This summer more than 7,000 military personnel descended upon Michigan’s Camp Grayling Joint Maneuver Training Center for Operation Northern Strike (ONS) 2017.
ONS, an annual joint multinational exercise, brought Soldiers of various branches and nations to the largest National Guard training facility in the country. The two-week exercise provides readiness-building opportunities that emphasize cohesion between branches of service.
ONS has gained notoriety for its remarkably accurate training environment. It is one of only 43 programs worldwide to gain Joint National Training Capacity accreditation and is the only exercise managed by the National Guard that coordinates both ground and air assets, according to the Joint Force Headquarters, Michigan National Guard. The objective of ONS is to provide accessible, readiness-building opportunities for units of all service branches to achieve or sustain proficiency in conducting mission command; air, sea, and ground maneuver integration; and the synchronization of fires in a joint, multinational, decisive action and major combat operations environment that is scalable to unit resource levels.
“The Army, the Marines, the Navy – to get them synchronized at the right place on the battlefield at the right time to decisively win is what this exercise is all about,”
-MG Greg Vadnais
“Today’s warriors go to battle with companions from other countries and other branches of service,” said LTC Dawn Dancer, Public Affairs Officer with the Michigan National Guard. “We are all going in together, interwoven – not side-by-side or in separate lanes. Those co-warriors fly overhead and fire adjacent [to] each other’s battlefield locations all while speaking another language and using unfamiliar acronyms. The time to learn their acronyms and flight patterns is not the day you set foot on the battlefield. The Northern Strike exercise, by design, trains in exactly this scenario.”
ONS, hosted by the Michigan National Guard, was developed in 2012 as an Air National Guard exercise. The goal was to prepare Air National Guard units for employment with an air expeditionary wing within a deployed wing construct or into a brigade combat team.
