About 3,100 Schofield Barracks soldiers and hundreds of Stryker armored vehicles are in the California desert for a month of large-scale war-fighting practice — training that had ended several years ago for Hawaii units as deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan stopped.
But now the focus has changed.
In January, when Stryker soldiers out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state made the same trip to California, they encountered a "near-peer" simulated foe with chemical weapons, tanks and helicopters firing missiles that could destroy the eight-wheeled Strykers.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops faced guerrilla warfare and a low-tech enemy.
Schofield’s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team — and more than 1,000 vehicles and containers — were sent to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., in mid-April for war games through May, said Lt. Col. Derrick Cheng, a spokesman for the 25th Infantry Division.
"It really is to re-establish their readiness level because they had not gone through that type of training venue (in several years) where you have the opportunity to do the full combined arms fight at the brigade level," Cheng said.
The National Training Center has 1,200 square miles of high-desert terrain and villages that until recently represented Afghanistan. But it’s also prohibitively expensive at approximately $25 million to send brigades there, and the Army has stressed the need for "home station" training.
Both the 2nd Stryker Brigade, with about 4,200 soldiers, and 3rd Brigade, with more than 3,500 soldiers, were expected to deploy to Afghanistan last summer, but the Army canceled the war duty — and exercises at the National Training Center — with the Pentagon decision to return the soldiers to a Pacific focus.
Only partial elements of the Schofield brigades were slated for Afghanistan duty, and only a portion of the entire Stryker Brigade — about 3,100 soldiers — is in California now, Cheng said.
The Washington-based Stryker Brigade is part of Army forces that are now "regionally aligned" to the Pacific.
The January training also marked the first rotation to the training center by a unit from Japan. About 180 Japanese soldiers joined the Americans.
The commander of U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith has the ability to call on the Stryker units to respond quickly in the theater using sea transport of C-17 cargo-carrying aircraft, the Army said.
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ON VACATION: June Watanabe is on vacation. Kokua Line returns May 22.
