Photo By Troy Darr | U.S. Army Maj. Wade Cady, an exercise planner with the Joint Warfare Center...... read more read more
ULM, Germany -- NATO service members from 24 nations met at the Joint Support and Enabling Command here Sept. 11-14 to war game the alliance’s capability to enable, reinforce and sustain military forces in support of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
“Exercise Steadfast Foxtrot 24 demonstrated the NATO alliance's capability to deter our adversaries and defend alliance territory through three simultaneous war games focused on sustainment flow, medical patient flow management, and NATO's Regional Plan Southeast,” said U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 4 Jonathon Nelson from Allied Joint Force Command Naples J4 headquartered in Italy. “This exercise was extremely successful and highlighted our Alliance's mastery of complicated skill sets necessary to deploy, fight and win.”
The primary training audience for the exercise was the Joint Support and Enabling Command or JSEC whose key components in the coordination function are enablement, reinforcement by forces and sustainment, according to German Army Maj. Gen. Dirk Kipper, JSEC deputy chief of staff for operations. He added that more than 250 personnel participated in the exercise.
But for U.S. Army Lt. Col. Erin Humelsine, NATO Force Integration Unit-Romania, who is on the third NATO assignment of her career, the key component of the exercise was relationship building. The primary mission of NFIU-Romania is to help facilitate the rapid deployment of allied forces to Romania, support collective defense planning and assist in coordinating training and exercises.
“Being here at this exercise enabled me to network with a group of talented, professional individuals who are all here for one purpose, and that is to advance our NATO initiatives,” said Humelsine. “Having served in multiple NATO assignments, this exercise provided me the opportunity to reconnect with people who I have worked with previously and now can add to my, for lack of a better term, Rolodex to be able to call should I ever need anything, and have them know that if they ever need anything from me, they are able to call me as well.
“NATO is all about networking and building relationships. Our alliance is what makes us stronger,” she said.
Germany Army Lt. Col. Christopher Horny, JSEC J7, said Exercise Steadfast Foxtrot is unique.
“This exercise is a great chance for JSEC to test our own procedures, and it's a great chance for the nations to participate and align their plans with ours,” he said. “We are strengthening our alliance, and creating a mutual understanding of what needs to be done to send the message of a credible deterrence and defense. We are ready for to protect our allies and our alliance.”
Steadfast Foxtrot is in its second year after a long process developing a war game-based, strategic and operational level exercise for NATO that allows units and nations to work on and develop our logistics enablement and sustainment.
“As a member of SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), we are pleased to have the opportunity to train alongside the other NATO headquarters and our NATO allies, who have come to this exercise with an extremely high level of commitment to ensure that we are ready for the threats that we will face in the future,” said U.S. Air Force Maj. Brittany Morreale, SHAPE J4 located in Mons, Belgium. “Compared to last year, the 2024 war game has developed significantly.
“This year we're playing with more nations, and we're focusing especially on sustainment, which is what is ultimately required to ensure that we are ready to endure a long fight and win.’
Morreale said war gaming is a new way of exercising within NATO.
“It's forcing our officers at all levels to take the place of decision makers, to make the decisions that will ultimately be the change makers in our fight,” she said.
U.S. Army Maj. Wade Cady, an exercise planner with the Joint Warfare Center headquartered in Stavanger, Norway, helped develop and test the details of the war games used in Exercise Steadfast Foxtrot.
“War gaming in general is a great tool for the alliance that allows us to get at the distinctions that other methods may not, like ROC (rehearsal of concept) drills or just other exercises,” said Cady. “So, in a war game, players have decisions to make based on the conflicts or friction that's introduced by the mechanics that are part of this game.”
“And then they have to deal with those consequences for the rest of the game.
“War gaming is really about the players, the decisions and the consequences that that are made.
“Another part of war gaming is it's a multi-step process where we take the sponsor's feedback and what they would like.
“In this case JSEC is the primary training unit. And we're able to really develop and design a game to get after their training objectives and their questions.
“The game that's before us, a regional plan for southeast, is no different.
“We were able to create a refinement from Steadfast Foxtrot 23 last year. And we just continued to improve it over the last nine months with all the different engagements that JSEC has put together.
“You'll see the methods, models and tools we use in war gaming as far as the tokens and the dice mechanics, which aren't really about dice, it's more about probability.
“Realistically, this war game gets after roles, responsibilities and authorities. And it's generating a lot of good discussion, that we’ve had the last few days.
Cady also said that war gaming offers some opportunities that are not as accessible in computer modeling and simulations.
“What really, really is good about war gaming in general, whether you're a hobbyist war gamer or a war gamer in the military community is you're able to touch and feel and have those conversations and discussions that exercises and other simulated versions don't offer,” said Cady. “It just helps drive the dialog a little better when you're seated at a map, you have the player mat set in front of you, and you can see the pieces moving on the board.
“One, it's fun. And two, you're able to have detailed discussions about what is occurring in the exercise that I don't think you would get sitting at a computer.
“It helps people keep them more engaged, creates opportunities for better, more detailed discussions. You can really get after the sponsor’s training objectives.
“I think the success of a war game is really about the shared understanding coming out of all the participating nations that are here today. And I think this game is getting after that shared understanding,” said Cady.
British Royal Air Force Wing Commander Jayne Arscott, who is assigned to the SHAPE JMED directorate, participated in the medical patient flow management war game.
“We've got over 50 participants from 18 nations playing, and we're going through the motions of new patient flow management guidelines that we've introduced fairly recently in NATO,” said Arscott. “
“We're moving patients from the casualty staging unit near the area of conflict, and we're moving patients back to the nations via a new patient evacuation concept called hubs, medical hubs.
“Now, the medical hubs are, generally, civilian hospitals that are in countries some ways from the area of war fighting, and it's a safe haven for our patients to be cared for and where they can stay until the nations are ready to come back and collect them.
“Our hubs will generally be civilian hubs, having that integration and coordination with our civilian partners.
“The hubs are the safe haven where we can keep our patients so they're safe, they're away from the conflict area, and they can be cared for in civilian hospitals.
“The hospitals will have the capacity and capability to look after the types of patients that we will be seeing in a lot of the conflict areas, in major operations, and in an Article 5 scenario that we may be facing.
“Cooperation and coordination with our civilian health care system is really important.
“We've seen lessons from recent conflicts where civilian health care systems and the military health care systems really have to work closely together and pool our resources to coordinate and get our patients home safely.
“Steadfast Foxtrot has been a really positive experience.
“We've had a huge amount of engagement from all the players, and we're really hoping that the players will go home and feel very confident with the way that patient movements will flow from the battlefield right through to the hubs and back to the nations.
“Because of the new patient flow management guideline, this exercise is really showing how well NATO is working together with all the nations and the allies.
“Not only are we sending our troops to the frontline, but we are also actually able to care for our troops on the front line.
“And on the way back, we will get our patients, and no one will be left behind,” said Arscott.
While JSEC was the primary training audience for this exercise, NATO’s new Allied Reaction Force was a critical focus for the participants’ game play.
The NATO Allied Reaction Force is a strategic, high-readiness, multi-domain capable force that can deliver forces, fires and effects within 10 days to either strengthen deterrence or provide strategic capabilities to oppose adversaries.
U.S. Army Lt. Col. David Howe, NATO Rapid Deployable Corps-Italy, represented the ARF in the NATO Regional Plans Southeast war game.
“What this exercise lets us do is interact with all the agencies and nations that we (NRDC Italy as NATO’s Allied Reaction Force) will be working with in a real situation, understanding the mechanics of movements and coordination that are required to make the whole process work,” said Howe. “This is a perfect venue to do that and identify where potential friction points are and take notes on that and continue to find those processes that are going to be critical for us to operate.”
As the U.S. senior national representative at JSEC, Army Col. Drew Johannes, had the opportunity to interact and participate in all three war games during the exercise. Johannes’s primary duty at JSEC is deputy chief of staff for the Joint Military Engineering Directorate.
“This is a very, very complex mission,” said Johannes. “These war games make it clear how complicated it is reinforce, move into the theater, sustain your units already there, and simultaneously retrograde in and out of theater while involved in an active conflict.”
“You add on to that the multinational component of it, having to coordinate support with all the different nations for all the different troop contributing nations' military units, as well as just physically moving through those nations increases the scope of complexity.
"But as we work through the process here, we actually start feeling more confident and comfortable knowing that we have such great partners and such a great opportunity to get after this complex problem,” said Johannes. “I believe the participants are leaving here more confident that, if we do actually need to do this for real, we've got the right people in the right places to deter aggression and defend our alliance.”
| Date Taken: | 09.20.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 09.20.2024 05:22 |
| Story ID: | 481370 |
| Location: | ULM, BADEN-WURTTEMBERG, DE |
| Web Views: | 146 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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