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VAZIANI TRAINING AREA, Georgia - About 250 service members from five NATO-allied nations joined forces with the host-nation of Georgia during Agile Spirit 15’s command post exercise July 18-21, 2015, at Vaziani Training Area, Georgia.
“It’s always important for us to develop partnerships with any nation, and Georgia is no exception,” said Col. Clifford Weinstein, commanding officer of 10th Marine Regiment. “They are a democracy like [the United States] and they hold many of the same values that our country holds.”
Agile Spirit is an annual multilateral training exercise including a command post exercise to train in regiment-level scenarios and a field training exercise for company level engagements. The Georgian-led exercise included participation from 10th Marine Regiment and the Black Sea Rotational Force, as well as NATO allied soldiers from the countries of Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and Latvia.
“It’s important that we constantly engage with our partners and allies in terms of exercises. It gives us a chance to both learn how we operate, learn the capabilities that we both have, and what we can bring to a conflict scenario,” said Lt. Col. Mark McCarroll, operations officer 10th Marine Regiment.
The CPX, established during the previous iteration of Agile Spirit, consists of a pre-planned scenario taking place in a fictional nation. Objectives were established and different situations were injected during the exercise, training the multinational command element to work together to find solutions.
“They go through the planning, and then we’ll go through a simulation where both forces will operate against a thinking enemy. So we respond in real time and in the simulation, and that gives us the opportunity to react to things that may happen on the battlefield,” said McCarroll.
Soldiers and Marines from each nation worked side-by-side each day during the CPX, working through language barriers and adverse scenario injects to ensure the mission continued as planned. The command post exercise concluded the morning of July 21, signaling an end to Agile Spirit 15 with all objectives completed.
“Now, every single individual has had exposure to a foreign military,” said Maj. David Palacio, assistant operations officer of 10th Marine Regiment. “Really we’re planting seeds in a way for any type of future operations.”
| Date Taken: | 07.21.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 07.22.2015 03:56 |
| Story ID: | 170723 |
| Location: | GE |
| Web Views: | 84 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, Planting Seeds: Marine, NATO, Georgian forces unite during Agile Spirit 15, by Sgt Ryan Young, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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