily at Camp Lemonnier and Chabelley Airfield. It is built around a large, simulated mass‑casualty incident and focuses on medical response and aeromedical evacuation. Typical objectives are to practice trauma care, triage and patient stabilization, rehearse moving casualties from expeditionary medical facilities to higher levels of care by air, and test how quickly Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps teams can coordinate and communicate during a real‑world emergency in East Africa, thereby strengthening U.S. Africa Command’s ability to respond to regional crises.

In exercises like Pale Serpent, readiness training typically includes:

• Medical drills: trauma resuscitation, mass‑casualty triage, emergency room workflow, patient stabilization and documentation inside expeditionary medical facilities.
• Aeromedical evacuation training: configuring aircraft for patients, loading and unloading litters, operating critical‑care equipment in flight, and transferring patients between ground medical teams and aeromedical crews.
• Operational and security tasks: establishing security around incident sites, recovering casualties from a simulated attack, managing limited space/equipment, and rehearsing multi‑service communication and command‑and‑control procedures so different branches can work together under pressure. These activities are all described as part of Exercise Pale Serpent and similar disaster‑response drills at Camp Lemonnier.

Public reporting on this iteration of Exercise Pale Serpent identifies:

• Air Force units: 449th Air Expeditionary Group; 776th Expeditionary Air Base Squadron (medical); 10th Expeditionary Aeromedical Evacuation Flight; 406th Air Expeditionary Wing.
• Army units: Task Force Bataan (including Bravo Company 2‑162 Infantry and attached medics), which provided security and casualty recovery during the mass‑casualty scenario. The exercise is described as joint with Army, Marine Corps and Navy partners, but specific Marine and Navy unit designations and any participation by non‑U.S. allied or partner nations are not named in the available open‑source reports.

Joint readiness exercises in the Horn of Africa—including at Camp Lemonnier and Chabelley Airfield—are held regularly rather than as one‑off events. For example, Pale Serpent has appeared in 2025 and 2025–2026 coverage as a recurring mass‑casualty drill, and other named exercises (such as Bull Shark water‑rescue drills, disaster‑response exercises and multinational crisis‑response tabletop exercises) are conducted on annual or biannual cycles under Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa and Camp Lemonnier. However, there is no single public schedule stating an exact frequency for all joint readiness exercises in the region; broadly, they occur multiple times per year under different exercise names.