Exercise SHATRUJEET

…Similarly, and later as MARFORPAC’S G5 South Asia Desk Officer, I turned a small platoon-level exercise into what was designed to eventually become a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), infantry battalion reinforced, engagement.  When I took over the South Asia Desk, the platoon-level exercise did not even have a name.  It was a relatively obscure mil-to-mil exercise that was conducted one year in India and the following year in the United States.  Because of the distance between our two countries, no Desk Officer had attempted to grow this exercise into something more appropriate between near-peer, if not peer, nations.  My belief was that this exercise was totally inadequate and was basically serving next to no purpose as a platoon-to-platoon exchange. I wanted to grow it into an exercise that was strategic in its outlook and impact.

At that time, however, the war in Iraq was raging, and the Marine Corps’ involvement in Afghanistan was also significant.  Once again, I had to convince the G5, Chief of Staff, Commanding General (CG) of the MARFORPAC, U.S. Ambassador to India, and the senior-level Indian civilian and military leaders that our two nations should be conducting a strategic-level exercise.  Although this exercise was eventually conducted, the hardest part may have been convincing the MEU Commander (Colonel) to reschedule the MEU’s sustainment training en route to his unit’s seven-month deployment to Operation Iraqi Freedom.  He pushed back hard, not wanting to give up the usual sustainment training evolution in Australia, but I had already convinced his Commanding General (who was also my CG) that this exercise was strategically important, and Exercise (Ex) SHATRUJEET was born. 

India’s senior leadership, however, was not willing to grow this engagement from a platoon-level to a battalion-reinforced-level exercise without slowly building up to it.  My belief was that they were unsure of their ability to support such a major engagement and that they wanted to begin with something more manageable. So we initiated this at the company-reinforced level.  This created a problem for me as the exercise planner because all of the Marines needed to get off the Navy ships and conduct sustainment training prior to disembarking in Iraq.  So I traveled to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives in order to explore the possibility of the MEU’s conducting sustainment training in all of these countries.  After once again gaining approval to conduct distributed-operations sustainment training, that first year the Ex SHATRUJEET was conducted in India while other elements of the MEU conducted sustainment training in the Maldives and Sri Lanka.  Senior leaders in Bangladesh were extremely interested in supporting these distributed operations also, but the first year the timing of the event fell during Ramadan, and due to religious and political considerations, the government of Bangladesh was unable to support the event. However, senior leaders of Bangladesh indicated to me that they would be interested in a substantial mil-to-mil engagement in subsequent years as long as the timing did not fall during Ramadan.