For the first time, XVIII Airborne Corps is conducting a warfighter exercise that simulates contingency operations in the Indo-Pacific Theater under the command of U.S. Army Pacific.

Launched on Aug. 1, the 10-day warfighter, dubbed a “campaign of learning” by senior leaders, is centered on the responsibilities of corps- and division-level staffs and leaders who will plan, prepare and fight against simulated near-peer forces in large-scale combat operations, said Gen. Andrew Poppas, commander of Army Forces Command.

Poppas, along with Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, and Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, XVIII Airborne Corps commander, briefed reporters on the warfighter exercise during an Aug. 1 call.

Responding to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s guidance to incorporate Army service component command exercises in Army Pacific and U.S. Army Europe and Africa, the warfighter exercise is the first for XVIII Airborne Corps under an Indo-Pacific-focused scenario.

“The beauty of the simulation is you can train a headquarters of a few hundred people and you’re going to get that experience of conducting the wartime mission, but you don’t have to have a hundred thousand ground forces in the field to provide the simulation,” Poppas said.

Because the enemy is replicated by a war simulation program run by a cadre of military officers, it allows units to receive feedback based on enemy reaction to the decisions their leaders are making, he added.

In addition to multiple exercises taking place in the Indo-Pacific Theater, Flynn explained that with XVIII Airborne Corps taking the lead as the operational corps headquarters working from its own headquarters at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, leaders and planners have an opportunity to experience the same distances Army Pacific has in its area of operations.

“The distances between North Carolina and Hawaii are replicating the very distances if you just rotated that into the theater between Hawaii, the second island chain, first Island chain and the Asian continent,” Flynn said.

Replicating the “tyranny of the challenges” associated with communicating across multiple time zones, understanding the complexity of maneuvers in a contested operational environment, the challenges of engaging a peer threat that exists across the globe, the restrictive nature of the terrain and challenges with communications, logistics, protection and command and control, Flynn said, “is all very, very important for us to continue to train on that.”

Donahue noted that the corps is a contingency corps that must be able to rapidly deploy and integrate with combatant commands.

“Right now, all of our networks, all of our systems, we’re using exactly what we would use in combat anywhere in the world, and we’re forced to integrate that into this combatant command, supporting the United States Army Pacific in this case,” Donahue said.

The new capabilities that the Army is fielding or will field, such as long-range fires, Future Vertical Lift and several Mission Command systems, Donahue said, are “worth testing right now to make sure that they can, in this case, work in [the] Indo-Pacific,” or any theater.

“The new technology that we’re using today, we’re putting under load and stressing,” Donahue said. “There’s no other military in the world that can do that, and we are now doing that, and we’re on the … front of this.”