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If you’ve spent time with the military – whether in uniform or not – you’ve probably participated in an exercise or six. The ships sail, the aircraft fly, the ground forces seize territory, and days later everyone evaluates how things went.
But while the exercise lasts a week or two, the planning and preparation have taken a year or more, and joint exercise are a full-time job for the personnel of J7 – the Joint Training and Exercises Directorate at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command at Camp H. M. Smith, Hawaii.
“The Joint Event Life Cycle combines conference events together to apply a formal method of collaboration to plan and execute a joint exercise,” said U.S. Air Force Col. Craig Rumble, the branch chief for warfighting exercises within the J7 Directorate. “Our exercises [also] typically consist of allies and partners.”
In a nutshell, the JELC process consists of the following:
- An exercise design meeting within the J7, where objectives are developed
- A concept development conference, also within the J7, where the exercise is shaped for a training audience and training objectives are loosely defined
- Initial, middle and final planning conferences – each are nuanced and require a significant number of people with varying levels of experience to attend
- Personnel and scenario logistics conferences, typically before the final planning conference
- A final decision brief to the exercise director leading into the exercise execution timetable
Though each step in this process is important in its own right, the most important puzzle pieces are the initial, middle, and final planning conferences. Known as the formal planning events of the JELC, these conferences bring together subject matter experts across the combatant command, in this case U.S. INDOPACOM, to officially build the exercise scenario. These can include service component, and sub-component leads from U.S. Army Pacific, U.S. Marine Forces Pacific, U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. Pacific Air Forces and U.S. Space Forces – Indo-Pacific), U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific, U.S. Forces Korea, and U.S. Forces Japan.
“First and foremost are disparate experiences and disparate levels of years of that experience,” Rumble said. “In the Air Force, we talk about air-mindedness, and that changes depending on where in the Air Force you come from. And then there are unique perspectives on the speed and tempo of a war when you talk to a Sailor, and even more when you talk to a Soldier and a Marine. In the speed of a fight, how the fight is tackled, and the problem is solved, how we get after thinking about integration – it changes, and it is different in nuanced, important ways across all those different services.”
Those perspectives – and that joint-mindedness – are part of why the United States military is so successful. IPCs and MPCs are designed to build the scenario with key joint partners to ensure training objectives are achievable within the scope of the exercise.
“The IPC sets conditions, defines training objective and starts laying out the support requirements, and who we think is likely to participate in the exercise,” Rumble said. “Following that, the Middle Planning Conference refines the actual scenario, putting boundaries on the geographic scope of the exercise and how much simulation and virtual play will feed into the live integration.”
In terms of simulation and virtual play, Rumble refers to a model called LVC, the Live, Virtual and Constructive environment that provides exercise participants with varying levels of situations they could face in a real-world situation.
“The LVC concept is decades old, and live is live people flying or executing with live weapons systems,” added U.S. Air Force Col. Vaimana Conner, the chief of all-domain training within the J7, U.S. INDOPACOM. “That can be airplanes, ships, tanks and ground maneuver personnel. Virtual is live people in a simulator-type environment, and constructive is not live, with the exception of where real people are managing weapons systems, moving in a computer-only environment.”
By the time the Final Planning Conference rolls around, subject matter experts have spent anywhere from 10 to 14 months ironing out all the details needed to finalize and wrap up tactical and operational details required for execution. And that timeline is often increased when multiple services and allies get involved.
Take Red Flag-Alaska as an example. Though RF-A often incorporates other services and other countries, it is planned, funded and executed under the Air Force’s service exercise program, according to Conner. The consistency of those exercises, and how often they occur, allow planners to jump it at around the MPC or FPC level, rather than beginning at the concept design level.
“Northern Edge 2025 is a good example of a non-standard exercise that gets put on J7 to plan,” Rumble said, because integration with other exercises moved the timing and purpose of NE25 as directed by COMUSINDOPACOM. Consequently, “we didn’t have the typical length of time to plan, because we were changing the ‘why’ behind the exercise, where we wanted to physically do it, and what its focus [would be].”
Due to the changes that exercise participants will see when participating in an exercise like Northern Edge, getting subject-matter experts from multiple combatant commands – USINDOPACOM, Northern Command, and Alaskan Command – in the room is vital to planning efforts.
These experts help ensure that Northern Edge exercises meet and exceed strategic and operational lines of effort in support of the National Defense Strategy – specifically, how joint forces integrate across combatant commands in order to project power and defend the homeland here in Alaska.
“Northern Edge is distinctly unique because it is now hitting on the operational, and touching a little bit of the strategic because we’re taking [each command’s] equities to figure out how we support and defend, depending on what we’re doing in [the exercise],” Rumble added.
In the end, the purpose of any training exercise is to learn, and even planners learn something new during each iteration of the JELC.
“All those training objectives, the scenario, are all built for learning,” Conner said. “We fully expect that when people, even the planners who are planning the exercise – when they leave and go back to [home station], they’ve taken something from participating in this joint exercise. Because now they understand that what they’re doing feeds a greater warfighting requirement from a joint warfighting integration aspect.”
| Date Taken: | 05.28.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 05.28.2025 17:53 |
| Story ID: | 499129 |
| Location: | ALASKA, US |
| Web Views: | 34 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, The art of planning multilateral exercises, by MSgt Hailey Staker, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
