Airborne assault comes to Super Garuda Shield exercise in Indonesia

The U.S. Army and the National Indonesian Armed Forces, along with other allies and partners, coordinated a complex airborne assault mission into South Sumatra for the first time as part of Super Garuda Shield that wrapped up earlier this month.

A battalion out of the 11th Airborne Division based in Alaska conducted the airborne assault operation amid a variety of other operations taking place throughout Indonesia that were mostly centered in Java.

“We definitely expanded our reach. For me to go and command and control the airborne operation, that took me four hours of flying to get up to the operation,” Brig. Gen. Kevin Williams, the Army’s 25th Infantry Division’s commanding general for operations, told Defense News in a recent interview. “You’re talking about inter-theater operational reach, which was pretty amazing.”

In previous iterations of Super Garuda Shield, the participating forces would focus on one area at a time, Williams explained, such as Java or Sumatra, “but we’ve expanded that to test how we command and control this as a joint force and with a partner.”

Japanese and Indonesians participated in the airborne assault to test joint entry operations as well, according to Williams.

The exercise also expanded in overall participation this year, Williams said. In 2015, 200 Indonesian soldiers participated along with just 300 U.S. soldiers. Williams was one of them.

Garuda Shield now has over 2,500 U.S. participants from the joint force. Partner nation participation nearly doubled that.

“That is a huge increase in the complexity and scale of what we’re doing,” Williams said.

The multinational element has greatly expanded, with eight full participating nations not including the U.S. and Indonesia – Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, United Kingdom and New Zealand. Twelve other nations provided observers who also participated in a staff exercise.

Also new this year, with the Air Force bringing in assets like C-130 aircraft and the 25th ID bringing a Combat Aviation Brigade with two CH-47F Chinook cargo helicopters, the exercise had a fully combined Aviation Task Force that helped in critical operations like pushing the logistics tail in the archipelago.

A large emphasis was placed on forming a Combined Task Force Operations Center to build interoperable operational command and control, Williams noted.

And the 25th ID brought the Army’s new Integrated Tactical Network and more mission command nodes across the joint force, which helped set conditions to see a common operating picture.

The exercise allowed participants to test logistics capabilities, over-the-horizon communications infrastructure and the ability to tie together assets.

Garuda Shield included a joint strike exercise in Java where the U.S. Army brought in its High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, the Marine Corps brought its attack aviation, and partner nations flew F-16 fighter jets and incorporated other missile systems to evaluate the ability to use any sensor or shooter across air, sea, and ground platforms to take out a series of targets, Williams described.

The Marine Corps, along with Indonesia, Japan and Singapore, conducted an amphibious assault using three different platforms including an assault craft from Singapore and the amphibious transport dock Green Bay.

“We were able to demonstrate our ability to combine doing an amphibious assault on a beachhead with reconnaissance, utilize long-range fires to set those conditions and then also conduct another air assault operation using the [Marine Corps V-22] Osprey [tiltrotor aircraft] to get the forces on the ground with the partners and then exfil[trate],” Williams said.

Williams said prior to the culminating event, the Army would conduct a combined arms live fire operation in a “pretty complex scenario using ground maneuver with the partners.”

Garuda Shield is just one example of many exercises within the Army’s Operation Pathways series in the Indo-Pacific that has seen significant expansion in recent years as the service focuses on building its relationships with nations in the theater while also ensuring the ability for countries to rapidly come together to conduct complex operations seamlessly in a potential conflict.

“It goes back to building this readiness and interoperability, this realistic training and really these repetitions that we’ve done during Super Garuda Shield and across all our Operation Pathways [exercises],” Williams said, “It really just provides capable, ready land forces that allow us to be positioned throughout the Indo-Pacific. It does bolster our allies and partners with that trust and it really just ensures we and Indonesia are prepared for any contingency or conflict or disaster that comes along.”