Photo By Spc. Carleeann Smiddy | Sgt. Thomas Tamesis, a gunner assigned to the 1st Battalion, 174th Air Defense...... read more read more
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CAMP GRAYLING, Mich.—In the swelter of the August heat, the convoys and cargo planes arrive. U.S. Marines, Army reservists and Guardsmen, and international partners who know too well war is no longer theoretical, descend upon Northern Michigan. They pack their gear, trudge the pine forest trails, and listen for the high buzz of drones. Somewhere high above an M109 Paladin gun line, an AC-130 gunship peaks out from the clouds. It’s not a combat zone, but the choreography looks familiar.
This is the National All-Domain Warfighting Center, or NADWC, and if it sounds like a battlefield, that’s the point. Here, from the maneuver areas of the north woods to the air bases scattered like islands across the state, the U.S. military and its partners rehearse for wars that haven’t started yet.
“This is training how we’ll fight,” says Capt. Mason White of the 2nd Battalion, 222nd Field Artillery Regiment, Utah Army National Guard. His soldiers scanned the skies above as he spoke, where drones, now an everyday feature of modern conflict, could be hovering unseen and nearly silent.
In the Northern Strike command post, the exercise planners call it multi-domain operations—land, sea, air, cyber, space. They talk in acronyms: JADC2, CEMA, DCO. Beneath the jargon, though, is something urgent. This team is trying to imagine the unimaginable, creating the challenges of a war that does not yet exist, to train service members from all walks of life on how to address them.
Drones are incorporated everywhere. They are cheap. They are ubiquitous. They are deadly. In Ukraine, grenades are dropped in tank hatches like it’s a video game. In the Middle East, they move in swarms, overwhelming air defenses. At the NADWC’s Camp Grayling, service members train to kill the drones before the drones kill first.
“The challenge with drones is learning to deconflict airspace,” says British Army Warrant Officer 2 David Pepper, 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, “Also managing the airspace with suicide drones and [friendly] manned aircraft like helicopters.” Pepper is from Northern Ireland. This is his first time at Northern Strike.
Here these drones are hunted like birds. In a training area referred to as “The Cage,” algorithms flag their flight paths. The first attempts to disable them are electronic in nature, jamming their signals. When this fails, service members are introduced to a 30mm automatic cannon, which can rip into the sky from atop a mine-resistant vehicle. Nearby, a sergeant wipes sweat from his brow and stares into his computer monitor, tracking pixels for the next engagement.
But tech isn’t the only reason they come to train here. Terrain matters, and Michigan is an analog for half the world. Here there are thick forests like the Baltics, rolling hills like Poland, and great inland seas dotted with islands like the South China Sea.
These men and women who have spent years training for conflict in the Middle East, and then Europe, must also now train for the Indo-pacific, where the distances are vast. At the NADWC, the distances between training locations, more than 900 kilometers between Battle Creek and Calumet, make logistics and communication a challenge and second chances a rarity. Over 17,000 square miles of special use military airspace, including over the Great Lakes, give pilots and maritime planners the closest thing to the ocean you can find in the American Midwest.
“This place could be the Baltics or the first island chain, or anywhere,” says U.S. Army Capt. Nick Discher, who helps plan the exercise. “It’s supposed to challenge you and make you uncomfortable.”
In Lake Huron an unmanned maritime vessel provides targeting data to aircraft overhead, while at Wurtsmith Airport in Oscoda, a B2 bomber makes its grand entrance on the runway. In Grayling, long convoys of military trucks churn dust. In command posts throughout the training areas, signals are jammed and communications severed. The young leaders in the field are learning: what good is your infantry platoon when your comms are down? This war isn’t just kinetic, it’s in all-domains, all at once.
While service members train for war, Michigan is leveraging its role as the industrial engine of America once more to get cutting edge technology into the hands of service members at the point of contact. Here service members train on drones and power generation systems developed in metro-Detroit, air-mobile secure facilities built in Cadillac, and expeditionary manufacturing of replacement parts at the forward line of troops.
“It’s the arsenal of democracy again,” says Sgt. Maj. Bryan Goff, who leads industry integration. “Northern Strike is a proving ground; only this time we’re integrating sensors, networks, and AI-driven tools to synchronize effects across every domain.”
At Northern Strike, the reserve component of the U.S. military proves it’s more than a weekend force. It’s a bridge between civilian and soldier, defending the homeland and conducting expeditionary operations. The job now is to be ready for the war they hope never comes.
And so, they rehearse again and again. They seize objective after objective. They simulate medical evacuations alongside international partners. They use electromagnetic warfare to jam each other’s radios. They listen for the buzz of a drone, hope it’s friendly, and plan for the next move if it’s not.
At dusk, a platoon from the 1st Battalion, 24th Marines, fresh from raiding an objective, lays in security, awaiting the UH-60 Blackhawks to arrive on the landing zone for exfiltration. After a week of sustained operations, they are sunburned and quiet.
“This is the most realistic training I’ve had as a Marine,” said U.S. Marine Cpl. Terron Wade.
It’s not real. Not yet.
But it could be.
And that’s why they’re here.
| Date Taken: | 08.15.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 08.20.2025 10:48 |
| Story ID: | 546027 |
| Location: | CAMP GRAYLING, MICHIGAN, US |
| Web Views: | 87 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Northern Strike 25: Training for Tomorrow’s Fight, by David Kennedy, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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