July 21, 2021 ELLSWORTH AFB, S.D. — The prepping began over a year ago for Ellsworth Air Force Base to play home base to visiting aircrews during Combat Raider. Fighters from Goldsboro, North Carolina and Sioux Falls, South Dakota launching from Ellsworth with tankers and the familiar B-1B bombers. The large-scale exercise also brings in other fighter, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms to the Powder River Training Complex, the military operations area, or MOA, over the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming. “For a large-force exercise like this, we’re bringing in multiple weapons systems and we’re putting them in the same piece of sky and that’s a logistical challenge,” said Capt. Taylor Hiester, F-16 pilot with the 114th Operations Group in Sioux Falls.