If you had to put together a fleet of aircraft to launch a war, you probably wouldn’t change a thing from the line-up of a massive “elephant walk” the Air Force put on last weekend at Kadena Air Base in Japan.
It’s one of the biggest elephant walks — what pilots call a runway parade of dozens of aircraft assigned to one base or mission — we’ve ever seen, but it really jumps out for the message the Air Force seems to be sending with the various types of planes on display.
While most elephant walk events are simple parades of one or two aircraft — like the 52 F-35s that lined up at Hill Air Force Base in Utah in 2020 — the Kadena display was a near-perfect, piece-by-piece roster of the different aircraft the U.S. assembles for a serious air campaign.
Arrayed down the runway were spy planes built to locate targets, a 10-ship strike package to attack them, and fighter escorts to get the whole fleet safely in and out of harm’s way. There were two kinds of tankers to keep everything in the air, a command-and-control platform to quarterback the whole fleet and even in-the-dirt search and rescue forces to swoop in if something goes wrong.
If elephant walks are just to show off, this one, held on the U.S. largest air base in the Pacific theater, has a very clear audience in mind.
Let’s walk through what the Air Force and Navy were showing off.
At the heart of the package, right down the centerline, are eight F-15E Strike Eagles, one of the Air Force’s primary tactical strike aircraft of the post-9/11 wars. The ones at Kadena, the Air Force said, are from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina. F-15Es fly with both a pilot and a weapons officer with the specific mission of using speed and low-level tactics to reach well-defended targets with a wide range of bombs and other air-to-ground munitions.
Somewhat symbolically, the F-15Es are surrounded by 24 F-35As from Hill Air Force Base, the Air Force’s top air superiority fighter. In a notional mission into contested airspace, those F-35s would be charged with defending the Strike Eagles from enemy fighters. (F-35s can also be equipped with bombs for targeted strikes and close air support, but an F-15E can carry far more bombs than an F-35 can internally, while putting bombs on the F-35’s wings ruins one of its key advantages, a stealthy radar profile.)
Just ahead of the F-15s are two Navy E/A-18G Growlers, electronic warfare strike fighters. While both can add to the firepower of the Strike Eagles, their real role would be to find and suppress air defense radars that pop up along the way.
Of course, all that firepower is only as good as its intelligence. For that, Kadena had three big jets on display whose job is to find targets for the fighters.
In the back is an E-3 Sentry, the command-and-control platform known as AWACS. With its massive radar dome, AWACS is the U.S’s eye in the sky for modern air wars, directing friendly planes and detecting threats across a 200-mile front.
In front of the E-3 are two specialized spy planes, an Air Force’s RC-135 Rivet Joint and a Navy P-8 Poseidon. Like the E-3, both are converted airliners stuffed with electronic warfare equipment and operators. The RC-135 is an electronic intelligence, or ELINT, platform that can eavesdrop on modern communications systems, from cell phones and tactical radios used by individual soldiers to large radar systems. The P-8 is a hybrid with two missions: it can be a spy plane with targeting radars and other sensors that can find targets from hundreds of miles away, and it can carry weapons to attack ships and submarines.
And out front are two MQ-9 Reaper drones, which can attack a target, or simply watch over one indefinitely — even if that tactic is getting expensive recently in the Red Sea.
But as the saying goes, while amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, which explains the eight tankers on hand to keep everything flying — six KC-135s and two MC-130J special ops planes.
The KC-135s, which use a boom refueling system, would keep the Air Force’s fighters and bigger jets in the sky. The MC-130Js could be on-hand to deliver ground troops, either as paratroopers or by landing, but in the context of this air armada, they’ll be needed to refuel the Navy’s Growlers and six HH-60 rescue helicopters at the front of the fleet (the Growlers and helicopters both refuel via a hose-and-drogue, which the MC-130J uses.)
The rescue forces, of course, will be hoping for a slow night. But should the pilots of any of the fighters above them need to eject — due to combat or just bad luck — they can do so knowing that search and rescue forces are already in the air.
In all, it’s 53 planes, which beats by one the 52-aircraft elephant walk at Hill Air Force Base in Utah that we wrote about in 2020.
“An elephant walk like this sends a message you can’t ignore—it shows our Airmen, allies, and adversaries that we’re united, capable, and ready,” said 18th Wing command chief master sergeant Brandon Wolfgang in a release. “This kind of teamwork and presence is exactly how we maintain deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.”
The flyers at Kadena, it seems, need little prompting to put on a show. The base held a similar, 33-aircraft elephant walk a year ago.
UPDATE: 5/9/2025; This article was updated after publication with additional information about the assets fielded during the elephant walk.
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