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AGADIR, Morocco – U.S. Military Service Members across all branches and components came together to support troops on ground during African Lion 2022 providing planning, movement, supply, medical, religious, and all other logistic support to the joint all-domain, multi-component, and multinational exercise June 6-30, 2022.
AL22 is U.S. Africa Command’s largest, premiere, joint, annual exercise hosted by Morocco, Ghana, Senegal and Tunisia. More than 7,500 participants from 28 nations and NATO train together with a focus on enhancing readiness for U.S. and partner nation forces.
An exercise of this scope, employing a full array of mission capabilities with the goal to strengthen interoperability among participants and set the theater for strategic access, relies on many support components to ensure operations run smoothly and participants are taken care of.
U.S. Army Chaplain Lt. Col. Russ Boyd, an Army Reservist with the 311th Expeditionary Sustainment Command located out of Los Angeles, said he supports troops on ground by providing religious support.
“Soldiers are far away from home, but they still have a constitutional right to the free exercise of religion, and chaplains ensure they’re able to practice their religion however they need to do that,” Boyd said. “We do that by either performing services or by providing them with whatever it is they need to practice.”
AL22 events are supported by total force contributions, including National Guardsmen and Reservists, who provide critical support throughout the AFRICOM area of responsibility by deploying and interacting with a variety of nations.
“Chaplains come from a lot of different religious traditions,” said Boyd. “Religious affairs personnel have a lot of additional duties and things that they’re good at. Once we learn who else is in theater and get to know them, then we adjust so that we can utilize the things that they bring to the table and let them know what we bring to the table so that we can work together to provide more effective religious support.”
Boyd said that supporting religious services in a foreign environment calls for adaptability.
“We just led a chapel service here on the military base in Agadir, and we did not have access to any grape juice that we could find or obviously wine that we could use for communion,” said Boyd. “The closest thing we could find was beet juice, so that’s the first time I’ve ever served communion with bread and beet juice.”
AL22 is a critical opportunity for members of the joint team to build and test their strategic readiness to deploy, fight and win in a complex, multi-domain environment.
U.S. Army Maj. Chance Wirey, also with the 311th ESC, is the AL22 live joint operations center (JOC), battle major. He supports troops in a different capacity by tracking anything from ammo to medical movements during the exercise.
“I do all of the battle tracking for all live events in this exercise,” Wirey said. “If it’s a real-world movement of any kind, we track it in the live JOC.”
“The most important component to my job is to be a facilitator,” Wirey continued. “With that, we have to know exactly who to call when an event goes down, and we have to know who to reach out to, in terms of our partners.”
Supporting service members during an exercise or any large-scale operation relies on the interoperability of larger partnerships in African Lion 2022.
“This is a moment where I’ve been able to be taken out of logistics, and I’ve been able to do a job that I’ve never done before,” said Wirey. “I’ve gotten to work with people that I’ve never met before, and I’ve gotten to see amazing people like our [Royal Moroccan Armed Forces] partners and talk to them and understand their culture and how they work.”
AL22 integrates relevant partners and allies with mutual defense and security interest connecting vital lines of communication in North Africa, the Mediterranean and Atlantic Oceans. The success and size of AL22 is a reflection of the commitment these partners and allies have to security in Africa.
| Date Taken: | 06.28.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 07.12.2022 11:36 |
| Story ID: | 424105 |
| Location: | AGADIR, MA |
| Web Views: | 39 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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