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CAMP WILLIAMS, Utah — Panther Strike, a military intelligence training event that began over a decade ago as a battalion-sized exercise, has evolved into a completely new animal this year.
Nearly 700 military intelligence soldiers, trainers and professionals from 14 states, Guam, Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, came to train at Camp Williams, June 10-24, in the largest exercise of its kind in the U.S.
From the beginning stages of planning for this year’s exercise, hosted by the Utah National Guard’s 142nd Military Intelligence Battalion, 300th MI Brigade, the goal has been to expand the size and scope of Panther Strike to make it into the premier MI training event in the nation.
Lt. Col. Joseph Green, commander of 142nd MI Bn., and Task Force Panther commander, said that the exercise has recently shifted from a relatively small exercise, focused on human intelligence, to a large-scale multi-discipline exercise that incorporates human intelligence, signals intelligence, counterintelligence, and imagery intelligence, all acting at the same time in a real-world, deployment-based scenario, to prepare MI Soldiers for the kinds of missions they face when deployed.
Incorporating all MI disciplines into a single, cohesive exercise is extremely difficult because of how complex the scenario has to be to allow for all the intelligence disciplines to train at the same time, the way it happens in actual deployed situations, said Green. The difficulty lies in creating a training opposition insurgency, fully fleshed out with all its roles that military intelligence Soldiers can collect information about, analyze, and then act on.
“All of that is a very complex kind of thing to try to draw up and manage and so creating a real life insurgency that can be exploited by all those different disciplines has been difficult,” said Green.
Despite the inherent difficulties with creating a training scenario beneficial to all MI disciplines, Panther Strike leadership and planners have maintained high expectations for the exercise, now and in the future.
“We have a big vision for the exercise to be a mechanism to train our Soldiers to be mobilization ready and prepared in their collective military-intelligence tasks,” said Green. “That’s what I think we’ve achieved with this version of Panther Strike, and from here on out the brigade is intent on keeping the same kind of blueprint, still moving it around to its battalions, but keeping it at this level.”
Responsibility for planning and conducting Panther Strike, which was started by the 260th MI Bn. in Florida, rotates between the five battalions of the 300th MI Bde.: the 142nd and 141st MI Bns. out of Utah, 341st in Washington, 223rd in California, 415th in Louisiana, and Florida’s 260th. Last year, the rotation fell again to Florida, and Capt. Timothy Kelley, plans and operations officer, 142nd MI Bn., who is the lead planner for this year’s iteration of Panther Strike, observed that exercise. He met with the planners as well as brought after action review comments back to Utah to apply to the planning process for this year’s Panther Strike. Kelley said that from the beginning stages of planning, they have tried to make the exercise more applicable to a larger training audience than ever before.
“In previous years, there was more of an emphasis on Warrior Tasks and battle drills than you see in Panther Strike 2012,” said Kelley. “We really wanted to make this an intelligence-centered exercise.”
Soldiers spent the first week of the exercise training on equipment and tactics unique to their specialties. The second week, the soldiers moved to a forward operating base downrange on Camp Williams, and training transitioned from the classroom setting to a real-world scenario in which soldiers could put to use their skills, and the prior week’s training, into practice.
“Panther Strike was awesome,” said Pfc. Keiyonna Lighten, an intelligence analyst from Forest Park, Ga., who serves with Company B, 48th Brigade Special Troops Battalion. “Anytime we have exercises that combine a lot of experience from different groups and different intelligence professionals from across the country, it’s going to contribute to your success and your development as a soldier.”
Kelley and the many others who have been involved in planning and putting Panther Strike together have worked hard to create a training environment that is intelligence-centric, that revolves around the skills, equipment, and knowledge that Soldiers of all intelligence fields would benefit from. Such emphasis on those skills is a change from years past, and making Panther Strike more intelligence centered has gotten the attention of the larger military intelligence community, Kelley said.
“By making Panther Strike more of an intelligence exercise, we’ve gotten a lot of attention from within the intelligence community, and a lot of support,” he said. “For example, Intelligence Security Command has a lot of resources and assets that we have been able to tap into and coordinate for this exercise. A lot of our training teams that came out are INSCOM teams, or are from INSCOM units, which brings a level of legitimacy to the exercise.” Department of the Army military intelligence has also shown interest in Panther Strike because of its intelligence focus, equipping the exercise with servers and laptops, essentially an entire network, said Kelley.
Camp Williams itself has even benefited from Panther Strike, and those physical improvements will trickle down to all MI soldiers who come to Utah to train. One such resource created to enhance the training experience of Panther Strike participants is a Detainee Holding Area connected to the training FOB downrange on Camp Williams, fully equipped with state-of-the-art detainee holding and interrogation booths for use during training, Kelley said.
“They’re being used in Afghanistan, and for this exercise we were able to get some to Utah, emplaced and operational, for Panther Strike. They will stay here and remain an asset for the intelligence courses that the 640th RTI conducts throughout the year,” he said.
Next year, Utah’s 141st MI Bn. will be in charge of continuing the evolution of Panther Strike into one of the premier training events in the MI world, and as such will inherit much of the hard work that has gone into this year’s exercise, as well as lessons learned through the evaluation process designed to identify issues that come up this year in preparation for the next go around. Kelley said he believes that next year’s exercise could be even better and run more smoothly than this year’s because of that evaluation process and the hard work he and other 142nd MI Bn. Soldiers put into this year’s exercise.
“I think next year’s Panther Strike audience will have a fantastic experience as well,” Kelley said.
| Date Taken: | 06.10.2012 |
| Date Posted: | 07.06.2012 15:55 |
| Story ID: | 91208 |
| Location: | CAMP WILLIAMS, UTAH, US |
| Web Views: | 682 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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