Right now, on the other side of the world, roughly 56,000 service members are in the middle of one of the biggest training exercises in the Pacific. Keen Sword 27 opened on October 19 with a ceremony on Ishigaki Island, Japan's westernmost point, and it runs through October 29. I've been following it this week, and I wanted to share why it caught my attention.
The basics
Keen Sword is a biennial field training exercise between the U.S. military and the Japan Self-Defense Forces, and this is its 18th iteration. The official release puts participation at about 45,000 Japanese personnel and 11,000 U.S. service members (the Associated Press reported about 12,000 Americans). Forces from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the Philippines are taking part, with the Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom attending as observers. According to the AP, citing Japan's Joint Staff, five of those nations are taking part for the first time: France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the Philippines.
U.S. Pacific Command says the training is spread across Okinawa, the Sakashima Islands, Tanegashima, the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea, and the surrounding waters and airspace. The training list itself is what jumped out at me: air and missile defense, facility protection and repair, logistics and resupply, casualty evacuation, and maritime operations.
The part that doesn't make the highlight reel
When people picture a big exercise, they picture the hardware. I get it. But look at that list again. Repairing facilities. Resupply. Getting the wounded out. That's the work that decides whether everything else can keep going.
I served in the Marine Corps from 2014 to 2018 as an Airborne and Air Delivery Specialist. Our whole job was getting supplies to people who needed them, often to places a truck couldn't easily reach. You learn fast that the best plan in the world falls apart if the water, fuel, ammo and medical supplies don't show up. Spread that across a chain of islands, with nine countries working side by side, and it gets a lot harder. Exercises like this are where you find the gaps before they matter.
Training as one team
At the opening ceremony, the Marine lieutenant general serving as deputy commander of U.S. Pacific Command closed his keynote simply: “Keep drilling, keep learning and remain ready, together.” Japan's joint operations commander told the troops in formation that they were “under different national flags and represent different cultures, yet we share the same fundamentals.”
That stuck with me. Working with another country's forces means different radios, different procedures, and sometimes a different language. Drilling together ahead of time is how you make sure those differences don't cost you when it counts. Some of the best lessons I picked up in uniform came from working alongside people who did things differently than I was taught.
Why I keep an eye on this
A lot of the veterans I talk with through The Calm Seas Project still follow the news out of Okinawa, Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton, because we know the kind of Marines who are out there. Somewhere in this exercise is a corpsman running casualty evacuation drills one more time, a young Marine standing a cold watch on an island far from home, and a logistics Marine making sure the pallets land where they're supposed to. They won't make the headlines, but they're the reason the whole thing works.
If you know someone out there for Keen Sword, send them a note this week. If you did your time on Okinawa, I'd love to hear your stories. And to every Marine and sailor training in the Pacific right now: keep drilling.
Semper Fi.
Sources: Marines.mil: Exercise Keen Sword 2027 Commences in Japan · U.S. Pacific Command: Deputy commander visits Japan, highlights combined readiness · AP News: Japan, US kick off major joint drills focusing on southern islands
