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CAMP ATTERBURY, Ind. (WISH) — National Guard leaders on Wednesday said this month’s training exercise will help them find shortcomings in new tactics before they become a problem in combat.
About 6,000 military personnel, including roughly 4,000 Indiana National Guard members, are taking part in Combat Readiness Exercise 26-02 at Camp Atterbury. The exercise is one of the first for a National Guard unit involving a new type of formation called a mobile brigade combat team. The 76th Mobile Brigade Combat Team, the Indiana Army National Guard’s primary ground combat unit, was recently converted from an infantry brigade combat team. National Guard leaders said the new approach is designed to allow smaller subunits within the brigade to disperse, redeploy quickly and operate independently. It incorporates lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, which has demonstrated the vulnerability of large formations to drone attack.
Maj. Colin Davis, the exercise’s project officer, said the exercise gives soldiers a chance to test new drone and counterdrone technologies and tactics, new communications systems, new electronic warfare systems and new vehicles, such as the Infantry Squad Vehicle.
“We don’t want any soldier or airman or anybody to experience something for the first time against an enemy, when it’s a two-way shooting range,” Davis said. “We want to be able to experience that, even if it’s simulated, here so we can think through that, take care of each other and do it successfully.”
Col. Benjamin Tooley, the brigade’s executive officer, said the biggest adjustment so far has been the speed of the units involved, along with the vulnerabilities his soldiers have to consider when dealing with new technology. He said the exercise allows the Guard to learn how to best employ the new formation on a battlefield.
“This is kind of a once-in-a-career opportunity to be able to take an organization and learn how to reemploy, follow those doctrinal principles in a new way when you look at the evolving threats around the world,” he said.
In addition to American personnel, a small number soldiers from Slovakia, Estonia, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine are taking part in the exercise. Tooley and other Guard leaders said they are especially interested in the Ukrainians’ hard-won drone warfare expertise.
“We’re super excited to have them here so that we can learn from each other,” Tooley said. “Obviously, they have a lot of experience implementing some of this tech in the real world.”
Davis said the exercise runs through the end of July and includes two mock battle periods. He said outcomes are not scripted and observers are present to provide feedback on what soldiers did well and where they can improve.
National Guard leaders said lessons from this and other exercises will be applied to a larger exercise at Fort Polk in Louisiana next year.
