The exercise, known as Dynamic Front 22 (DF22), saw more than 2,700 service members, 65 artillery pieces and numerous aircraft working together to conduct carefully integrated fire missions. Multinational exercises are designed to enhance professional relationships, refine systems and improve overall coordination and cooperation with allies and partners.
It's all about delivering more massive firepower to try and defeat the enemy, and we do that by various methods.
Allied and partner nations trained together under a unified command structure to build readiness and improve interoperability. Participating nations included Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Kosovo, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United Sates.
A stated training objective for the ARRC's participation in DF22 was to use the exercise as a testing venue of one of its fires-focussed Concept Development, Experimentation, and Innovation (CDE&I) projects: the multinational field artillery brigade (MN FAB) concept. "Filling the role as the exercises higher control (HICON), and not part of the training audience, ARRC was perfectly situated to set the conditions to test the validity of the MN FAB concept," said Maj Tyler Kennedy, DF22 Exercise Planner. "The exercise program allowed this to be done in a dry (simulated) environment, and then progress to a live-fire event utilising firing organisations from five different nations."
The MN FAB concept is centred around creating an artillery brigade headquarters model that is able to receive and command artillery elements, to include rockets, guns and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, from any nation. "The multinational FAB is a project initiated by the ARRC three and a half years ago. It is multinational by design, leveraging a staff backbone made from a Framework Nation but using force generating from across the NATO Ally and partner nation fires communities to fill most positions in the headquarters," said Kennedy.
"It's all about delivering more massive firepower to try and defeat the enemy, and we do that by various methods," said Brig. Matt Birch, Chief of Joint Fires and Influence Branch at the ARRC. Training included all multi-domain considerations including electronic, cyber, space and information related capabilities.
"Artillery, like any technology, continues to evolve. We need to make sure that we are at the cutting edge of it so that we can use it to the best affect, and make sure all our people remain trained to it, no matter what NATO nation they come from. This is therefore a unique opportunity to come together, validate the previous training that's happened and allow us to develop and be at the cutting edge of technology," said Birch.
Observers of the exercise live-fire witnessed synchronized and integrated target destruction via artillery from multiple firing points and nations, along with carefully coordinated aircraft bomb drops. This served as a clear mark of success as a culmination of weeks and months of training efforts combined with rapid and precise implementation.
"In NATO, as always, we're stronger together," said Birch.