A soldier with the 2nd Light Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, prepares an Anduril Ghost X drone for takeoff during the Balikatan Exercise at Itbayat Airport, Itbayat, Philippines, April 22, 2025. (Brandon Roland/U.S. Army)
FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii — The Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division will join Philippine army forces this summer for an exercise involving a massive movement of troops and equipment over 250 miles by air, sea and land, according to the division commander.
The defensive drill is an expansion of combat training by the U.S. Army Pacific’s mobile Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, or JPMRC, which begins later this month in the Philippines for the second year in a row.
Soldiers with the 25th will train with troops of the 5th and 7th Philippine infantry divisions, Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans said by phone Friday.
The movement will take place on Luzon, the largest and most populous island in the Philippines, and employ Army watercraft along its east coast to transport troops and equipment north, Evans said.
At the same time, Army aircraft will transport assets from locations such as Fort Magsaysay in central Luzon to “a location of positional advantage” in the island’s north, he said.
JPMRC held a territorial defense drill last summer, “but not to the scale that we’re doing it this year, where we’re using air, land and sea to reposition forces,” Evans said.
The two allies are keeping a sustained pace of what they describe as defensive exercises in the Philippines. U.S. Marines and soldiers most recently teamed with Philippine troops for territorial defense drills during the 19-day annual Balikatan exercise that concluded Friday.
During the upcoming JPMRC, the 25th will further expand and tweak the Army’s “Transforming in Contact” initiative, which aims to rapidly put the newest technology into the hands of soldiers to make them more lethal, survivable and adaptable in any environment.
The initiative passes sequentially through three divisions — the 25th, 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain — which hand off lessons learned to the division next up for training.
Last fall, the 25th field-tested the Army’s new Infantry Squad Vehicle during JPMRC combat training in Hawaii that focused on the division’s 2nd Light Brigade Combat Team.
The 25th also employed about 100 small drones to create smaller, more mobile reconnaissance strike teams.
The Philippines JPMRC may fly more than twice that number of small drones thanks to 3D printing capability employed by the 2nd Light Brigade Combat Team during Balikatan, Evans said.
The range of those drones is also increasing. During JPRMC in Hawaii last fall drones had a range of roughly 3 miles, useful at platoon and squad levels, he said.
This summer unmanned aerial systems at the brigade level will have a range of almost 20 miles, he said.
The Transforming in Contact initiative is also working to streamline troop sustainment.
“For the last six weeks, we have been producing and purifying all of our own water, and we’re going to sustain that throughout the duration of this training,” Evans said.
