Joint Exercises / Special Ops Training

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.

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 say work will start on two jets with flight integration scheduled to run over the next 12 to 18 months.

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. They launched quadcopters from public parking lots, clocked response times and worked off lessons from June’s Operation Spiderweb, where cheap Ukrainian drones knocked out Russian bombers.

The U.S. Navy will run its third Large Scale Exercise (LSE 25) from late July into August. This iteration brings Canadian, Japanese, and NATO representatives into the control architecture for the first time. They will sit beside U.S. commanders to test global decision-making under pressure.

Finlands defence chiefs took a bold step in early 2022. They shifted every special-operations unit into one, single chain of command. Many officers cheered the plan straight off; others worried it might cramp service-level culture. Yet, the Commander of the Finnish Defence Forces (FDF) signed the order and never looked back.