Several hundred National Guard Soldiers made the long trip overseas to participate in exercise Dynamic Front 18 serving in key roles throughout the exercise.
Dynamic Front is an annual U.S. Army Europe exercise focused on the interoperability of U.S. Army joint service and allied nation artillery and fires support in a multinational environment, from theater-level headquarters identifying targets to gun crews pulling lanyards in the field.
Dynamic Front 18 includes approximately 3,700 participants from 26 nation at the U.S Army's Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany.
The 18th Field Artillery Brigade from the Kentucky National Guard provided the main fire control element as a headquarters operations for live-fire missions.
Col. Dennis Hawthorne, commander of the 138th Field Artillery Brigade from the Kentucky National Guard has been involved in preparations for the exercise since June 2017.
Those months of preparation allowed him to understand the training objectives of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps and then tailor his own unit's training objectives to nest into theirs while also specific inwards-focused objectives for the 138th.
"(Participating in Dynamic Front 18) will allow us to really hone our proficiency in providing fires," said Hawthorne. "We normally do that for either a division or corps so the ability for us to work with a multinational corps will really allow us to be able to develop some skills that we've not been able to do so in the past, either at our home station training or even with other additional U.S forces. This type of exercise will also grow our staff's ability in the planning and execution of any type of operation."
More than 20 National Guard Soldiers from units across the United States were also on-hand to serve as Observe Coach/Trainers for the exercise.
The extra manpower provided by the citizen-Soldiers was mission critical to ensuring enough qualified OC/Ts were available to properly fill the requirements for DF18, said Capt. Steven Hojnicki, a senior support analyst at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center.
"Being able to have Soldiers come from all over the states to help us is an incredibly awesome opportunity for us and then it's mutually beneficial because they get a chance to come over here and learn from multinational armies and from how we do operations and we learn from them what their experiences back home are," said Hojnicki.
The OC/Ts provided by the National Guard were vetted and selected based on their experience and familiarity with the subject with would be provided support for.
"We look for people who have done the job they are going to be watching," said Hojnicki. "If a sergeant is going to be a fire direction sergeant OC/T, he or she will have done that job previously. Same with the officers, if they are going to be looking at an operations shop, they'll have been an operations officer."
Maj. Cliff Morales, from the Pennsylvania National Guard, served as the battalion lead OC/T for the Lithuanian artillery battalion.
Morales first participated as an OC/T in last year's DF due to a partnership program the state of Pennsylvania has with Lithuania.
"We've supported them since 1993, it's one of the longest running state partnership programs so when they were coming to (Dynamic Front II) and they needed an American OC/T, Pennsylvania got somewhere in the mix, and as one of the senior artillery officers in Pennsylvania I was asked to come and be part of the exercise," said Morales.
Morales is happy to have participated in the exercise a second time.
"For me personally I get to see something that is larger than what we would normally see in an exercise for the Pennsylvania National Guard-- or even the Lithuanian battalion," said Morales. "Watching what we do work across all these other nations -- it's very nice to see how we're still an important role in what the Army does."
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