Sentry Storm is a West Virginia National Guard led joint exercise involving 15 separate military and civilian organizations. The exercise is designed to provide military units real world readiness training while providing domestic response capabilities to support the World Scout Jamboree.

Transcript

Now Sentry Storm used to be an exercise where we really just did aeromedical evacuation, and the whole idea was to have it at the same time with the National Scout Jamboree, or the World Scout Jamboree, so if something really, really went wrong with the Scouts, we’d have crews and aircraft available to come in and help with any mass casualty evacuation. But this year I said, “Okay, we’re gonna use Sentry Storm “to build up our full-spectrum readiness, “and I want you all playing hard, “and no easy aeromedical evacuation, and just being around. “I want you all bringing in our partners.” We wanted to show what West Virginia has to offer to train our Airmen, and our Soldiers, Marines, all of our DOD, for the near-peer fight. We’re gonna be practicing like we really want to fight if that moment should come in maybe Eastern Europe, the Balkans. West Virginia has the terrain to really, really simulate that. I’ve always been one who says, “If you’re gonna be “training to fight, shadowboxing is not gonna get you “to the championship. “You’ve gotta get hit every once in a while “and know how to take a hit.” So we brought in the 266th Range Control Squadron so that they could use their emitters to have our Airmen simulate being shot at by anti-aircraft fire, surface-to-air missiles, and be able to react to them, and react quickly in an environment that’s full of mountains and valleys. This gets our people training for the fight more, and then adds a little bit more pressure for them to get time over target and drop their loads accurately. And everyone I’ve talked to from those other units, they wish they could come around here a lot more for training.