The Joint Multinational Readiness Center will conduct “hybrid threat” exercises to prepare two Europe-based Army brigades for future conflicts that might pit them against a conventional enemy equipped with tanks and artillery as well as insurgents resorting to guerilla tactics.

The Vicenza, Italy-based 173rd Airborne Brigade will do a “hybrid threat” exercise at Hohenfels in October, Joint Multinational Training Center commander Brig. Gen. Stephen Salazar said last month. The Vilseck, Germany-based 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which is expected home from Afghanistan in May, will do the training later, he said.

Salazar said 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, which recently marked the completion of a five-year mission that saw its companies taking turns deploying to Zabul Province, Afghanistan, will provide the opposing force during hybrid threat exercises.

The battalion’s troops are already training in tracked vehicles that replicate tanks in preparation for the exercises, JMRC spokesman Maj. Nick Sternberg said.

“For the last eight years, they have focused on replicating an insurgency for troop rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Sternberg said. “Now (during the exercises), they will have an element acting as insurgents and another playing a conventional military force.”