Lodamun

[imperialpearl]

Lodamese Navy conducts snap logistics exercise with Altea Accord nations

Eager to determine the state of interoperability between its new alliance members, the Lodamese Navy's Strategic Mobility Command conducted a snap sealift exercise spanning from Southern Valruzia to Northern Trigunia/Nadiya

ⓘ: Lodamese and Kalistani Navy auxiliary ships in harbour at Port Swedes in Kalistan.

“In many instances, our forces haven’t worked together, outside of our traditional relationship with Kalistan. So I think this would be an amazing opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t,” Captain Marcus Holloway, commanding officer of the Vehicle Cargo Ship, LCS-Timothy Parrish. Vessels such as the Timothy Parrish were stood up earlier this month as part of a snap exercise by the Department of Defence’s Strategic Mobility Command (STRATMOBCOM), with strict orders to assemble in various port facilities throughout Valruzia, New Endralon, Kalistan, Egelion, Lodamun and Nadiya to be joined by similar vessels from the aforementioned countries. The exercise, coined Operation United Bridge, had been conceived by STRATMOBCOM to determine the state of readiness for transnational logistical operations between the various signatory nations of the Atlea Accord and had been largely planned by officials from the aforementioned territories. According to officials from STRATMOBCOM, Lodamun’s involvement in the alliance necessitated that its lofty overtures towards interoperability and mutual cooperation be put the test, lest in the event of a potential conflict, where any member may (under extreme circumstances) call upon other states to come to its aid, that the very act of moving equipment and aid from one country to another, were to become a significant challenge. “It is easy for anyone to throw around the notions of interoperability and cooperation. It’s much harder to see that interoperability being put to the test, especially among nations which have not cooperated before,” Walter Bradford, a reporter for Armed Forces Daily, reported. Beyond being used as a means of testing the current, unmodified state of cooperation between Egelion, New Endralon, Kalistan, Lodamun, Valruzia and Nadiya, the exercise’s more practical objective was to test whether, using their current equipment, it would be possible to move a hypothetical Division-sized group (roughly 25,000 men and their accompanying equipment) from one end of the alliance’s ‘extreme’ to another, without significant mishap or a breakdown of communication.

Speaking at Bozo River in Kalistan, alongside his Kalistan counterpart, Regular Navy Commander Darien Orr, the exercise’s coordinator, Vice-Admiral Glen Allen, noted that there was no coincidence in the Altea Accord’s first major exercise being one focused entirely on assessing the scale of its ‘interoperability challenge’. He noted that the alliance is largely populated by states with varying languages and operating procedures, which, to the untrained and unprepared, could become a major vulnerability. “It would make no sense to have an alliance across two continents and be unable to say and demonstrate with confidence: Yes, I can move a battalion of Twardy main battle tanks from Southern Valruzia to Northern Eastern Nadiya. Or perhaps a section of AH-64 Jahs from Ananto to Northern Valruzia,” Vice-Admiral Allen quipped. In seeing off the Lubomił as it left port to partake in the exercise, Vice Admiral Allen noted that much of the planning behind the exercise began months in advance. “It really started as a veign curiosity from General Arnold Wiatrowski [Commander, Strategic Mobility Command] and soon we had liasons from Egelion, New Endralon, Kalistan, Nadiya and Valruzia sitting in the same room. Obviously, we were talking past eachother in various languages initially, but it was sort of settled that Luthorian would be the best to settle on,” Vice-Admiral Allen explained. “Outside of the times Kalistan had been invited to Lodamese exercises, none of our liaisons had conducted an exercise of this nature and scale before. There was a difference of opinion as to what needed to be done operationally; however, that friction was what we needed to experience now, in a controlled environment, rather than when lives are at stake. If we couldn’t coordinate a cargo manifest in peacetime, we certainly won’t be able to coordinate a relief effort or reinforcement effort during a crisis.”

The first scenario saw eight cargo ships depart from Valruzia, bound for the Nadiyan port of Weißkliff in Southern Brakav, transporting self-propelled howitzers and accompanying ammunition. The LCS-Timothy Parrish was one of the vessels central to the exercise’s convoy. “The challenge wasn’t just the distance,” Captain Holloway explained. “It was ensuring that when we arrived in Weißkliff, our Nadiyan counterparts could actually offload the equipment in a timely manner.” The exercise revealed the immediately obvious, that manifests written in Valruzian with Valruzian military terminology would have difficulty being translated into the various languages present in Nadiya and then reconciled into coherent orders for port staff. While workarounds were made, namely using translators on their mobile phones, Brigadier-General (LA) Ernest Carlson, the Scenario’s evaluator, noted that what should have been a 72-hour port operation stretched onto five days. According to the Brigadier-General, the largest concern is the fact that given the plethora of languages spoken in Nadiya, it may be difficult for cargo coming from Valruzia to dock and unload at any random port throughout the country, especially in those areas where translation services may not be available and where Rodshyan is not widely spoken. “This could become a major issue in times of crisis. There is an inherent benefit to the fact that when a replenishment ship docks in any port throughout Lodamun, Kalistan, New Endralon, Valruzia and/or Egelion, there is a common language being spoken. Nadiyan logisticians will have to reconcile with which language we [the rest of the Altea Accord members] will be interfacing with,” Brig-Gen. Carlson noted. Colonel Alenka Ruchkina, the Nadoyan liaison officer tasked to the scenario, noted that the learning curve was steep but valuable. “We discovered that our tie-down procedures don’t match those used in Valruzia, which was to be expected. What we consider secure, they consider a hazard. What they might consider efficient stowage, we consider to be extremely risky, especially during the winter season. These are things you simply cannot learn from watching a video or reading a handbook; you have to work through them in real time.”

The second scenario sought to see how long it would take to move a Kalistani armoured squadron from Ananto, Kalistan, to Valruzia. The scenario intentionally avoided the use of direct routes, as one might argue that it would be easier to move the squadron from the island of Ananto to Valruzia via a direct ship route along the North Seleyan coast. However, as Colonel (LMC) Theodore Horton highlighted, the entire exercise had been based on the ‘worst case scenario’, thus the most difficult and ‘bothersome’ route would be trialled. Moving the squadron from their posting on Ananto to the Kalistani mainland occurred largely without major issue, as the movement had been aided by commercial RORO ferries chartered for the exercise via the Regular Navy. As Kalistani troops had been accustomed to operating alongside Lodamese logisticians, moving the squadron into Lodamun via the Trans Seleyan Railroad occurred largely without issue. However, Colonel Horton noted that a technical mishap on the part of LodRail had occurred where a part of the squadron had been routed to the Lodamese-Likatonian border instead of the Lodamese-Valruzian border. “We were a bit surprised. We thought that we had missed some major geopolitical event that saw the militarisation of the Lodamese-Valruzian border. Eventually, we were informed that we had been placed on the wrong track and inadvertently sent to the Likatonian border,” Lieutenant Patricia Mendez of the Kalistani Regular Army admitted. “I figured the fact that we had passed through multiple scanners should have pointed out that something was off,” she said jokingly. The handoff to Valruzian railway authorities was relatively smooth, given that the Valruzian is still spoken in Millford. There were, as Colonel Horton admitted, some challenges offloading the Kalistani medium tanks from their respective train cars. “Because the platforms aren’t the same height as the train cars used to transport these tanks, we had to improvise and just have the tanks ‘leap’ off the cars themselves,” Colonel Horton said. “It was a bit jank. Never did something like that before. We were told by some Valruzian soldiers that it’s how they had done it in the ‘olden days’, but I don’t know whether I should trust that or not. But I guess what matters is that we got the tanks off the trains.” Lieutenant Mendez noted.

The final and perhaps the most complex of the three scenarios focused on moving a battalion-sized Commonwealth Guard formation and their equipment from their posting in Abernathy, Millford, to Ananto, then onward to Egelion and to their final position in Trigunia, via New Endralon; a journey involving three separate sea legs and coordination with a Nadiyan nuclear-powered icebreaker. The operation reportedly began smoothly, with the vehicle cargo ship LCS-Roebuck departing for Ananto. However, on the second, from Ananto to the Egelian port of Cartablanca, a critical communication failure was ultimately exposed. “We lost contact with the convoy for nearly six hours,” recalled Egelian Frigate Captain Joel Zapatero, the Egelian liaison attached to the exercise. “Our encrypted communications systems were not compatible with those used by the Lodamese Navy, so I figured that is the ‘interoperability challenge’, brought to life.” The final leg split the convoy of ships in half, with one half docking and unloading in Cartablanca and the other simply refuelling and continuing onto the White Ocean. The Nadiyan icebreaker, which had been dispatched for the exercise, the Admiral Ushakov was supposed to rendezvous with the convoy; however, delays from the previous leg meant that the ships had arrived at their predetermined position during a narrow weather window. “Because we had arrived late, it meant that we missed the window, which would have allowed the icebreaker to power through thin ice sheets with relative ease. As a result of that, the icebreaker had to operate above its ceiling to power through tougher icesheets which had formed. Getting stuck in the Nadiyan tundra was not something I was comfortable with,” remarked Captain Jeremy Lewis of the HCS-Samuel Hinton, an oil tender from the Harrington Company, which accompanied the convoy on their final leg. On land, the ships were unloaded onto railroad cars to be sent directly to Trigunia via New Endralon. According to Sgt. Roland Burns, an engineer with the Millford Commonwealth Guard, New Endralonian, Kalistani and Egelian engineers present to observe the process, suggested that it may be necessary to consider loading ramps for heavy equipment.

Vice Admiral Allen noted that the Exercise had ultimately provided a much-needed ‘humbling experience’ for the alliance’s members. Reiterating his earlier statement on the need to demonstrate that the alliance was capable of otherwise complex deployments, Vice Admiral Allen noted that the mistakes and errors encountered throughout were not to be viewed as embarrassments on the part of the countries themselves, but ‘teething issues’, associated with nations that have traditionally operated in their own silos, finally learning to cooperate. Officials from STRATMOBCOM noted that on its scaling system for success, the exercise could easily capture 78 points out of 100, as they noted that for the most part, when issues were encountered, workarounds were made which attempted to ‘get things back on track’. Technical staff from the Defence Ministries/Departments of the Atlea Accord nations are expected to meet in the coming months to discuss the creation of a new broad-based communication platform which would enable smoother communication between all domains, be it air, land and/or sea. “Obviously, we also hope to ensure that perhaps Luthorian could be the language of business throughout whatever we do within this grouping,” Vice Admiral Allen concluded.