The Army’s 11th Airborne Division recently completed an annual joint force, multinational exercise in Alaska that included the service’s new Cold-Weather All-Terrain Vehicles (CATVs) and tested deep helicopter attack and other missions in extreme weather conditions and contested environments, the commanding general of the division said on Monday.
The 11th Airborne had five of the CATVs and used them as command-and-control nodes, “which was really good for the brigade,” and for troop sustainment, Maj. Gen. Brian Eifler, the division’s commanding general, said during a telephonic media roundtable.
BAE Systems last fall began delivering the un-armored Beowulf CATVs to the Army. The company is under a $278.2 million contract to deliver 110 of the tracked vehicles.
The CATVs are “light” in all kinds of snow, can swim, and operate in Alaska’s muskeg, which are bogs and peatlands that Eifler described as “like a mud quicksand.”
“The CATV performed very well,” he said. “It’s a pretty good vehicle. There’s a couple of little minor things that we have to tweak with it, but overall, it did very good.”
The meat of the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center exercise took place from Feb. 8-22 and included the Air Force, Marine Corps, and allies and partners. Lessons from the exercise will help inform the Army’s first Arctic-focused doctrine in more than 50 years, which is expected to be issued in mid-2024.
Eifler said about 40 tests and experiments were done during the exercise, including using snow mobiles—the Army calls them snow machines—with soldiers working as hunter-killer teams equipped with man-portable Javelin anti-tank missiles. The snow machines allowed soldiers to “get to places where are normally difficult in the snow,” he said.
The exercise provided insights into the tactics, techniques, and procedures to operate with the Javelins and to generate requirements on the numbers of snow machines an Arctic force needs, Eifler said. There is a need for more snow machines for missions such as the hunter-killer teams, mobility, and casualty evacuation, he said.
The opposing force in the force-on-force exercise, which consisted of two battalions of the 11th Airborne operating as a near-peer adversary, had a “ton of artillery, a ton of rockets, a ton of ammunition…a ton of air defense, and there was not air supremacy or superiority,” Eifler said. Conducting airborne assault missions was difficult in this environment, he said.
The division created “windows” for operations that included a 150-mile-deep attack mission with an AH-64 Apache helicopter brigade that had to “duck and weave” over low terrain and “avoid air defense emitters” to destroy the target and return, Eifler said. Boeing [BA] makes the Apache.
To execute attacks in increasingly contested battlespace, windows must be created using capabilities such as counter-electronic warfare and counter-drones, Eifler said.
“So that’s just some of the things that we had to do with the with this adversary and the threat,” he said.
Temperatures during the exercise ranged from 40 degrees below zero to 40 above with winds reaching 80 knots, Eifler said.
Regarding the Apache operations, Eifler said current manuals do not cover flying and operating with these aircraft in harsh, Arctic-like conditions. Based on lessons learned from the exercise, some warrant officers are making recommendations to the Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence for inclusion in future manuals, he said.
“If we follow the manual, we probably wouldn’t be flying in the conditions up here,” he said.
Eifler said that the electronic spectrum in the exercise was so contested that at one point, one of the Blue Force’s digital communications capabilities was jammed, requiring a brigade to use runners to relay operations orders to units.
The exercise also showcased a 500-mile flight of a C-130 to Utqiagvik, the northernmost point in Alaska, to insert a HIMARS rocket system and team in minus 20-degree temperatures, Eifler said. Lockheed Martin [LMT] makes the C-130 and HIMARS.
The 11th Airborne did not operate with autonomous technology but along with the opposing force used small unmanned aircraft systems. Eifler said the UAS were able to find command-and-control operations, and to drop simulated munitions on enemy positions. Eifler’s forces also used counter-drone systems, he said.
Eifler said that previous uses of the Army’s fixed-wing Shadow UAS did not work well in Alaska because of the cold weather impacts on the ground control station and the need for a good runway. Vertical take-off-and-landing UAS are necessary in the Arctic and must “withstand the extreme temperatures,” he said.