The U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines are getting ready to conduct a global exercise spanning 22 time zones to test their ability to individually and collectively address global hotspots. The Army recently hosted a joint service and multinational exercise that also spanned multiple time zones and continents. In both cases, the services tested their ability to react to global hotspots that requires leveraging traditional and novel technologies. Interoperability, logistical ability to support operations, smoothing out kinks discovered in previous exercises are among the goals for these exercises.
From Wavy News:
Naval and USMC commanders of U.S. Fleet Forces and Fleet Marine Force Atlantic briefed the media Monday morning on the exercise that will comprise 22 time zones, in a real-time test of technology and force readiness.
The Naval Warfare Development Center will serve as the overall command center.
“There’s an old boxing analogy that goes: precision beats power, and timing beats speed every time,” said ADM Daryl Caudle, Commander of U.S. Fleet Forces. “So to conduct high-end modern warfare in a distributed maritime operational construct, you have to work on precision and timing.”
It will involve six carrier strike groups in either virtual or live roles, including USS Eisenhower. Harry S. Truman and George H.W. Bush. A total of 25 live ships and subs will take part.
The exercise will enable Marines to work in a more maritime environment, after conflicts in recent decades that required more land and desert-based operations.
“We’re naval by nature, soldiers of the sea, and this training is imperative. It’s by law why we exist,” said Lt. General Brian Cavanaugh.
And short of actual war, the Large Scale Exercise will give the Navy and Marines the best idea of the limits of new technologies that will include “autonomous and unmanned capabilities, communications systems, and our ability to conduct contested logistics,” Caudle said.
“When you talk about from Desert Storm until now, we just have to get better. We should continue to iterate each time. The technologies have improved, our capabilities have improved over the last three and four decades,” Cavanaugh said.
Wavy News has additional information on this story.
“It will involve six carrier strike groups in either virtual or live roles, including USS Eisenhower. Harry S. Truman and George H.W. Bush. A total of 25 live ships and subs will take part.”
In other words, it will include 3 carrier strike groups and simulate 3 more.
I get that we don’t have the resources to involve over half our carrier fleet in an exercise at the same time and still maintain the posture we need to maintain, but be honest about it. Participating in an exercise “virtually” isn’t participating, it’s pretending.
Hey, I’ve been playing the “Seal Team Six” video game series for a long time, when do I get my Trident?
No time like the present I suppose, but not sure how this will improve the Marine Corps’ ability to deploy or test its effectiveness.
In a recent article written by General Conway and General Zinni, they observed that during February 2022 the Marine Corps was unable to meet a request to surge forces in response to the invasion of Ukraine, and during the following year, the Corps was unable to send a disaster relief force to Turkey after an earthquake there (due to the lack of Marines embarked on amphibious ships) – but managed to send a small detachment of Marines instead. THEN, the Marine Corps watched Special Forces Operations Command evacuate American citizens from the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan – a mission traditionally performed by a Marine Expeditionary Unit – followed by ending of rotational deployments of special-purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Forces. For the past 3-5 years, the Marine Corps has been unable to project forward presence and respond to crisis.
I thought that getting rid of their tanks and artillery was going to make them a leaner, more flexible, and more responsive force. 😂
Laughing to keep from crying.
Park a sub at the North Pole and hit all of them at once.
Came to offer the same advice.
Wait, grid or magnetic?
Interesting things happening, another magnetic pole possibly forming in Russia, a big hole in the Indian Ocean and some anomaly off of South America (link).
Don’t get me started on ‘disturbingly abnormal climate change-induced axial wobble’.
Never need MagVar when setting my watch.
*grin*
And yet, some 2nd LT will read a map and lead his troops to a barbed wire fence.
Night Compass Course: 2Lt pulls out map…looks up into thhe sky…”men we’re directly under the Big Dipper”.
No time like ZULU TIME (training).
[Current “Zulu” Military Time, Time Zone]
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/timezone/zulu
Hopefully, no main battle tanks will be needed in any of those time zones.
Make it a real test exercise…give them all analog wrist watches and a box of grid squares.
America’s decline began with digital watches and velcro shoes.
Worse, take away their cellphones:
https://media.tenor.com/TT-F0ehjSgcAAAAC/aliens-game-over-man.gif
Looks like they’ve downgraded from 3 to 2 actual carrier strike groups.
From the Navy Times:
“In all, the exercise will use nine maritime operations centers and six carrier strike groups — two live and four virtual — across seven U.S. fleets to globally streamline operations, according to Navy leaders.”