"It allows you to be very creative," a Special Forces sergeant major explained about the Ridge Runner exercise.
"You have to get very resourceful and kind of adapt to the changing environment and realize that you don’t have the freedom of movement that we did in other places. It’s no longer about having air supremacy. It’s no longer about having open comms with higher [headquarters]."
Unlike recent conflicts where Special Forces teams operated in a semi-permissive environment, they are now having to train for scenarios in which the electronic warfare environment is so intense that they will not be able to rely on comms superiors, near real time intelligence, or air superiority.
The Ridge Runner exercise was run with National Guard Special Forces teams and allied partners from 16 nations this summer. Training lanes focused on working with partners to wage irregular warfare within a wide spectrum of combat scenarios.
"Irregular warfare is our way to do that through more low visibility operations and our ability to work around the civilian populace and provide that support to the conventional military," the sergeant major explained in an Army press release.
The complex training scenario aimed to exercise all of the Special Forces' core capabilities, and was even designed with fictional media stories that soldiers watched about the operational environment, sometimes the stories were in response to their own actions in the training scenarios.
"This is different," from how Green Berets trained and operated during the war on terror the sergeant major said. "This is full-spectrum warfare. It’s preparing for invasion or preparing the territories that we would operate in, in order to facilitate conventional battle lines."
Reach Jack Murphy: jack@connectingvets.com or @JackMurphyRGR.
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