Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 112

and other organizations have spent countless hours
with their foreign counterparts, from every branch and
across the Total Army; the bonds they created through
their shared tactical experiences in training will have
positive strategic impacts. This is time well spent, as
gestures of respect and friendship are all in an effort to
create interoperability at the most junior levels.
For example, our pilots and crew chiefs invited the
Filipino pilots and leaders to fly with them at night
while wearing night vision goggles. This is not a capability typically found in their aviation units, and the
Filipino aviators were thrilled with the opportunity.
Days later, as a nearby brush fire grew into a raging
wildfire and began to threaten Fort Magsaysay, a
Filipino operations officer who felt comfortable with
our battalion commander and his team asked our
pilots if they would provide support to help contain
the fire. Our battalion commander and his superb soldiers immediately began preparing and flying buckets
of water to drop on the blaze. Over the next three
days, day and night, they provided over three hundred “Bambi Bucket” drops totaling 63,000 gallons of
water. They successfully extinguished the fire despite
110

Soldiers from Company B, 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 3rd
Infantry Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, and Indonesian soldiers from
1st Infantry Division of Kostrad conduct tomahawk training 23 August 2015 during Garuda Shield, Pacific Pathways 2015, at Cibenda,
West Java, Indonesia. Garuda Shield is a regularly scheduled bilateral
exercise sponsored by U.S. Army-Pacific and hosted annually by the
Tentara Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Armed Forces) to
promote regional security and cooperation. (Photo by Spc. Michael
Sharp, U.S. Army)

the threat it posed by coming within five hundred
meters of the fort.
Relationships are everything. Our ability to bridge
language, perceptions, and biases is accelerated when
Army leader and soldier relationships manifest to
solve problems.
The combined capabilities of a division early-entry
command post and BCT, logistics, and aviation TFs
provide a flexible and formidable force package with
command-and-control options for USARPAC and
USPACOM. These capabilities are becoming far better
understood by other U.S. leaders and our partners the
more they see them. The mixture of experience and capability resident in the division and BCT TFs allows us
November-December 2016  MILITARY REVIEW