Super Garuda Shield 2024

FORUM Staff

Concealed in the holds of Indonesian and Singaporean ships off the Java coast, Allied and Partner military forces braced to assault a mock enemy outpost in a field of brush and coconut palms a few hundred meters inland. The troops deployed ashore in amphibious tanks and transport vessels, scrambled across a beach and jogged inland while partly obscured by smoking mortars. Minutes later, after overcoming the would-be adversary, the combined forces established a perimeter and United States Marine Corps helicopters moved in to provide aerial support.

The amphibious assault was part of Super Garuda Shield 2024, a multilateral military exercise staged across East Java and South Sumatra, Indonesia, in August and September 2024. Launched in 2007 as a bilateral Army-to-Army encounter featuring Indonesian and U.S. Soldiers, the annual exercise blossomed into an international series of academic exchanges, development workshops and field drills in 2022. The 2024 iteration featured militaries from 10 participating and 12 observing nations.

The 12-day exercise emphasized international partnerships and utilizing military operations within each nation’s defense structure, an all-domain, multiservice approach to deterrence and warfighting that is increasingly prevalent throughout the region.

In Surabaya, military leaders discussed strategies and tactics, including how to recognize and counter cyber intrusions. Field exercises near Banongan, Baturaja and Situbondo included a combined arms live-fire, a joint strike drill, an airborne operation and the amphibious assault at Indonesian military ranges, among other drills. To foster community engagement, multinational forces built a road in Puslatpur and renovated an elementary school in Palagan province.

The exercise leveraged the expertise of each military. “It’s an opportunity to strengthen interoperability and foster friendships,” Rear Adm. Augustine Lim, Singapore’s head of naval operations, told FORUM. “It’s a great opportunity not just for Singapore but for all the countries.”

Unified Approach

Super Garuda Shield also demonstrated how each nation’s service branches work together with minimal overlap. In the amphibious assault, for instance, Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) Sailors worked alongside TNI Marines, while U.S. Marines and Sailors likewise collaborated. Soldiers from Japan and Singapore also participated.

Super Garuda Shield’s Joint Operations Center (JOC) was central to this collaborative effort, rapidly disseminating information to help ensure its success. U.S. Army Capt. Gene Maslink, the combined task force battle captain, described the JOC as a command post that coordinated across nations and their military services.

The joint strike drill — viewed by TNI chief Gen. Agus Subiyanto and Adm. Samuel Paparo, Commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) — demonstrated the ability of combined forces to address increasingly complex scenarios. Indonesian and U.S. forces worked together using land-based missiles, naval fire, and crewed and uncrewed aircraft to identify and destroy a target and then assess damage. Paparo called it “the future of warfighting.”

The multilateral cross-service effort aligns with the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) commitment to establish joint, all-domain command and control (JADC2) that “provides an approach for developing the warfighting capability to sense, make sense, and act at all levels and phases of war, across all domains, and with partners, to deliver information advantage at the speed of relevance.” Rapid improvements in telecommunications, sensors and processing, along with space and cyberspace capabilities, amplify the need for such strategies.

“Successfully designing, developing, and implementing JADC2 requires a clear vision with an increasing emphasis on cross-service and cross-domain integration,” the War on the Rocks website reported in 2022. “History has repeatedly shown that victory goes to the side with the decision advantage.”

JADC2 is the DOD’s mechanism to share intelligence from the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Space Force, the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reported in September 2022. The goal is to ensure that the joint force commander has “the capabilities needed to command the Joint Force across all warfighting domains and throughout the electromagnetic spectrum to deter, and, if necessary, defeat any adversary at any time and in any place around the globe,” according to the JADC2 strategy.

Enhancing situational awareness is critical, Dr. Andre Stridiron III, manager of the USINDOPACOM Pacific Multi-Domain Training and Experimentation Capability program, told FORUM. Safety, communication and data sharing are key considerations for Allies and Partners weighing potential responses to a scenario, whether it’s conflict or a natural disaster. “We’ve got to do the hard part — understand the threat thoroughly, understand the process — before pushing a red button,” Stridiron said.

“Exercises like Super Garuda Shield show the appetite for integration is there,” he added. “We need to build an infrastructure to make militaries truly interoperable.”

Canada, a longtime exercise observer, participated for the first time in 2024. “This is a concrete demonstration of our commitment, not only to the success of this specific exercise, but our commitment writ large to the region, to being a trusted, reliable, persistent partner in promoting safety and security in the region,” said Col. Stewart Taylor, Canada’s defense attaché to Indonesia.

The joint strike drill showed how communication is critical to multilateral, all-domain collaboration. “We can see the real integration,” Col. Frega Wenas Inkiriwang, the TNI’s joint task force commander, told FORUM. “We successfully executed the mission. When we are conducting combined or joint exercises, we keep not only building mutual trust, but we also give the opportunity to Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines to elevate their individual knowledge and learn different doctrine, different tactics, techniques and procedures,” Frega said.

Multilateral Exposure

Exchanges among international forces on tactical and personal levels are key to successful warfighting and the focus of multilateral Indo-Pacific exercises, which also include Balikatan in the Philippines, Cobra Gold in Thailand and Talisman Sabre in Australia. As the provocative rhetoric and actions of North Korea, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia raise regional tensions, such exercises reinforce the commitment of like-minded nations to a Free and Open Indo-Pacific.

“My focus on these exercises is always about getting everyone on the same page,” Royal Australian Navy Cmdr. Andy Clowes told FORUM during Super Garuda Shield. “How we do the scenario gives us an indication of how we’re going to fight. The key to fighting is actually having those relationships to start with. So that is always useful at a military-to-military level — understanding one another from both a military perspective, which is the easy part, and a cultural perspective, which is often the hard part.”

Participants said the exercise achieved its goals of boosting interoperability, fostering relationships, and improving capacity to plan and conduct joint operations. “There’s a platoon of Soldiers doing field exercises,” Maj. Carl Schroeder, commanding officer of the British Army’s B Company, 1 Royal Gurkha Rifles, based in Brunei, told FORUM. “They benefit a lot from working side by side … with our partners. That’s where the strong bonds for our future leaders form, in those field exercises.

“We’re developing our understanding and how we work on problems together because we all have our different staff processes,” Schroeder said. “Working through them, we get to see those differences and the areas where we’re on the same page.”

Building trust and enhancing collaboration with Allies and Partners was “tremendously beneficial” for Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Soldiers, Lt. Col. Naoki Okayama told FORUM. Through airborne and amphibious training, they also learned more about recapturing islands, Okayama said.

The U.S. Army defines interoperability as “the ability to act together coherently, effectively and efficiently to achieve tactical, operational and strategic objectives.” Collective operations can leverage partner capabilities and fill gaps; enable access to locations and forces; facilitate clear messaging; and reduce costs, the Rand Corp., a U.S.-based global policy think tank, reported in April 2024.

With the U.S. identifying the PRC as its pacing challenge, interoperability among U.S. Allies and Partners increasingly is a strategic priority. Regional military exercises support this concept and continue to grow, as evidenced by Super Garuda Shield’s transformation from a bilateral to a multinational endeavor. “U.S. bilateral alliances and partnerships in the region are a critical element in deterrence against PRC threats, both for the access they provide to the United States and the capabilities our allies bring to the table,” Christopher B. Johnstone, a senior advisor at the CSIS think tank, testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in March 2024. “And all of these relationships are strengthening at the same time in response to growing concerns about PRC intentions.”

Cooperation among U.S. Allies and Partners in the region is robust, Johnstone said. “Although these networks fall short of formal treaty arrangements, they make an increasingly important contribution to deterrence by promoting information sharing, advancing interoperability and, more broadly, reinforcing for China that the use of force could trigger a regional, if not global, response.”

Moving Forward

Rapid development of technology has spawned a need for interoperability and all-domain collaboration to counter bad actors. Advancements in space and the evolution of cyber are expanding traditional perceptions of effective defense.

The cyber exercise at Super Garuda Shield wasn’t the first such training among Allies and Partners, but it was new to the Indonesian exercise. Designed to enhance technical skills, develop relationships and establish groundwork for increasingly complex cyber programs, the exercise at the TNI’s Naval Warfighting Training Center in Surabaya involved personnel from Indonesia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the U.S. It concluded with a scenario in which one team attempted to penetrate cyber networks defended by another team.

“We’re using it as a baseline to build on,” Hawaii Air National Guard Col. Glen Hayase, 154th Mission Support Group commander and an exercise facilitator, told FORUM. “Going forward, the plan is to make things more complex, to expand the multinational participation and further develop technical skills for our partner nations.”

Cyber intruders target civilian as well as military functions, putting power grids, airports and health care services at risk. “That’s what makes cyber unique,” Hayase said. “There are opportunities for malicious cyber actors to conduct activities below the level of conflict.”