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CAMP SHELBY, Miss. – Southern Strike 2020 rumbled across Mississippi Jan. 30-Feb. 11, allowing units to not only coordinate missions across a wide area of the state, but to practice joint operations with other branches of service as well as international partners.
Southern Strike is a large-scale, conventional and special operations exercise hosted by the Mississippi National Guard at several locations throughout the state. During the joint international combat exercise, participating units train in counterinsurgency, close air support, non-combatant evacuation and maritime special operations. More than 2,000 service members from the active and reserve components from approximately 22 states build combat readiness and relationships while conducting missions designed to enhance their effectiveness.
“The missions we do at home are what we’re tasked to do. That’s usually moving somebody from one place to another - VIPs or some Soldiers. It’s not always the missions we need to train on to better prepare us for a fight,” said Capt. Nicholas Simpson, 106th Assault Helicopter Battalion, Georgia Army National Guard.
“When we come to Southern Strike, we get to do missions that are more out of the ordinary – working with Special Forces and other ground units that get to train us on different tasks that we don’t get to see very often,” said Simpson.
It was Simpson’s second Southern Strike experience.
The pace of the exercise often challenges units because they have to adapt from their normal operational standards, he said.
“The missions we get at home are set up in advance, we have days to plan and it’s a very rigid schedule. When we come here and work with these units, they do change things on a regular basis,” Simpson said. “Sometimes it’s the mission they are getting that changes and then they pass on those changes to us. It helps us learn to be flexible and to work on the fly and that better suits the needs of a real war-time mission.”
It also emphasizes the need to train jointly with other guard and reserve components as well as active duty units.
“The joint training scenario is great. It’s something we never get to see at home. We’ve been able to work with TACPs [Tactical Air Control Party] on the radio, have Navy aircraft above us, and Predators above that watching everything that’s going on; so we’re sharing the airspace with more people and it puts more of a workload on our pilots just to train them better,” Simpson said.
The forces on the ground also benefit from the exposure provided by a joint environment.
“I thought it was a really great training exercise for everybody involved. I think it provides a great venue to integrate with partner nations. It is truly joint and inter-agency and multi-nation … so having a venue to do that, in a training (operational) environment simulates well with what we are going to do down range,” said an active duty Special Forces officer. “It’s hard to organize events like that, so accomplishing that organization and being able to train in that sort of environment is very beneficial to both SF Teams, foreign partners, and all the aircraft.”
Foreign partners participating in Southern Strike 2020 included Uzbekistan, Bulgaria and the Netherlands. Uzbekistan’s 6th Special Operations Battalion led U.S. Special Forces in an assault on Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center’s Combined Arms Collective Training Facility (CACTF) Feb. 11. The unique operation was the exercise’s culminating mission and was watched by Javlon Vakhabov, the Uzbekistan ambassador to the U.S., and other dignitaries.
“I was really impressed with all the different objectives and the CACTF in particular. It is very good, very good,” said the U.S. special forces officer. “The only reason I could tell (this was a National Guard post) is because it was a little bit smaller … As far as the training areas, they are up to par with what I’ve seen anywhere else.”
In a first for Southern Strike, in its ninth year, exercise directors were able to integrate the use of the MQ-9 Reaper. Its first mission was to launch from Gulfport’s Combat Readiness Training Center and fly to Camp Shelby to drop a GPS-guided inert bomb (GBU). The MQ-9s were piloted by servicemembers from five different states, another unique first for Southern Strike 2020.
Col. Rick Weaver, exercise director, said the addition of the MQ-9, an armed multi-mission, remotely piloted aircraft is enormous because of the integration with the different ground troops and air assets that the service members get to train with.
It took nearly two and a half years to coordinate with the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies for the approvals necessary for the mission, he said.
“Southern Strike is one of the few platforms that the MQ-9 can train in multiple locations in a joint environment with three branches of the military, Special Forces and almost 20 fixed and rotary wing aviation platforms,” Weaver said.
The MQ-9 airframes belonged to the 119th Wing in Fargo, N.D., one of only five Launch and Recovery Elements in the National Guard. They were transported from their home to Gulfport in Mississippi C-17’s flown by the 172nd Airlift Wing in Flowood.
The joint training has highlighted some of the differences in the way each service branch conducts their operations. Sgt. DeAngelo Mitchell of Company E, 1st Battalion, 185th Aviation Regiment, said refueling techniques are the same for the services, but there are differences in the techniques used. He was among a contingent of Company E that set up a Forward Arming and Refueling Point at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center’s Hagler Army Air Field for helicopters conducting missions there and refueled Navy MH-60 Seahawks.
“The Navy wants to see a visual sample of the fuel every time they fuel up,” Mitchell said. “Other than that, the refueling is basically the same.”
In addition to other equipment, the Navy also employed its Fast Attack Craft/Fast Inshore Attack Craft in the joint environment provided by Southern Strike.
The KC-135 Stratotankers of the Mississippi Air National Guard’s 186th Air Refueling Wing provided extended stays in the air above operations for various joint service aircraft, including B-1 bombers and A-10 Warthogs, which are a rare sight in the southern state.
| Date Taken: | 02.12.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 04.07.2020 12:16 |
| Story ID: | 363752 |
| Location: | HATTIESBURG, MISSISSIPPI, US |
| Hometown: | CAMP SHELBY, MISSISSIPPI, US |
| Hometown: | GULFPORT, MISSISSIPPI, US |
| Hometown: | HATTIESBURG, MISSISSIPPI, US |
| Web Views: | 63 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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