Pour rendre l’exercice à grande échelle 2023 aussi réaliste que possible, la Marine a déployé près de 1 000 personnes pour modifier dynamiquement les champs de bataille pour défier la flotte.
Inside a nondescript building at this southeastern Virginia naval base, dozens of sailors, officers, civilians and retired admirals roamed around a large room filled with computers and televisions.
Some of the monitors have been shut off — a concession to the arrival in the room of a few journalists, who moments ago were outside and staring at a sign above the entrance that warned that operations were happening on a “secret” classification level. Inside, signs atop some screens read out certain ship hulls or strike group numbers, partner and ally flags hung from the ceiling, and overseeing it all was Rear Adm. Andrew Burcher, vice commander of US Fleet Forces.
This room, he said, is the “nerve center” of Large Scale Exercise 2023, a global training event, which took place Aug. 9 to Aug. 18, pulling together more than 50 commands across 22 time zones, featuring thousands of sailors and Marines as well as dozens of warships and submarines, some real and some simulated.
While most military exercises often include other branches of the Pentagon or cooperation with foreign countries, LSE is a uniquely naval event testing whether the US Navy and Marine Corps are prepared for a global conflict using the technology and training they have today.
At the command level, the goal of Large Scale Exercise 2023 is meant to pressurize the Navy and Marine Corps’ leaders with what one admiral called “objective tension,” the innate dilemmas that are created for every Navy commodore and Marine Corps commanding officer when they have to accept that the fight happening elsewhere is going to impact the fight in front of them.
“When I say operational and tactical level, we’re talking from the 3- and 4-star fleet commander all the way down to the sailor or the Marine that is fighting with their weapon system,” said Capt. Chris Narducci, the exercise’s lead planner. The “sailor in the console, the Marine with his weapon. We’re stimulating that entire audience from the E-1 or E-2 up to the O-10 with this exercise.”
“It’s extremely infrequent,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, the commander of US Fleet Forces, said of working directly with both of his four-star counterparts in the European and Indo-Pacific theaters during an exercise such as LSE.
Adm. Samuel Paparo, who is currently leading US Pacific Fleet, is one of those two counterparts.
“The effect of simulating virtual units and virtual activity is to stress the command centers to get them up on a wartime footing,” he said, “so that we’re always ready and that the habits of mind and habits of action of commanding in a global threat environment, across a wide geography, across hundreds of units and 1,000s of warfighters, becomes ingrained in the key warfighting headquarters staff to train them.”
‘Injecting’ Problems, Virtually Teleporting Around The World
The precise details of the broader scenario that encompasses Large Scale Exercise were classified, according to the officials. Further, the staff said the envisioned adversary is not connected to any real individual country. Still, the Pentagon’s relentless focus on China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and violent extremism makes it easy to guess where certain simulated forces originate.
For example, Caudle, the officer directly responsible to the chief of naval operations for LSE’s success, told Breaking Defense in an interview that simulating Russian forces for part of the exercise brings “Arctic-type of thinking” into the event.
One of the ways commanders were tested during the exercise is through what’s known as “Live, Virtual and Constructive” training. LVC is akin to a massive video game. While real sailors and Marines operate in the field or aboard their vessels, the exercise’s staff can “inject” a variety of scenarios and problems into the operations, simulating what could happen if a real global conflict broke out, the planners said.
A ship’s commanding officer might be told an adversarial spy plane is patrolling overhead. A fleet commander ashore who requests an asset be deployed might be denied because those capabilities are tied up in operations elsewhere.
A crew might be physically docked in Norfolk, Va., but modern training technology can effectively teleport them to the Mediterranean where their consoles and maps will show other units and assets in the area — whether those units are physically present or also simulated, the crew would be none the wiser. (This is easier to accept if you remember that when sitting in the bowels of an aircraft carrier, there are no windows to let you see the Atlantic Ocean just a stone’s throw away and you are relying on monitors regularly.)
The possibilities are only limited by what the exercise staff can think up, with the goal of creatively stress testing the system and discovering failures.
And the exercise’s leaders say they have close to 1,000 personnel helping them do just that. Among those staff were a handful of retired admirals and generals — referred to as “graybeards” — tasked with using their experience to role play joint force commanders or civilian leadership such as the secretary of defense.