With the Arctic having a renewed place in American military strategy, the United States military is increasingly turning to allied partners who have experience in the region. While America is an Arctic nation via Alaska, the militaries of Canada, Sweden, Norway, and Finland are always going to better verses in winter and arctic warfare tactics, techniques, and procedures.
Recently, 10th Special Forces Group participated in a joint exercise with Sweden's Home Guard in Lapland where they played the opposition force as well as acted as observer coach trainers (essentially exercise referees) this June.
Part of the exercise involved the American Green Berets working with Swedish soldiers as a make-believe guerrilla force that took on the Home Guard in the training exercise.
"The aircraft we were flying in went down and we landed somewhere we didn't plan to and made a link-up with our partner force," a Special Forces medic explained in a recent press release. "We eventually met up with the rest of our team, minus one [teammate]. We then conducted a hasty personnel recovery mission based on some limited intelligence we got in the scenario."
The training scenario gave the Green Berets an opportunity to train themselves on one of their core capabilities: unconventional warfare.
"The scenario gave us time to almost completely rehearse what we’d be doing in irregular warfare – conducting a link-up with a force we didn't know too much about; working through assessments, hitting a few targets to see what their capabilities are, what we have to work with and what direction we need to go," the U.S. Special Forces Team Sergeant said.
"What it really did was give us the time over five days to work through a very surface-level unconventional warfare campaign."
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Reach Jack Murphy: jack@connectingvets.com or @JackMurphyRGR.
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