FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTUU/KTVF) - The 11th Airborne Division for U.S. Army Alaska participated in the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC) 25-02 exercise, which included a jump, simulated combat, and a medical evacuation rehearsal.
The medical evacuation rehearsal took place shortly before the combat exercise began. This allowed troops to practice the skills necessary to ensure safety, which “is a top priority,” said Maj. Stuart Wilson Davis, part of the Headquarters Battalion for the 11th Airborne Division.
While other rehearsals are also common, the Medevac rehearsal, “is the most important because nothing is more important than soldier safety,” Maj. Davis explained.
He said that involved personnel from Ft. Johnson in Louisiana who came up to observe and help facilitate the rehearsal. That event specifically involved an array of hypothetical injuries markedly provided to soldiers. This includes injuries such as gunshot wounds and frostbite.
The operations of the rehearsal involved everything from the retrieval of an injured soldier to evacuating them to a hospital.
That rehearsal was followed by the start of the exercise which began with a “joint enforceable entry and then they went into essentially a defense,” Davis said. That entry comes in the form of an Airborne jump at night.
That’s when the simulated combat in the Donnelly Training Area began just outside of Ft. Greely, near Delta Junction. The exercise was designed to ensure “the ability to rapidly deploy a brigade-sized force package quickly and integrate with external elements, focusing on large-scale combat operations in an extreme cold weather environment,” according to a press release from the 11th Airborne Division.
That press release stated that there were roughly 10,000 participants, including Canadian forces. Maj. Davis added there were Mongolian soldiers as well.
“There’s 10,000 folks out there who learned what they can and can’t do in the cold weather and how they can best achieve their mission from that,” Davis said.
An exemplification for both the soldiers and their equipment was the temperatures the soldiers saw during the exercise, starting at 30° F dropping to a low of -40° F with windchill.
“It just highlights the soldiers, you know, their grit, the warrior ethos that each of them live throughout their daily lives,” said Davis.
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