The Norwegian Home Guard and U.S. Marines Corps have been moving hundreds of pre-positioned Tanks and LAVs from their secure storage in the mountains surrounding Trondheim for one of Norway’s largest joint exercises, Cold Response.
As the name implies the Norwegian-led exercise is to rehearse high-intensity operations in winter conditions. The exercise will involve more than 16,000 troops from 13 countries: More than 3,000 U.S. service members; approximately 6,500 members of the Norwegian Armed Forces; and nearly 4,000 troops from 11 allied and partner nations including Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Denmark, Canada, Belgium, France, Latvia,; and approximately 300 NATO personnel.
The Nordic gods of winter warfare, the Norwegian Home Guard, are constantly training in the tough, austere conditions and the Marines are eager to learn from these winter warriors.
“This lets us work side by side and get expertise from the Norwegians, who operate in this environment full time.” -Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Conradi, logistics operations chief with Marine Forces Europe and Africa.
The Marines have been conducting live fire and icy condition driving drills with their Norwegian counterparts ahead of main exercise. You can watch a video of Marines drifting Abrams on ice by clicking here.
The Norwegians are also enjoying learning from full-time professional Marines.
“We love to work with the Marines. It’s an important thing for us to be able to train with them. We are lucky to have the Marines come over and do all of our training here.” – Norwegian Army Capt. Rune Andersen, the company commander for Movement and Transportation Company, Host Nation Support Battalion.
This year’s exercise will gain a fair amount of attention from Norway’s neighbor to the East, Russia. After the invasion of crimea and the hybrid warfare in Eastern Ukraine, this is Norway’s way of saying “that won’t happen here.” Although it’s a regularly scheduled training event, it will showcase to Russia NATO’s ability to wage war in arctic conditions.
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Cold Response 2016. USMC and Royal Marines lands at Namso, Norway. Where Thay link up with the defending swedish-finnish mech battle group. Slow Advances from the attacking norwegian force continued during the day. Mostly due to heayv mine emplacment by the defending side. An air assult mission to take the bridges at Namso was beaten back during later stages of the day by an combined force of USMC and parts of the Swedish BG.
Apperently the air assult mission landed right ontop of the logistical part of the swedish engineer company and a forward support company of the mech battalion. The small unit had hard time defending itself before the USMC could relieve them. The unit then found a CV9040 parkt on a semi-truck tralier in the FSC outdoor repair bay with a boken gearbox. And just by chance gunner and commander was still hanging around in the repair bay. The CV 90 wouldent move but a semi-truck and the tralier was used creatively by the engineers move the CV90 around. The 40mm cannon and machine gun was used to fend off the air assult infantry until the USMC arrived and drove them away.”