Enhanced bilateral decision-making just one goal of Yama Sakura
By C. Todd Lopez December 13, 2016
WASHINGTON (Army News Service) -- The bilateral command post exercise Yama Sakura 71 concluded Dec. 13 in Japan, where Soldiers with I Corps, out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, and Soldiers with the Japanese Western Army trained together to defeat a near-peer competitor.
Chief among the goals for I Corps during Yama Sakura, said its commander, Lt. Gen. Stephen Lanza, was enhancement of the bilateral decision-making process between Japanese and U.S. military partners.
"The Japanese have a different decision cycle than we do, they have a different way they make decisions than we do," Lanza said. Overcoming those differences and finding common ground there was a top priority, he said.
Also a priority, Lanza said, was looking into how assessments are made to arrive at those same decisions. The Japanese and Americans work differently there too, he said.
"The Japanese have a different methodology of doing assessments," he said, than the U.S. military. "But all of those assessments need to feed decision-making."
Finally, Lanza said, increasing interoperability was an I Corps priority at this Yama Sakura. One place that would be important, he said, is in building a common operating picture, "so both U.S. and Japanese forces have the same picture of what's going on from an operational perspective and an intelligence perspective. We're working through that with our systems and their systems."
This year's Yama Sakura -- a yearly exercise -- involves more than just the U.S. Army and Japan's Western Army, Lanza said. Under I Corps this year is also the 5th Air Force, the 7th Fleet, and the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force. Special Forces also played a role as well, he said. Jointness, he said, played a larger role in this iteration of Yama Sakura, adding "it's the first time that's happened to this scale."
Getting that kind of jointness on the Japanese side, Lanza said, has been a goal of the Japanese Army as well.
"What we've seen with the Japanese is that they have grown -- at least in the short time I've been in command -- in terms of not only their interoperability with U.S. forces, but their ability to apply joint resources to an Army operation."
He said that means that the Japanese Army has enhanced their ability to call on air power, amphibious operations, and their navy as well. "All of that has grown in the last couple of years, besides just the fact that our two armies can work together."
Increasing joint interoperability is "something their leadership wanted to do," he said. "It was really the vision of Gen. (Kiyohumi) Iwata who was their chief of staff who said we need to move in a different direction and break down the ability of services to work on their own and be able to do these joint operations. I really attribute it to Japanese leadership."
What's also grown for both the U.S. and Japanese military is development of a bilateral partnership -- which is of course the No. 1 goal of such exercises.
"Any time you have the opportunity to build that physical relationship, where you're actually doing it not just through meetings, but you're actually doing it where you are actually training together as a headquarters, that forces that relationship and trust with the organization," Lanza said.
Next year, Lanza said, he'll have moved on to a new leadership positon. But the new I Corps commander will get the opportunity to work with Japan's North Eastern Army as part of Yama Sakura 2017.
In addition to Yama Sakura, Lanza said that I Corps has also been involved in the ongoing series of Pacific Pathways exercise for going on three years now. With Pathways, he said, I Corps has deployed on multi-month tours of multiple countries to participate in not just one exercise, such as with Yama Sakura, but on multiple exercises in series.
"I think the key for Pathways is that we want it to be additive to our home-station training readiness. So as we train in other countries, as we go through the sustained readiness model, we're actually increasing more live-fire opportunities with Pacific Pathways," Lanza said.
Right now, Lanza said, Pathways involves the U.S. Army and a few other U.S. military partners as well, engaging with one country. He said he thinks in the future, these Pacific Pathways could be enhanced through the inclusion of even more nations.
"Perhaps there is an opportunities for multi-lateral pathways, where you have multiple countries working together," he said. "Right now it is just one country at a time, but could you combine different countries?"
Lanza said another enhancement to Pacific Pathways could be inclusion of multiple domains of battle, including air, space and cyber.
The Pacific Pathways experience, Lanza said, has not just increased readiness for American Soldiers, it has also enhanced the partnerships between the United States and the partner countries that participate, he said.
"The intrinsic value that we get, when you see the U.S. military operate in these different countries, is it enhances the professional militaries of these other countries as well, which then leads to better governance and better stability," he said. "We see a growth in their professionalism, in their ability to be a professional military: the growth of their NCO corps and the growth of their leaders, as well as ours."
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