ST. MAWGAN, Cornwall, England -- Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commanding general, U.S. Army Europe, joined other senior military leaders during the Distinguished Visitor Day at Exercise ARRCade Fusion, here, Nov. 20.
The exercise, which is NATO's Headquarters Allied Rapid Reaction Corps annual training exercise, is designed to further develop the headquarters as a deployable NATO Joint Task Force.
The aim of the day was to show the ARRC in a deployed location, and allow visitors to see that the ARRC is an innovative multinational headquarters, ready to deploy if called upon to do so.
Exercise participants include units and troops from ARRC partner nations Canada , Czech Republic, Italy, the United States, as well as personnel from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and others -- all-in-all totaling some 2,000 military and civilian personnel.
An operational concept conceived by NATO, the JTF builds a land-centric headquarters, like the ARRC, into an element capable of commanding an entire military theatre of operations. For ARRC, this means adding both air and maritime personnel to its structure so that it can command air, land and sea troops. To this end, military personnel from NATO Air and Naval forces have been training with the ARRC and its many subordinate units during the exercise.
NATO has tasked the ARRC to train this way because in 2015 the headquarters will be one of the first NATO JTF's held by NATO for short-notice, rapid recall tasking.
For more information on Exercise ARRCade Fusion, visit the ARRC website at www.arrc.nato.int.
Exercise ARRCade Fusion 2014
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