YAKIMA TRAINING CENTER, Wash., – More than 1,500 Soldiers with the Washington National Guard’s 81st Stryker Brigade Combat Team converged at Yakima Training Center this month for Raven Focus, a collective, high-intensity, field training exercise.
Held from July 14 to July 24, Raven Focus capitalized on the two weeks of annual training that National Guard units typically receive to give Soldiers a more thorough and intensive training experience than the usual drill weekend.
Raven Focus marked the first time the 81st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, or SBCT, had trained together as a brigade since July 2018, pushing Soldiers and leaders to collaborate with units and staff they don't typically interact with and learn to operate as a cohesive team.
“We’ve been able to see all the things we’ve done really well…we’ve found a few things we need to work on as a team,” said U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Jacob Baur, an ammunition logistics non-commissioned officer with the 81st SBCT. “We’ve been able to work that process from start to finish out here in the field, where we would’ve never been able to do that on a regular drill weekend.”
Headquartered at Camp Murray in Tacoma, Washington, the 81st SBCT comprises nearly half of the Washington Army National Guard, with two regiments located in Oregon and California. The unit consists of artillery, infantry, engineering and support and logistics assets.
“For a lot of these Soldiers, they’ve never seen an operation like this,” Baur said. “They usually work at a company level, and now this is a brigade level. So they’ve been able to see the relationship between the brigade and the battalion.”
For Spc. Mariia Pecherytsia, a combat medic with C Company, 181st Brigade Support Battalion, Raven Focus was her first annual training experience and she was impressed by the scale.
“We’ve done cross-training with other companies [to see] what capabilities they have,” Pecherytsia said. “But I don’t think we usually get to do a lot of that interaction with the other companies, so now this is giving us the bigger picture.”
In addition to Washington National Guard Soldiers, the event was augmented by service members from partner nations, including the Royal Thai Army, Canadian Army and the Bulgarian Land Forces. These military-to-military engagements facilitate the sharing of knowledge and expertise between U.S. Army personnel and their counterparts overseas through the U.S. Army Subject Matter Expert Exchange program and the Department of Defense National Guard Bureau’s State Partnership Program.
Raven Focus was designed to provide training opportunities that exceed the standard, according to the 81st SBCT senior leaders.
“If we train and fight like everyone else, we’ll be just like everyone else,” said Col. Craig Broyles, commander of the 81st SBCT. “We want to be better.”
Training collectively as a brigade creates unity of purpose, regardless of warfighting function, enabling subordinate units and ultimately strengthening the organization as a whole.
“This is probably one of the things that sometimes gets forgotten by the military, and that’s the support behind the mission,” Baur said. “And these guys are here doing that.”