A Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC) exercise was recently conducted in Hawaii and saw simulated large-scale combat against a peer adversary with new and advanced military equipment.

Soldiers from the US Army 25th Infantry Division teamed with US Marines from the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, special operators from the United Kingdom and the US Army’s 1st Special Forces Group, US Air Force Special Tactics, and the US Army’s 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force for long-range fires and intelligence. All together they conducted a two-week exercise executing simultaneous offensive attacks and defensive maneuvers, as a combined and joint brigade stretched across multiple islands and large areas of ocean.

The US Army called this initiative “Operation Pathways”, including all its efforts to join units from the service with Pacific partner forces, and culminates in battalion and brigade-sized combined live fire exercises. The aim was to combine multi-service and foreign nation assets across a chain of islands, to replicate scenarios they could face across the Pacific. A company of Thai infantry, a battery of New Zealand artillery, a platoon of Indonesian infantry, and special operations forces and advisors from the United Kingdom participated in the JPMRC, with more than 5,300 troops in total.

The highly demanding scenario included recon in-depth, the seizure of airfields, the setting up of ‘air bridges’ for moving personnel and equipment, and then starting again, moving forward for hundreds of kilometers. The result was a complex maneuver conducted under the cover of EW, cyber, space, drone, and counter-drone assets, with the 3rd Multidomain Task Force helping coordinate fires from 4,000 miles away in Palau. The presence of real opposing forces, which also attacked the rear elements, pushed the brigade to fight both offensively and defensively while being stretched across hundreds of miles of terrain and ocean.

The JPMRC is the Army’s newest combat training center, where all Brigades conduct their pre-deployment certification as done, with success, with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, which is now certified for its 2024 Operation Pathways deployment. In accordance with some declarations of the participants, the JPMRC is already planning a similar major exercise, in the Philippines, early next year, with events at other locations in the region to come later in 2024.

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