A soldier with the 2nd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, drives an infantry squad vehicle with Australian soldiers as passengers during the Salaknib exercise at Fort Magsaysay, Philippines, on May 23, 2025. (Phillip McTaggart/U.S. Army)
FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii — The Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center combat training held each fall in Hawaii is a premier event for the 25th Infantry Division.
Last year, U.S. Army Pacific touted the massive 10-day exercise as taking place on three of the state’s islands, with personnel from 10 nations joining the training that focused on the division’s 2nd Light Brigade Combat Team.
This year, the Army has uttered nary a peep about JPMRC, even as it is set to begin Tuesday.
With the federal government in week four of a shutdown, most Defense Department civilian public affairs officers have been furloughed and social media accounts left largely fallow.
Meanwhile, the DOD has issued a force-wide directive to pause engagements with the media for the duration of the shutdown — with exceptions made by the Pentagon on a case-by-case basis.
The 25th ID is seeking such an exception for the exercise now looming, Lt. Col. Eugene Miranda, a division public affairs officer, said by phone Tuesday.
“What you can walk away with is JPMRC is still happening, and we are planning to have media,” he said. “We are just awaiting an exception to actually message it — actually go live with it.”
The exercise will run through Nov. 17, with the “height of activity” happening the first week of next month, Miranda said.
This year, JPMRC will validate the division’s 3rd Mobile Brigade, which is working toward full transformation from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team as part of the Army’s Transforming in Contact initiative.
JPMRC employs monitors, video and other digital information to give real-time feedback to soldiers on the ground, providing realistic combat training of the kind soldiers would get at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., or the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif.
The combat training center is supported by Army Pacific and the 196th Infantry Brigade, both headquartered at Fort Shafter.
The JPMRC also operates a combat training center in Alaska, along with one that is deployable throughout the Indo-Pacific region. It has been deployed to the Philippines and Indonesia.
The Army is in the process of converting 25 of its infantry brigade combat teams into formations called mobile brigade combat teams as part of the initiative, Army Times reported Thursday.
Central to the mobile brigades is the Army’s new infantry squad vehicle, which vastly expands maneuvering distance for soldiers.
The 25th tested about 100 of the vehicles during JPMRC last fall. It is manufactured by GM Defense, a subsidiary of General Motors, and is based on the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 Bison.
The vehicle is small enough to be loaded into a Chinook or Stallion helicopter and light enough to be sling-loaded under a Black Hawk helicopter.
