Photo By Spc. Jennifer Posy | U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the Multi-Domain Effects Battalion, 2nd Multi-Domain...... read more read more
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Shannon Collins
Army News Service
WASHINGTON – Leadership from the 56th Artillery Command, Mainz-Kastel, Germany; hosted a virtual media roundtable May 30 to discuss the operational significance of Exercise Arcane Thunder 25.
More than 300 U.S. and allied service members participated in Exercise Arcane Thunder 25 from May 11 through 27, a U.S. Army Europe and Africa directed, 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force-led exercise designed to strengthen multi-domain integration and interoperability across the European and African theaters. It took place across training locations in Germany, Poland and the United States.
The exercise served as a critical opportunity to validate emerging Army capabilities in contested, multi-domain environments, and validated the precision synchronization of nonlethal effects across domains including land, sea, air, cyber, and space to enable joint freedom of action in contested environments.
The Army and its NATO allies used the exercise’s location near the conflict in the Ukraine as well as information from Ukrainian partners to transform the warfighting concept and technology for the future of the Army, said Maj. Gen. John Rafferty, commanding general, 56th Artillery Command.
“We’re applying those lessons learned from our Ukrainian partners to the evolution of our warfighting concept and the technology we’re using to put in the hands of our Soldiers,” he said. “This multidomain training, live fire exercise stretched from Poland to Fort Huachuca, Arizona. It involved joint allied partners and proved the 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force capability to operate across all domains, to find targets at depth, and to strike those targets with kinetic and non-kinetic effects. I’m extremely proud of our leaders, Soldiers and allies from the task force and those who continue to prove the feasibility of the multidomain concept.”
Exercise Arcane Thunder is also the Army’s premier multi-domain effects exercise designed to synchronize non-lethal and lethal capabilities across the European and African theaters. The general said the exercise served as a critical opportunity to validate emerging Army capabilities in contested, multi-domain environments.
“The Soldiers are improving and refining the technology and the tactics, techniques, and procedures,” General Rafferty said. “Our Soldiers, sergeants, and lieutenants are the ones who have their hands on this equipment, who are determining the best way to employ it to get the effects and find the targets. We are putting that feedback right back into the system to improve the capability and optimize not just the equipment that we have, but the way in which we’re employing it.”
The general said one of the biggest breakthroughs was the Army’s ability to fight with live data across a large-scale combat theater using unmanned systems via land, sea and air.
“Sharing and fighting with live data through our mission command system, having the Soldiers receive information, produce targets, pass the information to the 56 multi-domain headquarters to work through the process of assigning the right shooter to those particular targets, all in real time, it’s a breakthrough,” Rafferty said. “Getting that data in real time from a micro high-altitude Balloon, refined by another platform interpreted by a Soldier at Fort Huachuca, [Arizona], and then back here at Wiesbaden in Germany for additional analysis and assigned to the right shooter. That kill chain used to take hours. Now it’s minutes.”
The Army improved its real time tracking of the Navy’s Unmanned Surface Vehicles through its command-and-control systems, said Colonel Patrick Moffett, commander, 2nd Multi-Domain Task Force.
“We also worked some contested logistics training, training with the Navy that we had not done before, using USVs to move supplies in a contested environment,” Moffett said. “It was definitely an improvement over previous iterations.”
The exercise validated the 2d Multi-Domain Task Force’s ability to lead and integrate multi-domain effects for the European theater, Moffett said.
“We demonstrated the operational use of next-[generation] technologies,” the colonel said. “We strengthened our readiness by deploying the formation, and we were able to capture a lot of lessons learned to inform the Army 2030 and 2040 modernization pathways. This was our opportunity to train for how we will fight and win in the future with the Army’s multi-domain capabilities.”
As the teams integrated all the Unmanned platforms across the domains, Colonel Moffett said one of the challenges was merging all the data together.
“Our biggest challenge as an organization was ensuring we had a good data management process to collect, observe, and ensure the data we were pushing out for our sensor-to-shooter kill chain was correct, valid, and good data,” he said. “It’s the essence of multi-domain operations, the ability to process data faster than our adversaries. From the task force level, it’s one of the major focal points.”
Lt. Col. Aaron Ritzema, commander, 2nd Multi-Domain Effects Battalion, said the team had to make strategic choices in terms of which technologies they brought into the exercise because of this.
“We wanted this not to just be an innovation, an exposition of new tech, but we also wanted this to be a training event,” he said. “We selected a lot of technology we were already familiar with. The challenge became, ‘How we can stitch all these together so we can conduct multi-domain operations?’”
Colonel Ritzema said the team met challenges with interoperability between platforms and payloads and worked through those challenges.
The exercise also helped Army leadership train on sustainment across continents, stressing mission command and control and how the Army can work as a distributed organization.
“There’s training, and then it’s qualification of crews in a live environment,” General Rafferty said. “We were qualifying multi-domain teams in a variety of tasks that involved finding targets at depth and then quickly layering kinetic and non-kinetic effects on those targets. That’s how we’ll fight and win. That’s how we’ll set conditions for large-scale combat operations in Europe. I’m so incredibly proud of the team and their spirit of innovation.”
| Date Taken: | 06.18.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 06.18.2025 12:51 |
| Story ID: | 500991 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 23 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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