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Arriving on the very runway they came to repair, the 1st Expeditionary RED HORSE Group stepped off a plane at Tallil Air Base, Iraq Thursday night ready to work. Based out of Southwest Asia, an 11-man heavy operational repair team has been tasked to repair more than 40 spalls surface chipping in both base runways.  

Once complete, the repairs will enable the runways to withstand larger aircraft that will eventually land at Tallil.

While the runways are safe for the aircraft they currently serve, the excessive chipping and cracking due to years of ill repair make it questionable for prolonged and extensive use by larger, heaver air frames.

"Basically it (runway) hasn't been repaired for the past twelve years probably not since the Iraqis left it after the end of the first Gulf War," said 1st Lt. Bryan Cooper, 1st RED HORSE Group deployed commander. "This runway was built back in 1980 by the French and the lack of maintenance and severe environmental conditions here have really taken their toll on the surface."

Repairs are expected to take approximately 3 weeks and will be accomplished in two separate phases. The first phase of repairs will begin on the inside runway "30R" which is currently closed. The estimated repair time will be about 12 days. During the closure, RED HORSE engineers will make "saw cuts" in and around the identified spall damage, and remove the inferior part of the runway. They will then apply a special material called PaveMend™ to fill the void. Pave Mend™ is a rapid repair concrete replacement substance that produces a bonded, rock-like material and forms a high performance concrete substitute.

Phase two begins when runway 30R is complete and repairs on the outside runway, 30L, begin.  "The outside runway will not close during repairs," Cooper said. "Runway 30L will still be able to accept inbound traffic while we're working on it, and we expect repairs on this phase to only take approximately a week."

RED HORSE teams are mobile civil engineering units that are manned, trained and equipped to perform heavy repairs and upgrade airfields and facilities, as well as support weapons systems  deployed to any theatre of operation.

The RED HORSE concept dates back to a March 10, 1965 memo from Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense to  Harold Brown, then Secretary of the Air Force. McNamara was intrigued by a report of U.S. Marines moving from an undeveloped Viet Cong-controlled area at Chou lai to a 4-squadron operational field in just under 20 days, in which they built an 8,000-foot runway.

By Sept. 1965, Tactical Air Command was tasked to organize train, equip and prepare two squadrons of civil engineers for deployment to Southeast Asia.

These squadrons took the name RED HORSE from the acronym, Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron, Engineer. In 1988 the were renamed to simply Civil Engineering RED HORSE squadrons.

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