THE WATCH STAFF
Sometimes the best way for troops to learn to fight together — especially in extreme cold — is to break the ice.
That’s how 350 members of India’s Army and units from the U.S. 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division began two weeks of combined exercises in October 2021 at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska.
Teams from both sides played American football, volleyball and kabaddi — an Indian contact sport — at the Anchorage base before starting Yudh Abhyas, an annual joint training exercise, Asian News International reported October 17, 2021.
The exercises further refine military interoperability between the U.S. and India, a key partner in advancing a Free and Open Indo-Pacific.
Besides offering a cultural education, Yudh Abhyas is intended to get the militaries better acquainted with each other’s weapons and tactics, including mountaineering and high-altitude training, according to an October 23, 2021, story in the Anchorage Daily News newspaper.
“This is an opportunity to learn the best practices from each other,” Indian Army Brig. Parag Nangare told the Daily News. (The Indian Army uses a different rank system than the U.S. Army).
On the firing range, U.S. Soldiers coached their counterparts in the use of common infantry weapons such as the .50-caliber machine gun.
“They don’t have anything like it,” Capt. Bradley Mikinski told the Daily News of the .50-caliber machine gun.
Likewise, the U.S. Soldiers were impressed with the compact grenade launchers in the Indian arsenal, Mikinski told the Daily News.
The Indian Army contingent included instructors from its High Altitude Warfare School, according to The Times of India newspaper. Troops from Alaska’s 4-25 Brigade are scheduled to go to India next year for training in the Himalayas.
“A lot of our forces are presently operating back home in a high-altitude and extreme cold climate weather, because our borders are such,” Nangare said.
The defense ties between India and the U.S. have grown closer since the implementation of several agreements in the past few years, according to The Indian Express newspaper. Those include the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement from 2016 that allows the nations’ militaries to use each other’s bases for repair and supply.
Then there is the conduct of Beijing in the Indo-Pacific. India’s long, mountainous border with China has been the scene of recent border skirmishes.
Still, Nangare told the Daily News that the joint exercises aren’t about China.
“We know that technologically the U.S. Army is far superior, and something we’d like to take back is how they work in a technologically advanced environment,” he said.
In addition to greater interoperability, one of the aims of such bilateral exercises, Nangare told the Daily News, is to “make good friends.”
That aim appears to have been met.
(Pictured: Indian Army troops and U.S. Army paratroopers pause for a photo while conducting sling-load training October 19, 2021.)
As the Daily News’ Zachariah Hughes observed during the exercises: “In idle minutes, Indian and American soldiers crowded together for group photos on one another’s smartphones, snowy mountains and bobbing helicopters in the background.”
IMAGE CREDIT: ALEJANDRO PEÑA/U.S. AIR FORCE