Military Exercises: Purpose and Examples

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Military exercises are planned training events that let armed forces rehearse missions, test procedures and practice working together. Participants may practice in the field, at a headquarters or alongside allied forces; in each case, the exercise’s value lies in what they learn about performing a mission.

The scenarios can range from combat to humanitarian relief, and from a few officers working through a problem to large formations involving ships, aircraft and troops. The useful question behind an exercise’s size or name is what problem it is designed to solve.

What military exercises are designed to do

NATO’s exercises test concepts, procedures, systems and tactics and prepare forces for operations in peace, crisis and conflict. NATO is an alliance in which member governments make collective decisions on political and military matters affecting their security. The exercises also give participants a way to identify practices that work and lessons that should change future performance.

The Defense Department’s dictionary defines joint activities as involving elements of two or more military departments. Multinational activities involve forces or agencies from two or more nations or coalition partners. Those distinctions describe different kinds of teamwork: cooperation across a country’s armed services and cooperation across national forces.

Interoperability means that forces can operate together, communicate and share procedures, infrastructure and services. It does not require every participant to have identical equipment; the equipment must be able to connect and exchange information or services. Practicing together gives forces a way to put compatible equipment and shared procedures to use in a mission.

NATO identifies human and procedural compatibility, including terminology and training, alongside technical compatibility. The people using the equipment, and the procedures they follow, are part of the coordination problem.

Real troops, simulated headquarters and war games

The Army’s training manual describes a field training exercise as rehearsed military operations in an actual field setting, against a real or simulated opposing force. It can involve an entire platoon, company, battalion or brigade, including its attached personnel and units. The mission is simulated, but the unit still has to function together in the field.

A live-fire exercise adds the task of coordinating and controlling weapons using full-caliber ammunition, with smaller-caliber ammunition permitted when appropriate. The Army’s manual includes movement, maneuver and logistical support in this training and requires proven skills in smaller units before higher-level live-fire exercises. Field training and live-fire training describe related but different features of an exercise, so field training should not automatically be read as firing live ammunition.

A command-post exercise focuses on headquarters: commanders and staff practice communicating, directing and coordinating forces, and following procedures within a simulated mission. It can take place at a military installation or in the field, where headquarters also practice moving, dispersing, concealing and protecting themselves. A command-post exercise tests how headquarters coordinate a force, while a field training exercise tests how the full unit performs in the field.

A war game represents a conflict in which players make decisions and respond to the consequences. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is an independent agency that works for Congress and examines how taxpayer dollars are spent. GAO describes war games as a method the Defense Department uses alongside military exercises and modeling. The U.S. Naval War College describes another analytic purpose for war games: exposing assumptions and collecting information that can give commanders useful insights. That makes a war game a way to explore choices and their consequences, rather than another name for every exercise involving troops.

An Army tactical exercise without troops takes leaders onto actual terrain, with minimal personnel, to analyze plans, unit actions and the placement of weapons. In a narrower situational training exercise, participants practice a task performed by a group, or several related tasks and drills, and their performance is assessed against the relevant task standards. These smaller formats let leaders concentrate on a problem without always assembling a full military unit.

Deployment exercises practice getting soldiers and units from their home stations to places where they may operate. Emergency deployment readiness exercises add minimal notice, and may test actual loading and movement or rehearse the processing steps without moving equipment. Communications exercises test equipment and procedures such as how messages move, which messages take priority and which communication methods to use.

From training objective to lessons learned

NATO’s exercises are developed by Allied Command Operations and Allied Command Transformation. The first sets training requirements and evaluates performance; the second manages and runs the exercise program.

NATO describes a planning sequence in which a fictitious scenario resembles a possible real situation, and specified training objectives determine the activities. Those objectives may concern skills, coordination or testing whether procedures work, followed by a collective review of performance. Training objectives provide a standard for judging performance: completing an exercise does not by itself show that participants learned the tasks it was meant to teach.

The Army’s after-action review is a guided discussion of performance during or after a training event, involving participants, a facilitator and observers. It focuses on training objectives and task standards, asks participants to work out what happened, and assigns responsibility for improving performance.

The review feeds the next training plan and the unit’s retraining, with further training planned promptly when objectives have not been met. The learning cycle therefore continues after the exercise ends: finding a weakness matters when it changes subsequent preparation.

Major exercises and the problems they rehearse

These examples show different training jobs, from moving a force into a region to coordinating air missions or coordinating cyber staff. RIMPAC emphasizes working together at sea, while DEFENDER rehearses moving forces into Europe and supporting them there.

Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, is a maritime exercise held every two years. RIMPAC 2026 ran around the Hawaiian Islands from June 24 to July 31, bringing together 30 nations and more than 30,000 personnel. Participants first established command relationships and planned in port, then trained at sea in tasks including anti-submarine warfare, air and missile defense, amphibious operations and logistics. Amphibious operations launch landing forces from the sea to operate along a coast.

The exercise ended with a scenario in which opposing forces responded to one another’s decisions. That progression moves from preparation and coordinated practice toward a test of how the combined force responds to another force’s decisions.

DEFENDER 25 rehearsed moving forces quickly and keeping them able to operate in Europe through Swift Response, Immediate Response and Saber Guardian. The 2025 exercise ran from May 11 to June 24.

Baltic Operations, or BALTOPS, included a multinational harbor-protection demonstration in Latvia in June 2026. U.S. Navy units worked with Dutch and Latvian support to demonstrate technologies designed to counter unmanned underwater vehicles. The harbor demonstration shows how an exercise can provide a setting to examine new equipment and threats, as well as rehearse established procedures.

Australia and the United States conduct Talisman Sabre as a multinational training activity held every two years. The 2025 edition’s closing release described three weeks of training across Australia and Papua New Guinea, with a closing ceremony in Lae on August 4. Its activities included large-scale amphibious operations, an operation to bring troops into the area by air and personnel recovery between Lae and Wewak. Those tasks join movement, combat and recovery across different forces, rather than training each participant’s specialty in isolation.

Red Flag-Nellis 26-1 took place at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, from February 2 to 13, 2026. An Air Force account of the 2021 edition explains the opposing-force role: aggressor pilots study adversary maneuvers and techniques, while simulated threats challenge pilots, maintainers and logistics teams. A deliberately prepared opponent makes the training more realistic, and the simulated threats also challenge the teams supporting the pilots.

The British Royal Air Force’s Cobra Warrior 26-2 ran from September 14 to October 2, 2026, with personnel from the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States. It also served as the culmination of the Typhoon Qualified Weapons Instructor Course, requiring candidates to plan and lead multinational missions under realistic operational pressure. The same event can therefore test cooperation across nations and the judgment of future tactical instructors.

U.S. Cyber Command describes Cyber Guard as a command exercise for practicing staff processes and identifying gaps in directing and coordinating forces, authority to act and information sharing. A Marine Corps report from July 2025 recorded Marines participating in Cyber Guard 25-2 alongside other military services and government agencies, facing opposition in cyberspace. The command’s stated emphasis is on how staff plan and coordinate cyber operations, bringing the headquarters side of military training into the cyber example.

How exercise results are assessed

In 2016, the Government Accountability Office examined Pacific Pathways, an Army initiative combining several partner-country exercises into an integrated operation. GAO found that the Army had assessed some benefits but had not comprehensively demonstrated the initiative’s value relative to its costs.

By September 2020, the Army had completed an assessment comparing costs and benefits with other exercise formats and training-center sessions, and GAO closed the recommendation after the Army addressed it.

The episode illustrates the difference between describing an exercise’s benefits and comparing those benefits with the resources and alternatives involved.

RAND is a nonprofit research organization focused on public policy. Its researchers found indications that U.S. multinational exercises might discourage aggression, but the findings were weaker than those for overseas U.S. forces and defense treaties. Exercises were associated with fewer shows of force against partner countries in the more-developed group studied; that association did not extend to lower-middle-income countries. The analysis observed correlations and did not by itself establish cause and effect.

Training results and deterrence are different questions: an exercise may identify performance problems without establishing how another country will behave.

Resources, safety and the risk of misunderstanding

NATO countries normally pay for their national contributions to an Alliance exercise. The Army describes full field exercises as events requiring substantial resources and detailed planning, coordination and execution.

For the three Pacific Pathways operations in fiscal year 2015, GAO reported $34.5 million in costs, about twice the combined cost of those exercises when they were conducted as separate, stand-alone events. Forces and equipment also more than doubled in many categories. Because forces and equipment also increased, comparing these exercises requires examining the amount and kind of training provided alongside the spending total.

The Army identifies inherent risks to soldiers, equipment and the physical environment, especially during live training. Its risk-management process calls for identifying and assessing hazards, choosing and implementing controls, then supervising and evaluating them. Simulation of a mission does not remove the risks created by the real people, equipment and setting used to rehearse it.

NOAA Fisheries is an office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is part of the Department of Commerce. It works to recover protected marine species under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.

NOAA’s Hawaii-California review addresses the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and Army’s proposed training and testing activities. For Hawaii-California training, NOAA’s marine-mammal safeguards include trained lookouts, reporting sightings, reducing or shutting down certain activities, monitoring explosive events and reducing the risk of ships hitting marine mammals. The safeguards link observations to action: crews must report sightings and change certain activities, with controls tailored to the activity or source of harm.

RAND’s strategic analysis also explains that activities intended to deter can provoke unintended escalation. Physical risk management asks what can harm soldiers, equipment or the environment; strategic analysis asks whether an activity intended to deter could instead provoke escalation.

Able Archer 83, a NATO command-post exercise in November 1983, rehearsed procedures for authorizing nuclear weapons use. In its scenario, commanders requested permission to use nuclear weapons, and simulated political authorities approved. A U.S. intelligence assessment recorded heightened readiness among Soviet air units in East Germany and Poland.

That assessment took the limited alert as evidence that Moscow did not think a NATO attack was possible then. A 1990 review by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board reached a different judgment: Soviet military leaders may have feared the exercise concealed a real attack.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Vienna Document framework provides for advance notification of major military activities, observation and exchanges of military information. It also provides for consultation about unusual activity or rising tensions and encourages voluntary visits to dispel concerns. These arrangements connect transparency with consultation: other states can receive advance information, observe certain activities and discuss concerns when military activity is unusual or tensions rise.