Pilots and maintainers from the 192nd Fighter Wing based in Richmond, Virginia, have begun to integrate into the 1st Fighter Wing based in nearby Langley, giving up their 1980s-vintage F-16 fighters for a chance to work on the brand-new F-22. Eventually, around 1,000 192nd personnel will join the 1st Fighter Wing and the Richmond Wing will be shuttered. Around a dozen Richmond Airmen have joined 250 people from the Langley unit's 27th Fighter Squadron for this three-month deployment testing the Raptor's ability to deploy and fight far from home.

"It's part of the total force initiative," says the 192nd's Lieutenant Colonel Phil Guy, who has racked up more than 3,100 hours flying the F-16 and, more recently, the F-22. Since the 1990s, the U.S. military has progressively and deliberately blurred the lines between the Active Component, Reserve and National Guard in order to create a seamless warfighting force. These days Army National Guard brigades deploy alongside their active-duty counterparts, Navy Reservists round out ship's companies and a growing number of Air Force wings are manned by a mix of active and reserve Airmen. Fiscal constraints have only accelerated this tend.

"The Air Force is losing front-line fighters," Guy explains, referring to recent decisions to cut several squadrons flying aged F-15s and F-16s. He says that integrating personnel from those squadrons into active-duty units is a way of preserving their experience while also taking advantage of new planes' ability to fly more missions than older designs. "We can get more out of F-22 with the utilization rate it has."

Lieutenant Colonel Wade Tolliver, the 27th Fighter Squadron commander with nearly 2,600 fighter hours, says the addition of Guardsmen will enable his squadron to fly sustained round-the-clock missions, something that was impossible before. Such "surge" operations would heavily depend on the 1st Fighter Wing's combined force of active and Guard maintainers including Tech Sergeant Scott Browning from the 192nd.

"I've been on jet aircraft fighters for 15 years," Browning boasts. Switching from the F-16 to the F-22 was no problem not just because of his high degree of experience, but because the two jets feature similar "fly-by-wire" control systems. This explains the seemingly unlikely pairing of a Guard unit flying single-engine, lightweight F-16s and an active unit equipped with larger, faster, twin-engine F-22s. "It looks more like an F-15," Browning says of the F-22, "but internally it's more like an F-16."

The integration hasn't always been easy owing to the cultural differences between the Guard and the active Air Force. ""We definitely operate differently than the traditional Guard," says Staff Sergeant Brad Fobear from the 27th. For example, the Guard is used to doing more with less, Browning explains. But even cultural obstacles haven't hurt the spirit of teamwork, especially on a deployment thousands of miles from home.

And besides, Airmen here acknowledge, active-reserve integration is inevitable in light of the Pentagon's ongoing budget crunch, whether they like it or not.