Photo By Staff Sgt. Michael Folkerth | Marines from the 4th Marine Division work on developing challenging situations and...... read more read more
LIBREVILLE, Gabon – Members of the U.S., European and central African militaries have joined together at Central Accord 2015 to strengthen existing partnerships and develop their multinational logistical and communication abilities.
A crucial element to running multinational operations is establishing and maintaining an effective staff and command center. Marine reservists from the 4th Marine Division and Marine Air Control Group 48 are here using their staff operations experience to mentor their African partners to do just that.
Col. Richard Thompson, from the 4th Marine Division’s operations section, said that the U.S. Marine’s role in the exercise is to guide and mentor the participating nations in running an effective staff and operations center.
“Most of our senior officers in the division have a lot of staff training. Our goal is to go into these exercises and provide some staff expertise and help train partner nations on good staff work,” said Thompson.
Maj. Andrew Carl, a group logistics officer from Marine Air Control Group 48, said that the biggest challenge in multinational operations is bridging the language barrier, but it is not a challenge that nations cannot overcome together.
“Despite our differences we share many war fighting qualities that allow us to develop solutions,” said Carl.
In addition to the staff and operations expertise, the Marine’s also played a part in the team developing the scenarios that were used in the exercise. Carl said that the underlying theme for scenario development was to promote interoperability amongst the partner nations.
Thompson said that the central African nations were not the only ones who were going to walk away having learned something from the exercise.
“It’s good training for us every year to not only train and deploy, but to work with partner nations, the Army and gain experience from working across cultures,” Thompson explained. “It gives us a chance to maintain a stable of staff-trained officers at the division. The 4th Marine Division is not a warfighting division; it’s a force provider. So having those staff-trained officers gives us the ability to, if there is a real world crisis, provide officers that we can provide to whomever to plug into liaison or other staff positions.”
With military budget cuts being a hot topic in Congress, leaders across the U.S. military have been forced to constantly analyze exactly which operations are worth funding and investing in. Thompson said he believes that annual exercises such as Central Accord are wise long-term investments because they prepare not only partner nations but also the U.S. military for real world crises.
“There’s fighting the fights that exist right now, then there’s preparing for things in the future. This gives us a chance to work with folks to hopefully prevent things from happening. In terms of bringing partners together, it also helps solve regional conflict issues because each of these partner nations can bring something to the table. If we can help them understand the staff pieces by providing training like this, they’ll be more effective working together and it requires less interaction by the U.S. on a global scale,” said Thompson.
| Date Taken: | 05.19.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 05.20.2015 03:27 |
| Story ID: | 163902 |
| Location: | LIBREVILLE, GA |
| Web Views: | 92 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, Marines provide command and control expertise during Central Accord 2015., by SSG Michael Folkerth, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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