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Golden Kastle

The success of GOLDEN CARGO led to the planning of another training exercise in FY98 for engineer units, called "GOLDEN KASTLE." The primary training opportunities include road and rail repair at designated AMC installations. The overall exercise involves units from the Army Reserve and the National Guard. Current planning involves engineer, rail, maintenance, military police and medical units, all ranging from the echelons-above-corps to the detachment level. By incorporating these levels, units learn how to deal with changes in their command structure as some units are attached to other units at various levels.

The Oklahoma National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve provided McAlester Army Ammunition Plant, Oklahoma, with a much-needed facelift as a part of their annual training exercise, "Golden Kastle '98." More than 1,500 citizen-soldiers from engineer units completed $5.4 million worth of construction projects that otherwise would have cost the plant considerably more.

The guardsmen built a surge support base camp for the reservists who worked on road and magazine projects that enhanced the plant's ability to meet Tier 1 requirements. (The plant, as a Tier 1 installation, will be required to ship ammunition quickly during the first 30 days of a military conflict.) The reservists paved 4.5 miles of road, prepared 8.4 miles for paving, built concrete truckstop pads at 19 railroad crossings, and extended the drive-through slabs at 30 ammunition storage magazines.

The training that the soldiers received closely resembled a real-time mobilization because the participating units reported to an unfamiliar group headquarters and combined forces with units from other parts of the country to accomplish the mission. Units participating in the exercise were the 120th Engineer Combat Battalion (Heavy) of the Oklahoma National Guard; the 389th Engineer Combat Battalion (Heavy), Dubuque, Iowa; 467th Engineer Battalion (Corps) (Wheeled), Memphis, Tennessee, and the 863rd Engineer Combat Battalion (Heavy), Darien, Illinois.

Golden Kastle 2001, with a "K" (The "C" was already taken) was the third year of operations at McAlester, Oklahoma and my third year also. The first two were with the 412th Engineer Command, with duty as the Duration Operations Officer in year two. This year, I got to return as a Battalion Commander and find myself on the receiving end of all that divine guidance I had been dishing out in the previous two years. The exercise was a full spectrum event that required units to mobilize and deploy personnel and equipment by land and air and perform Echelon above Division Engineer Support to their doctrinal customer. Train as you fight could not get much more straight forward than that. The battalion completed twice the number of its commitments in engineer construction and redeployed without accident.