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FORT HOOD, Texas – More than 4,500 Soldiers from the Army and Air National Guard, Reserve, and Active Duty components participated in a Multi-echelon Integrated Brigade Training exercise here June 3-24.
The MiBT showcased the partnership of the Mississippi Army National Guard and active components to demonstrate the U.S. Army’s Total Force policy.
“The MiBT was designed to be an exercise for a brigade combat team that was not going to get a combat training center rotation,” said Lt. Col. Chris Cooksey, the 155th Armored Brigade Combat Team operations officer.
Units from all over the country came to help with the planning, preparation, and execution of the exercise.
“As the MiBT grew, we started seeing units from Texas, units from Puerto Rico, and units from elsewhere in the United States coming together to make this happen,” said Cooksey, who was in charge of brigade planning for the exercise.
With all the different units involved, the exercise wasn’t simple to plan.
“We’ve been planning this whole exercise for about a year,” Cooksey said. “Multiple units came out here to Fort Hood countless times in the past year to plan this exercise.”
The exercise was meant to be challenging for the Soldiers in the participating units.
“The conditions were set for the most complex scenario,” said Col. Brandon Robbins, the brigade commander for the 177th Armored Brigade. “The planning and preparation has led to the MiBT, which is a way for a brigade combat team to train every system they have.”
The MiBT forced the Soldiers to flex their mental and physical muscles in ways they are not used to employing in standard training operations.
“We put platoons and companies in scenarios that made them think in a combat environment, and we achieved it,” Cooksey said.
The exercise was a multicomponent event that sustained readiness of reserve and active components.
“The reason we’re here is to build training readiness and to build collective formations, but it starts with the individual Soldiers, the leaders that lead them, and the ability to set the conditions to train in a rough environment,” Robbins said.
The MiBT involved many different training scenarios including moving a tactical operating center, defending a TOC, unit maneuvers, and offensive movements.
“There’s a lot that has to happen here at MiBT, and the goal is to make all of the training scenarios transparent to the Soldiers,” Cooksey said.
It was an opportunity for the Mississippi Army National Guard’s 155th ABCT to come to Fort Hood to train in a new environment that is more extensive than Camp Shelby in their home state.
“We took the brigade combat team from Mississippi, moved it to Texas, and trained with the 1st Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood,” Cooksey said. “Here we’re able to maneuver as a company, and use our maximum abilities in this massive terrain.”
The 155th ABCT and 1st CAV partnership is one of the strongest Active/Guard partnerships in the U.S. Army, which was demonstrated through joint staff training and development as well as tactical skills training.
Because the 155th was in a new territory, they also had to employ some of their basic Soldier skills.
“We train every year at Camp Shelby, but we know the place so well that we don’t even need a map. Here we had to do land navigation and we had to work on our communications and logistics,” Cooksey said.
The training exercise has been beneficial to every active duty and National Guard Soldier as they prepare for next summer’s visit to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif.
“While we performed superbly this year, we can always get better,” Cooksey said. “Now we have an assessment on where we are, and we know what we need to work on for next year.
“We’ll continue to train and push forward so we can come out of NTC next (year), prepared for what our country needs us to do,” Cooksey said.
| Date Taken: | 06.24.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 06.24.2016 11:19 |
| Story ID: | 202353 |
| Location: | FORT HOOD, TEXAS, US |
| Web Views: | 213 |
| Downloads: | 2 |
This work, Fort Hood Welcomes 155 ABCT for the MiBT, by CPL Justin Humphreys, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
