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GRAFENWOEHR, Germany — During Exercise Avenger Triad 25, the Exercise Control Group (EXCON) serves as the central hub ensuring training objectives are met, scenarios stay on track, and multinational forces operate in a synchronized and realistic environment across Europe.
Avenger Triad is designed to refine NATO defense plans, enhance multinational interoperability, and strengthen readiness through integrated command and control operations.
“The overall goal of Avenger Triad is to refine and validate our defense plans while exercising large-scale combat operations in a multi-domain environment,” said Lt. Col. Joseph Lemay, the Joint Force Headquarters Branch Chief, for U.S. Army Europe and Africa G37.
The scale of the effort to simulate a real-world operational environment is truly immense, underscoring the dedication and resources invested in Exercise Avenger Triad 25.
“We control an exercise by ensuring that we have an exercise control group which, for a scope and scale of an exercise such as Avenger Triad, is about 2,500 people, and that’s to simulate 620,000 soldiers operating within Europe,” LeMay said. “We control that with all forms of warfighting functions, from operations to sustainment to intelligence, making sure the training audience gets the training required to perform their functions for warfighting.”
Every component of Avenger Triad 25 is tied to clear training goals or objectives and refined through coordination, which shapes the exercise’s structure and flow. Those objectives serve as “guardrails” directing the exercise’s flow while testing emerging operational concepts.
“Exercises are tied to training objectives, and that’s a bottom-up refinement,” said LeMay. “A unit will say, ‘I want to train the following tasks,’ such as going to the range or doing something simple. With Avenger Triad, it’s much more complex. We want to incorporate lessons learned from Ukraine, use new technology, new capabilities, or new doctrine that we’re developing.”
EXCON uses those training objectives to ensure the exercise stays on track and remains challenging for participants. “The training objectives keep the exercise on track by allowing the ECG some guardrails,” LeMay explained. “We use those to ensure we are forcing the staff into situations that train that specific objective. For example, if you wanted to do a wet-gap crossing, I’m going to force operations, intelligence, fires, and engineers to work together. It forces cohesion among the staff, but not only among U.S. staff; it also brings in our allies and partners.”
Avenger Triad 25 includes hundreds of diverse multinational participants who collaborate daily to improve coordination and communication across the Alliance. This year’s exercise is the first to fully merge a U.S. and a NATO exercise under a shared operational framework, requiring extensive coordination among organizations.
“The U.S. has a certain way of running exercises, and NATO has another,” said LeMay. “This is the first exercise where we’ve combined both a U.S. and a NATO exercise focused on the entire theater. It took a lot of understanding and communication to align those processes. “We found that NATO is a process-driven organization, while the U.S. military is product-driven,” he added. “Those two things can clash, but we’re using best practices to play to each other’s strengths.”
Beyond evaluation, EXCON helps establish systems for collecting and sharing lessons learned across allied forces.
“For Avenger Triad lessons learned, we have a portal on MAVEN, our live common operating picture,” LeMay said. “Everyone can input observations or thoughts about what we can do better or what didn’t go so well. That information is coalesced by the Lessons Learned Cell and disseminated to all our allies as well as the U.S. government, to help prepare the future defense of Europe.”
Exercises like Avenger Triad reflect the collaborative effort required to sustain readiness across the Alliance. By integrating new technologies, refining defense plans, and reinforcing interoperability, the Exercise Control Group and its multinational partners ensure U.S. and NATO forces remain ready for any challenge.
“We’re working toward full-scale interoperability of technology throughout the theater,” said LeMay. “Every observation and improvement we make helps prepare for the defense of Europe.”
Avenger Triad 25 highlights the pivotal role of the Exercise Control Group in shaping large-scale, multinational training across Europe. Through deliberate planning, coordination, and assessment, EXCON ensures every scenario builds readiness and reinforces the foundation of collective defense.
The lessons learned will inform future operations and ensure that U.S. and NATO forces remain ready to respond anytime, anywhere.
| Date Taken: | 10.30.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 10.31.2025 07:09 |
| Story ID: | 550568 |
| Location: | DE |
| Web Views: | 67 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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