Enormous Marine Corps and NATO Exercise Underway in SoCal

Marine Air-Ground Task Force Warfighting Exercise (MWX) 1-20 is running in the Mojave Desert in Southern California from mid-October through early November.More than 10,000 US Marines and Sailors of the 2nd Marine Division,as well as NATO troops are participating in the drills.They are enacting a scenario involving the conflict between sophisticated and well-equipped peer and near-peer adversaries.It is an unscripted event, unique in the history of the Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, the high desert terrain in San Bernardino County.The base's more than 998 square miles is larger than some small countries.The range provides live fire combined arms training to promote readiness of operating forces.*
The purpose of MWX 20-1 is to increase warfighting readiness in preparation for major combat operations on a Division scale (such as versus China and/or Russia).It is a multi-regimental war game in which 2ndMARDIV will serve as Ground Combat Element for a notional Joint Task Force higher HQ.All elements of the MAGTF will participate, including close-air support; integrated artillery fires; tanks; amphibious assault vehicles;and light infantry vehicles.It will provide the Division with an opportunity to better understand and modulate its signiture, be it physical or across the electromagnetic spectrum: how it looks from an adversary's perspective, and how we can effectively command and control while minimising our footprint.*
Scenario specifics are being withheld for operational security reasons.Overalll,it will enable 2ndMARDIV to hone its skills at regimental-level operations in the defence; transitioning from the defence to the offense; and serving as a Combatant Command blunt force in order to reassure notional Partners and Allies,and deter aggression in a given AOR;and to set conditions for the reestablishment of a partner nation's sovereignty.
NATO participants include the UK's Royal Commandos,who are serving as part of the ADFOR, reinforcing and validating the long-held understanding that when the US goes into a fight,it does not go alone.*
Logisticians across the Division and supporting units crafted a deployment and support plan to transport and sustain the thosands of Marines and and tens thousands of end items in equipment.Managing hundreds of rail cars, tractor trailer loads, and aircraft through six different ports has proven the Division's capability to mobilise.*
According to 2ndMARDIV commander MGEN David J. Furness:
In the Exercise design, we will encounter a free-thinking "adversary force" with tactics and capabilities as good as our own.
2ndMARDIV will conduct complex manoeuvre warfare training on a plethora of disparate and geographically-disbursed ranges in order to challenge and improve our command and control (C2) capabilities.
We will employ and test some technologically advanced equipment...all with an eye on modernising our force.
Success may well be defined by getting the Division, and all the personnel and materiel that entails, the 3,000 miles required to prosecute the battle.*

Clearing Militants Not Enough

Helmand Province,Afghanistan is bordered by Pakistan to the south,a base for militant operations.Brigadier General Lawrence D. Nicholson,Assistant Division Commander,2d Marine Division,says speed is of the essence in Helmand.Soon after clearing Taliban militants from the villages,the Marines will have have to improve the villagers' lives.They will offer work such as cleaning the irrigation canals that water the Afghani farms.A U.S. program to provide seed and equipment to 125,000 farmers is also part of the plan.
General Nicholson had served in Anbar province,Iraq,which he regards as similar to Helmand.As in Iraq,there is a great need to involve as many locals as possible in the Helmand security effort.They know the lay of the land better,and the Afghan people are less likely to be offended by their own.So far,though,General Nicholson is having trouble finding enough Afghan troops to help him.He would like to have Afghans serving alongside Marines on every patrol,and at every checkpoint.It looks like another long slog in the desert for the general,a survivor of a rocket attack on his former base near Fallujah,Iraq.