HOME

Lease cases support Army’s exportable training model

By Adriane ElliotMarch 2, 2022

Indonesian soldiers train with the U.S. Army 25th ID troops in Hawaii in October 2021. The Indonesian army, along with the Royal Thai Army, received no-cost leases for U.S. equipment to participate in the joint training exercise. They are also among the first partner nations to participate in the Army’s new exportable combat training center concept.
Indonesian soldiers train with the U.S. Army 25th ID troops in Hawaii in October 2021. The Indonesian army, along with the Royal Thai Army, received no-cost leases for U.S. equipment to participate in the joint training exercise. They are also among the first partner nations to participate in the Army’s new exportable combat training center concept.
(Photo Credit: 25th Infantry Division photo) VIEW ORIGINAL

The Army’s foreign military sales process incorporates unique ways to support allies and partners while strengthening U.S. foreign policy.

The U.S. Army Security Assistance Command manages Army FMS operations, and in addition to executing traditional FMS cases, the command executes rare, but beneficial no-cost leases.

“It’s a formal agreement between two nations, much like a memorandum of understanding, laying out the parameters for the limited-time use of U.S. weapons and support equipment,” said Thomas Browning, a foreign military sales case manager for the Tank and Automotive Armaments Command.

Browning, along with fellow TACOM CM Margaret Yamamoto, recently coordinated a lease case for U.S. allies Thailand and Indonesia. Both partner nations leased military weaponry and sent 200 Indonesian and Thai Soldiers to Hawaii to participate in the annual large-scale joint exercise alongside the Army’s 25th Infantry Division.

The lease was logistically and financially beneficial to the allied nations, who would normally have had to transport military weaponry and materiel to Hawaii.

“The main goal is to integrate our allies for interoperability that will prove crucial in combat operations and other real-world scenarios,” Browning said. “This is nothing new. We travel to their region of the world to conduct exercises, and in this case, they are traveling to Hawaii to participate in this event.”

What makes this case unique is the rarely used no-cost lease, and the fact that allied nations took part in the first-ever, exportable combat training center initiative.

Until this exercise in October 2021, about 5,000 25th ID Soldiers would travel every year from Hawaii’s Schofield Barracks to the 240,000-acre Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. In 2020, the 25th deployed over 5,000 Soldiers, nearly 350 containers, helicopters and over 1,500 vehicles to sharpen their warfighting skills at JRTC.

But Army officials noted that the combat training center located in central Louisiana is nothing like the Pacific environment where the 25th ID would fight its next fight. It was also clear that the Army could save millions of dollars if the exercise was hosted where the Soldiers reside, in this case at their home station in Hawaii, with its maritime-jungle terrain.

“We have not cut any (JRTC rotations) – two have moved to exportable,“ Maj. Gen. Sean Swindell, assistant deputy chief of staff, explained in a June 2021 Army release. “We recently published our Arctic strategy, and we are (also) going to come up with an Arctic rotation in fiscal 2022.”

The Army’s current combat training centers are located at Fort Polk, Fort Irwin (National Training Center in California), and Hohenfels (Training Area in Germany).

RELATED STORIES