Up to 10,000 personnel expected for 'home station' training exercise on ranges near Fort Greely, Eielson AFB
Up to 10,000 soldiers and other military personnel will converge on ranges around Fort Greely and Eielson Air Force Base next month for a big training exercise that’s intended to test the Army’s ability to fight in the Arctic.
The large-scale training exercise is called the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, 22-02. And it’s being held to evaluate the ability of the Fort Wainwright-based Stryker Brigade Combat Team’s soldiers and equipment to operate in a cold environment.
“It’s really a test of where we are right now as an Arctic-capable force in Alaska,” says John Pennell, a spokesperson for U.S. Army Alaska, or USARAK. And he says the exercise to be held March 9-24 mainly in the Donnelly Training Area near Fort Greely will include some 8,000 USARAK infantry and field artillery soldiers and personnel from Hawaii and Louisiana, along with a Canadian tactical helicopter squadron and paratroopers.
“So all told, I think we’ll be in the neighborhood of 10,000 folks that’ll be in and around the Donnelly Training Area,” he said in an interview last week.
That means those live in and travel through this area should know there will be more noise from aircraft and live-fire artillery training.
“There will small-arms fire. There will be increased helicopter traffic,” Pennell said. “We will be having a couple of live-fires of the HIMARS rocket system, as well as artillery.”
Pennell says this year’s Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center training is the first of what Army officials hope will be regularly held exercises to enable the Stryker Brigade to train in a cold-weather environment near the installation they’re stationed at. Instead of what they’ve been doing, which is sending the Strykers to the Joint Readiness Training Center, at Fort Polk, Lousiana.
“In the past, we’ve had to send all their vehicles and everything from Fairbanks to Anchorage to be loaded onto ships, then to be shipped to Louisiana,” he said. “Then, the soldiers would fly down, pick up their equipment, do two or three weeks of training, then be shipped home and all of their equipment shipped back to Fairbanks.”
Pennell says all those logistics can make a unit unavailable to do anything else for months at a time. And, he adds, “As you might expect, it’s incredibly expensive to ship all those Strykers and the other vehicles and equipment and personnel from here to Louisiana and back.”
Now that the U.S. military has wound down operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Pennell says there’s less need for Strykers to train for deployments in those areas. And with the Army’s adoption of an Arctic Strategy that focuses on that region’s strategic importance, Pennell says the service is placing greater emphasis on training for operations in and around this part of the world.
“So we’re again focusing back on being an Alaska force,” he said. “We’re focused on doing our training in the winter, because that’s what we’re here for. For cold weather and extreme high altitudes.”
Pennell says the new Alaska-based approach for training the Strykers and other units will mean all that equipment that previously was sent to Louisiana will instead go a hundred miles down the Richardson Highway to ranges around Fort Greely.
Slow convoys: 'The big thing to remember is patience'
The exercise will require numerous convoys to transport thousands of soldiers and the supplies and materials to the Donnelly Training Area, and back.
“You’re probably seeing convoys on the road right now,” he said, “as we move equipment and personnel into place for the beginning of the exercise.”
And they’ll be moving along very slowly.
“So the convoys will be traveling about 25 miles an hour,” says Andy Whitish, the Stryker Brigade’s safety and risk-management and mitigation adviser.
And he says convoys will begin running on the first week of March from Fort Wainwright to the Donnelly Training Area – in groups of 10 to 15 vehicles, each traveling 150 feet apart. The groups will depart about every 30 minutes in an effort to keep them spaced-apart.
“The big thing to remember is patience,” Whitish said in an interview Monday. “People have to remember that these vehicles are big, they’re slow.”
He says the groups of vehicles will stop two or three times on the way, and they’ll move over to the right lane in passing areas to give civilian motorists a chance to get by. But he says it’s inevitable that those motorists will up behind Army vehicles. And he cautions it may not be worth passing a few of the rigs and getting stuck in the middle of a convoy.
“The problem is,” he said, “if you start getting into the convoys, then you may have to pass 40 or 50 vehicles, only to find another convoy ahead of them, to do the same thing.”
Whitish advises drivers to check news outlets and other information sources to find out about when convoys are scheduled to run. And then either try to plan around them or prepare for a long, slow trip between Delta Junction and Fairbanks.
