101st Airborne tests new battalions designed for large-scale battles

During a recent home station training exercise, the 101st Airborne Division put three of its newly created division-focused battalions to the test in a large-scale air assault.

In the months leading up to the Army’s Operation Lethal Eagle, the division formed the 302nd Division Intelligence Battalion, 21st Division Signal Battalion and 326th Division Engineer Battalion to help push mass into the fight as the Army prepares for a division-level fight.

The units, still considered in their initial operational capability phase, were used extensively throughout the exercise at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Col. Travis McIntosh, the division deputy commander, told Army Times.

The three battalions worked their respective assets — intelligence, signals and engineers — as assets for the larger division during this year’s exercise, which featured large-scale movements and maneuvers with force-on-force fighting drills down to the squad level and company live-fire ranges, McIntosh said.

“That 21-day division-level exercise gave us the opportunity to take a little more than 7,000 of our soldiers into the field,” McIntosh said.

This year’s Operation Lethal Eagle, held from Feb. 19 to March 10, included 82nd Airborne Division soldiers and assets from joint forces such as the Marine Corps and Air Force.

The exercise saw 1,100 soldiers attack by three separate air assaults using 34 helicopters, McIntosh said.

The “Geronimo,” or opposition force that the soldiers faced, used their own drones and technology to mimic what observers are seeing in the Russia-Ukraine war, McIntosh said. That turned part of the exercise into a hide-and-seek mission for each side’s command post — the first spotted was usually the first targeted and likely destroyed.

But the work wasn’t limited to standard training, according to McIntosh. Troops integrated 65 new pieces of technology, a move inspired by the service’s larger Transformation in Contact effort to modernize and ready its troops while keeping units in the deployment cycle.

Transformation in Contact, or TIC, efforts previously focused on three separate brigades, one each with the 101st, 10th Mountain Division and 25th Infantry Division, respectively.

But the Army has pushed the experimentation up the chain to the division level, in what Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Randy George has called “TIC 2.0.”

Soldiers participating in this year’s Operation Lethal Eagle got a taste of what their 10th Mountain counterparts experienced during a recent rotation of their TIC brigade and associated units to Germany: freezing weather.

And then some.

Over the three-week exercise, McIntosh said soldiers endured weather ranging from minus-6 degrees and five inches of snow to 60 degrees with flooding and 40- to 50-knot winds.

To haul the gear they needed alongside the 1,100 air assault troops and their accompanying units, the 101st called on the Air Force’s 61st Airlift Squadron out of Little Rock, Arkansas, McIntosh said.

That’s because, much like a real-world event, the 101st will rely on joint and partner forces and is likely going to need to resupply and reinforce by air only, the colonel said.

Beyond the big platforms, the division started 3D printing and experimenting with new drones ahead of the event, ultimately building and flying 105 unit-made drones during the exercise.

Those flights, however, weren’t without their hiccups.

The colonel estimated that eight to 12 of the drones crashed at some point but were operational and back in the fight within 24 hours, after some quick maintenance.

Soldiers are using lessons learned from the drone printing and employment to build a better, 2.0 version of their “Eagle” drone for the next exercise, McIntosh said.

That work will focus on the division’s 1st Brigade, which is set for a Joint Readiness Training Center rotation at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, in May, according to McIntosh.