SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii — The 25th Infantry Division’s large-scale training now taking place across Hawaii is a glimpse of the future of Army warfare.
The scope and the scale of the unmanned aerial systems being operated at this year’s Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center combat training, ending Monday, is unprecedented, Maj. Gen. James Bartholomees, the division commander, told reporters Thursday during a media roundtable at his headquarters on Schofield Barracks. He was joined by Command Sgt. Maj. Shaun Curry.
“We have over 500 drones that are flying out there in airspace that we coordinate with the [Federal Aviation Administration] in order to safely fly and contest,” he said. “So you essentially have drone-on-drone fights that are occurring, which is, we think, the reality of the future of warfare.”
Curry said that the soldiers on the field are preparing for that future.
“We’re trying to train our teams to make contact with electronics or robots first,” he said. “The soldier is a precious commodity, and so in order to protect them or give them more protection on the battlefield, we want to detect the enemy earlier. We want to attack and defeat the enemy earlier, so that when it comes time for the human-to-human contact, we’re on level playing fields.”
The Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, or JPMRC, employs high-tech monitors to give real-time feedback to soldiers on the ground, providing realistic combat training of the kind soldiers get at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La., the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., or a center in Germany.
JPMRC also operates a combat training center in Alaska, along with a deployable version that has been taken to the Philippines and Indonesia.
The center allows soldiers in Hawaii to train in the kind of tropical, mountainous terrain and far-flung archipelagoes found in the Pacific.
It lets soldiers “island hop,” Curry said.
That experience is essential as the Army carries out its Transformation Initiative announced in May that aims to make divisions leaner and more mobile. The Army is morphing 25 of its infantry brigade combat teams into formations called mobile brigade combat teams as part of that initiative.
The 25th Infantry Division’s 3rd Mobile Brigade is one of the first to transform into this more agile formation.
“This exercise is the final validation of 3rd Brigade,” Curry said. “They’ve had the whole year to reorganize and practice and rehearse, and the Army has told us this is what it will look like.”
The Hawaii National Guard’s 29th Infantry Brigade Combat Team is also slated to transition into a mobile brigade, Bartholomees said.
Central to the mobile brigades is the Army’s new infantry squad vehicle, based on the Chevy Colorado, which vastly expands maneuvering distance for soldiers.
The division’s 2nd Combat Brigade was among the first to test the vehicles last fall.
“The whole idea is that it can move an entire infantry formation, self-deploy in very tight terrain,” Bartholomees said.
The vehicles have contributed to a reduction in the amount of sustainment required in the field, he added.
The division has also increased its mobility by divesting about half its howitzers this summer to make room for 16 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers, or HIMARS, which can fire rockets with a range of roughly 40 miles or missiles up to 300 miles.
Unlike howitzers, which must be towed and then positioned, HIMARS are truck mounted.
“It gets a fire mission,” Bartholomees said. “It immediately pushes its launchers into position. It fires, and then it moves out of the way.”
The system’s agility was highlighted Thursday when four HIMARS were flown from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam to Wake Island for a simulated fire mission and then immediately flown back to Hawaii, he said.
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