SPECIAL REPORT / PARTNERS IN GLOBAL PRESENCEtemplate ideas that we hadn’t really practiced,” he said,
like massing fires, not just precision fires more familiar
in counterinsurgency.
During the division’s two major annual exercises, Steel
Knight and Desert Scimitar, Nicholson and his staff serve
as “a mini-MEF,” managing air and logistics but without
the demands of a higher headquarters. So “working under
a MEFEX construct was great for us,” he said.
The division was joined by the MEF’s two other major
subordinate commands: 1st Marine Logistics Group and
3rd Marine Aircraft Wing. In all, 1,830 personnel,
including staff with the Army’s I Corps and British and
Canadian exchange officers assigned to I MEF, participat-
ed from several locations at Camp Pendleton, with wing
headquarters set up in the field at Miramar.
Berger noted, “We are not sitting in buildings. We
could be sitting comfortably in our offices. We took
everything that we would use out in the field ... and we
intentionally did not co-locate.”
The ability for command staffs to communicate was
well tested.
“The communications teams had to work all the
technical details of communication, as they would in
reality,” said Col Matthew Jones, the I MEF assistant
chief of staff for operations.In the scenario, one country invaded its oil- and
mineral-rich neighbor. The U.N. Security Council ap -
proved a multinational coalition to eject invaders. Moving
from ships ashore, I MEF joined with the host-nation
force to restore the border, liberate a key city and ensure
the invaders “are beat down enough where they can’t do
this again for some period of time,” Berger said.
Soldiers with the Army’s Washington-based I Corps
were on one flank, with Canadian and British forces on
the other.
It was far from an easy fight. The Marine Air-
Ground Task Force’s strength of going deep, supported
by air, proved critical to support the hard-hit division,
Berger said, but the toughest thing was “not getting
sucked into the now.”
The lesson? Let your subordinate units fight. Keep
the planning staff focused on “our horizon at 72 hours,
96 hours,” he said. The MEF staff’s job “is to set the
conditions, so the division, the wing, can win.”
In the conventional scenario, the MEF’s planning
cycle was much more demanding than in a counterinsur-
gency operation.
“Things are happening much more dynamically,”
Berger said. “You’ve got to be able to think 72, 96 hours
out. What is the battlefield going to look like that far out?”W W W. S E A P O W E R M A G A Z I N E. O R G S E A P O W E R / A P R I L 2 0 1 5 55The Quick Reaction Force (QRF) security element posts up four-corner security around an objective site during a drill
as part of Marine Expeditionary Force Exercise (MEFEX) 2015 aboard Camp Pendleton, Calif., Feb. 22. Marines with 1st
Law Enforcement Battalion employed a QRF to combat imminent “enemy threats” during MEFEX 2015.U.
S.
M
AR
IN
E^
CO
RP
S