Marine aviators and infantry worked with role-playing actors to simulate an embassy evacuation Friday evening at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center outside Twentynine Palms.
The operation was staged by Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One (MAWTS-1) personnel, who are based in Yuma, Arizona.
A Marine major with combat pilot experience briefed spectators just after 5 p.m. Oct. 18, before tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft roared in for vertical landings and take-offs.
"The Osprey now is probably the most efficient way to do it. They can put 24 combat Marines in and if you fold up the chairs you can get 32 combat Marines. In an extremist situation we'd stack people like cordwood. Believe me people would want to get out.
"A NEO (noncombatant evacuation operation) is an operation that frankly is a lot more common than you think. The Marine Corps . . . since the fall of Saigon in '75 we've done 20 NEOs. It's a pretty common real-world scenario. I think we had three in 2011. Liberia, Tunisia and Japan.
"It can be for civil unrest, which is a traditional way, like the colonel was saying. The people are mad and they don't want you there any more and you start evacuating. Or, it can just be for a tsunami. So it can be done. It's a non-combatant evacuation. It doesn't necessarily have to be combative in nature. Combative for us is what I mean.
"You can do it for disaster relief as well. When you need to get your folks out of a foreign country and you need to do it quickly, whatever the reason is, this is what you do."
The scenario covered two incidents in two states: a humanitarian relief mission in Arizona and a noncombatant evacuation at Twentynine Palms.
"There's two missions going on. The idea is we give the students a package of 33 aircraft and then there's the supporting air agencies, there's six of those, air traffic control, and there's also a ground element, you'll see people running around in cammies, they're from infantry, we're from combat logistics. So that's the whole package.
"The scenario we gave the students to work through is you have two things going on in the same time. You have a foreign humanitarian assistance in Arizona, which you have to drop off food, relieve suffering in some way, it has nothing to do with evacuation, you're actually delivering things for relief. And you have a NEO. And this NEO here is the other piece of it.
"So they have to figure out the apportionment of aircraft, how to do all that. That's the real drill."
For still images and more info see:
PHOTOS: Marines Simulate Embassy Evacuation at Twentynine Palms
Previous Patch coverage at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center:
Weapons Training with 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines: The Magnificent Bastards
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