Army looks at creating new unit to play role of enemy in military exercises

During the Army Commanders’ Conference last month, top officers had decided to explore the feasibility of creating a tailor-made organisation to function as an adversarial force that can carry out realistic wargaming and training to enhance the force’s combat potential. Countries such as the US have already employed this concept extensively.

As per officials, the new unit will be raised from existing ones. It will look at employing weapons, operating methods and tactics of one or more adversaries so that regular troops experience a scenario that is close to an actual war.

Troops in a military exercise are divided into blue land or red/yellow land with the latter denoting adversaries.

The Army teaches courses on the organisational role and tactics of adversarial forces, but these are largely restricted to officers.

There is also a REDFOR (red forces) unit representing adversarial forces under the Army’s training command, ARTRAC, which is responsible for vetting exercises and plans for wargames on paper and sand model exercises.

Additionally, commands have war centres where computer-generated models of different scenarios are tested, or wargamed, using artificial intelligence.

The implementation of the OPFOR, however, would strengthen this concept by highlighting the strength and weaknesses of a participating formation during on-ground military exercises.

While all wargames and plans are restricted to officers and other select ranks at present, the implementation of OPFOR will help all participating troops get first-hand experience during on-ground exercises.