Real life laser tag, beach landings live fire among increased statewide military activity
Real life laser tag, beach landings, live fire and fighter jets are among the increased military activity expected this week as Talisman Sabre ramps up for its final week amid the ongoing search for four missing soldiers.
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The biggest military training exercise in the southern hemisphere has mostly resumed throughout Queensland and other parts of Australia as a search continues for four missing Australian soldiers.
An Australian Defence Force spokeswoman Sunday night said Exercise Talisman 2023 (TS23) resumed from Western Australia to Queensland, bar from an exclusion zone near Hamilton Island in the Whitsundays where a search remained underway for four 6th Aviation Regiment soldiers missing since their MRH-90 Taipan helicopter crashed during a training mission late Friday night.
Every aspect of TS23 had been ‘paused’ following the chopper crash, which happened halfway through the two-week mock war games involving more than 31,000 military personnel from 13 participating nations.
Chief of Joint Operations at Headquarters Joint Operations Command, Australian Army Lieutenant General Greg Bilton on Sunday said most of TS23 recommenced about midday on Saturday except for “the special operations activities in the Whitsunday area.”
Members of the Sydney-based 6th Aviation Regiment provide air mobility for the Australian Army Special Operations Command.
Photos released by the US Navy earlier this month show members of the Australian Army 2nd Commando Regiment and a US Naval Special Warfare Unit conducting “fast rope” training – or descending down a rope – from a 6th Aviation Regiment MRH-90 Taipan helicopter at Sydney’s Holsworthy Barracks in preparation for TS23.
Different training missions have been taking place for the past week throughout mostly coastal Queensland, Norfolk Island and in parts of NSW, WA and the NT on land, air and sea as part of the 10th iteration of Exercise Talisman Sabre, which started July 22 and is scheduled to end August 4 with a massive mock war.
Australia’s largest bilaterally-planned, multilaterally executed military exercise with the US is designed to train forces in all aspects of combined operations to help improve the combat readiness and interoperability between the Australian Defence Force and its allies.
Throughout the first half of TS23, soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen and women from all participating nations have conducted field manoeuvres and battle drills, with those on an allied blue team tasked with reclaiming a fictional country after it was invaded by the red team, part of an opposition force from another fictional country.
The exercise is expected to ramp up for its final week despite the ongoing search for the four missing soldiers.
Here’s a roundup of a few Talisman Sabre components from the first week
Queensland
Members of the German Army, Japanese Self-Defense Forces and US Marines carried out a beach landing after leaving the USS New Orleans in landing craft air cushions – a type of hovercraft – as a part of amphibious operations at Midge Point, near Mackay.
Live fire and other activities have also been occurring at the Shoalwater Bay Military Training Area outside of Rockhampton in Central Queensland, while some soldiers and Marines have searched for simulated Explosive Ordnance Devices and conducted several other Tactical Operation Centre at the Townsville Field Training Area in Far North Queensland.
US Army Major Jeff Tolbert said some members of the Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division were among those participating in field training “designed to simulate a conflict with a peer adversary in an archipelagic war fighting scenario” in Townsville.
He said the battles are expected to culminate in a large mock offensive during the final weekend of TS23.
“There’ll be an air assault over a river … and then there should be a wet gap crossing,” he said.
Australian Army Brigadier Damian Hill, the TS23 exercise director, said 40 new components or activities would happen for the first time during Talisman Sabre.
Members of the US Army’s combat training centre, the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC) integrating with the Australian Combat Training Centre, based at Townsville’s Lavarack Barracks, to create a combined centre was among those “firsts”, according to Maj Tolbert.
“The Australian Army is the first army we’ve done this, combined our combat training centre with,” he said.
“(US Army Pacific Commanding) General (Charles) Flynn hopes we’ll then be able to take this combined capability and use it in other countries.”
Part of the combined training involves the use of laser tag-like technology, where soldiers have small sensors on their body armour and lasers on their rifles.
When the soldiers shoot (blanks) from their weapons, a laser on the front of the gun records information – such as if they hit their target – and the overall ‘score’ between opposing forces, similar to a civilian game of laser tag but on a much larger scale.
Data from the sensors – which are also on other items such as military vehicles and helicopters – is then fed into a centralised computer system.
This enables officers at a command centre to have a live, virtual feed of the mock battles at various locations as they happen, meaning they can make real-time decisions about the next move in a mission.
In another first for Talisman Sabre, troops from each participating nation have been embedded into units of different foreign defence forces, Maj Tolbert said.
In the past iterations, foreign nations had largely stayed within their own militaries but worked alongside allied forces to achieve a common goal.
Weipa
A Joint Petroleum Over-the-Shore (JPOTS) mission was undertaken by several US military units off Weipa, in Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula, in another first for Exercise Talisman Sabre.
The JPOTS comprised about 200 US military personnel laying just under 5km pieces of pipe by hand in two days, mostly along the surface on Rio Tinto mining land, to practice offloading fuel from a ship to shore in an austere environment.
Major Jonathon Daniell from the US Army’s 8th Theatre Sustainment Command said each piece of collapsible pipe was about 5.8m long, with a portion of the pipeline running about 610m feet from offshore to the beach, where it connected to an inland distribution point.
About 662,447 litres of fresh water was placed aboard a civilian barge named Bandicoot, which was anchored in the Embley River, with the water then pumped ashore through the pipeline to RAAF Base Scherger, off Peninsula Developmental Road, about 26km east of Weipa.
The water was used in place of petroleum with the project imitating the military’s capability to transport fuel from ship to shore anywhere if ever needed.
“The purpose of the fresh water is to demonstrate proof of concept, that if needed, the joint force could use the same system to bring fuel ashore,” Major Daniell said.
The concept could also be used to bring water ashore during humanitarian assistance operations.
Bowen
Another first for Talisman Sabre included the construction of a 274m-long floating, steel pier off Kings Beach, along Kings Beach Rd in Bowen through a Joint Logistics Over the Shore (JLOTS) operation by different components of the US military.
The JLOTS enables a temporary pier to be built anywhere so troops can move anything from ship to shore.
Indian Ocean, WA, NT and NSW
The Royal Australian Navy’s HMAS Perth III, the US Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers USS Robert Smalls and the USS Antietam and the Virginia-class attack submarine USS North Carolina have been conducting amphibious and flight operations with the Royal Australian Air Force in the Indian Ocean off the coast of northwest Australia.
Various other ships from different nations, including the USS Green Bay have been operating in the Coral Sea off the Queensland coast, while US Marines have undertaken water survival training with a flipped over Zodiac, an inflatable combat rubber raiding craft, at Robertson Barracks in Holtze, outside of Darwin in the NT.
Air component
About 3000 people and 100 various types of US Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force aircraft have been participating high intensity and air refuelling operations at bases across the country, including RAAF bases Curtin outside of Derby, WA, Tindal, near Katherine, NT, Richmond, outside of Sydney, NSW, Amberley, near Ipswich, Townsville and Scherger outside of Weipa.
This iteration of Talisman Sabre has become the largest combined military training of its type in the southern hemisphere, thanks in part to TS23 extending from northern WA to Norfolk Island, making it the largest-ever geographical footprint for the high-end warfighting.
But the largest in terms of people was during TS19, with 34,000 participating, while that number was cut in half for TS21 as a result of Australia then-ongoing Covid-19 pandemic restrictions.
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