An exercise is the only place a force finds out what it cannot do. Deployment timelines slip, fuel arrives late, radios from two countries refuse to talk to each other, and a headquarters designed for thirty people turns out to need ninety. None of that appears in a capability statement.
This section covers military training and readiness. Large national and multinational exercises, live-fire ranges, simulators and synthetic environments, logistics rehearsals, command post exercises, deployment and reception drills, and the readiness reporting that follows.
Exercises are also signals. A deployment described as routine training may be meant to reassure a neighbor or to demonstrate reach, and coverage says which purpose the participants have stated and which they have not.
What an exercise revealed usually matters more than that it happened. Where after-action findings or auditor observations are published, they get more attention here than the press release did.
An OA-1K Skyraider II assigned to Air Force Special Operations training at Will Rogers Air National Guard Base made a forced landing in a field southeast of Oklahoma City on Oct 23. The two-person crew – one active-duty airman and one contractor
Two U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancers from Dyess Air Force Base flew across the southern Caribbean and approached Venezuela’s coastline on Oct 23. Open-source flight tracks identified the pair as BARB21 and BARB22. The traces placed them roughly 50 miles from the
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. Air Education and Training Command leaders detailed the fielding steps for the T-7A Red Hawk. The first non-test jet arrives at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph on Dec. 5, 2025, to start instructor familiarization and maintenance workups before any student
SESIMBRA, Portugal — REPMUS and Dynamic Messenger 2025 ran through September off Tróia and Sesimbra. European crews, NATO commands and industry teams paired submarines, frigates and patrol craft with autonomous vehicles and trial software. The Portuguese Navy hosted with NATO organizations in
Ukrainian Navy personnel ran the opposing force during the REPMUS and Dynamic Messenger 2025 series off Tróia and Sesimbra through September, a first for the alliance-level unmanned maritime trials. The host navy concentrated the event at the Portuguese Navy’s Operational Experimentation Centre,
The US Army has drawn up a 2026 field event that sends well over one hundred high-altitude balloons across open water in the Indo-Pacific to test massed stratospheric operations.
Four F-15J fighters from Japan’s 2nd Air Wing completed a transatlantic deployment between Sept. 14 and Oct. 1 under the mission name Atlantic Eagles. The route linked Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, Canadian Forces Base Goose Bay, RAF Coningsby and RAF
The U.S. Air Force has awarded Red 6 a contract to integrate its Airborne Tactical Augmented Reality System (ATARS) on the F-16. The move takes cockpit-grade augmented reality out of trainers and places it in an operational fighter. Company and defense officials
The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise began on August 18, spreading across dozens of military sites in South Korea. It runs for 11 days, led by command post simulations that pull in real-world data and stress tests.
A July 25 after-action brief lays out what happened during the sixth RAND-Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office exercise, held the day before at Fort Belvoir. This was not another planning session. Teams ran live drills to stop drones from reaching runways.
