All the sounds, sights, and even smells of an Afghan village have come to Windward Oahu.
"When you combine the smells and the sounds and the fatigue of fighting under duress it really does help them to really hone their skills," Lieutenant Colonel Todd Fox said.
This 9-month-old Marine Corps Training Area at Bellows is hosting an annual training exercise between the U.S. Army and the Singapore Army and is aimed at strengthening the partnership between the two countries.
"Right now we have a new focus on the security in the Pacific so we have been given more and more opportunities to work with foreign armies and share our tactics and to learn from them," Fox said.
What would typically be considered mild to moderate in difficulty gets a whole lot harder when you introduce squads that don’t know each other very well.
"From our level to their level it kinda incorporates our leadership with theirs, it comes together and we agree on a mission and see how we can work together on that," Sergeant Joshua Castleman of the U.S. Army said.
Earlier this month 122 members of the Singapore Army flew in for the 30th annual training event which alternates between Hawaii and Singapore each year.
The training grounds span close to 2,000 square feet and utilize 340 video cameras to create 360-degree videos but in the end it’s the relationships created and the experiences both take away from the event.
"The professionalism with which they carry out their missions is good for our soldiers to see that," Fox said. "We can really elevate our degree of control during the conduct of an operation."
See the original article at: KHON2 Local News
