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The Northern Strike started this month with military exercises and a gathering for industry partners to showcase tech and innovations for military purposes. It’s a reserve forces exercise that the Michigan National Guard has executed or accomplished for 11 years in a row.

“We bring in members of active duty, reserve; of course Air National Guard to accomplish their training objectives the exercise is scalable and tailorable which means all of the participating units that are involved in Northern Strike enter the process early and define their training objective and we build a training exercise that fits their training needs,” said Col Rossi.

Col McDonald said, “we’ve done this throughout the year; we’ve created three major exercises we have a Winter Strike, we have a Northern Strike, and what we call an

in-between. So our industry partners don’t always need a large footed exercise if you will, sometimes they need to test in a quiet environment. This location were finding is one of the more quiet environments, allow us to really test electronic warfare things that are really required that you can’t necessarily do anywhere else. One of the unique features that Michigan has is your surrounded by water.”

Col. Rossi also stated, “We were honored to host the Secretary of the Air Force today, here at the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center(CRTC). I believe that’s first time in history that a Secretary of the Air Force has visited CRTC. He was very engaged and very interested in all of the great work the airman, and our civilian partners are doing here at the Combat Readiness Training Center.”

Col. Rossi included, “He was also very interested in Northern Strike and all of the things that we accomplished during Northern Strike and all of the successes that were having they’re doing it all week they did it today here in here in Alpena that involves putting airplanes in nontraditional locations just like this year there are this month during northern strike they’re focusing on actually putting them in austere airports are airports that don’t have a lot of support and figuring out how to get the support there it’s making them more capable in an austere environment.”