The 3rd Infantry Division is the only mechanized division on the East Coast of the United States, and it is transforming for large-scale combat operations by training hard and practicing rapid deployment of its massive firepower.

Following decades of counterinsurgency operations in the Middle East, the U.S. Army’s mechanized formations are returning to their roots and sharpening core war-fighting capabilities to prepare for combined arms war at scale.

Known as “the Hammer” of the XVIII Airborne Corps, the 3rd Infantry Division over the past 18 months has taken home-station training at Fort Stewart, Georgia, to the next level with a focus on nighttime operations and complex exercises meant to boost lethality and readiness. The two-week training periods typical for armored formations have been replaced with 45-day field exercises, stress shoots, new gunnery tables and round after round of packing up and shipping out to the Army’s combat training centers, other Army installations and, sometimes, just flying out and back for practice.

Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, commanding general of the 3rd Infantry Division, said the division always has retained a rapidly deployable response package. But after a couple of decades of deploying soldiers for the global war on terrorism, he said, the division now is focused on “restoring, strengthening that deployment DNA” by shipping out as often as possible. “You can’t start from nothing and move fast. You have to practice moving fast,” Norrie said.

“Because we’re in the XVIII Airborne Corps, our own belief is that we have to be ready to move as fast as the 82nd Airborne Division and be more lethal than any formation in III Armored Corps or across the Army,” Norrie said. “The world is unpredictable, and we don’t want to be caught flat-footed in any way. If there’s a need, our Dogface Soldiers will be there.”

‘Big Formations’

Norrie, who was slated to relinquish division command in June, offered a snapshot of an armored brigade’s firepower, explaining that an armored brigade combat team carries the net explosive weight equivalent to five GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs, also known as the “Mother of All Bombs.”

During one day of major combat operations, Norrie said, an armored brigade combat team is projected to consume over 31,000 tons of ammunition, including rounds from main tank guns, 25 mm Bradley fighting vehicle guns, 155 mm field artillery shells and more than 3,000 mortar rounds. “What we uniquely offer is scale. These are big formations designed specifically to break other armies as part of large-scale combat operations,” Norrie said. “An armored brigade can scale direct fires, sustainment, Mission Command and a bunch of other capabilities that our infantry brigades can’t.”

Training now includes integrated stress shoots, new gunnery tables, deception tactics, more force-on-force repetition and night maneuvers. “We’ve reduced the total length of time in the field but really focused on staying out for longer periods of time to build grit and on really increasing the intensity of our operations while out,” Norrie said.

Exercise Intensity

Behind the division’s lethality and readiness is a shift in the character and intensity of field exercises. Known as Marne Focus, the training was forged, in part, by guidance from U.S. Army Forces Command to conduct sustained training operations at night.

This guidance spoke naturally to division Command Sgt. Maj. Jonathan Reffeor, a career infantryman who sought to instill the light infantry mindset among the division’s armored brigades by modeling field exercises with the operational rhythm of an infantry formation. For years, Reffeor said, the division’s armored brigades maintained a training schedule involving two weeks of company-level gunnery combined with field training and a combined arms live-fire exercise, after which they would return home. The schedule would repeat at the brigade level in advance of a rotation at a combat training center, creating a cycle of about 200 days, Reffeor said.

In the former training plan, “soldiers would go out for a few days, come back in, go back out, come back in, so they didn’t ever really get after the reps and sets … that build lethality,” Reffeor said. “We’ve kind of broken that training plan.”

Drawing on the “light world” experience he gained as an infantryman in the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Reffeor said he established two 45-day field problems for the division’s mechanized brigades, the first of which is focused on team, squad and platoon training events, with company- and battalion-level objectives the focus of the second training event. The division’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, known as Spartan, has conducted two iterations of the new training, he said.

“You smash 90 days together, and you accomplish the original training plan where it would be over nine months, but you build in recovery periods to continue to build that lethality and combat power,” Reffeor said, explaining that soldiers get close to two months to recover, maintain their equipment and establish “good healthy habits” in physical training, recreation and time with family before they go back out.

High Readiness

Citing its 45-day nighttime field exercises, Command Sgt. Maj. TJ Holland, Forces Command’s senior enlisted leader, said the 3rd Infantry Division’s “operational readiness rate was really high because everybody was in the field.”

“They were … focused on war-fighting, their gunnery was exceptional, the culture of just getting out there and getting the rigor of firing through the friction, of just getting to the field,” fulfills the intent of building lethality, Holland said during a panel discussion about transformation at the Association of the U.S. Army Global Force Symposium and Exposition in Huntsville, Alabama, in March.

While it may be hard to capture data about a soldier’s mindset after 45 days in the field, Reffeor said after the seventh day, troops begin to settle into the mission, build relationships and solidify trust—and then, “something really happens.”

“Soldiers are getting accustomed to living in the field, field craft starts happening, you start understanding your environment, the weather and, ultimately, you start seeing your junior NCOs, your junior officers getting to understand how to maneuver and fight their formations,” Reffeor said. “It’s really impressive.”

Reacting to Change

Changing the game further, Reffeor incorporated infantry-style stress shoots for tank crews designed to replicate situations they may encounter in combat.

After completing their gunnery qualification table, in an unexpected change to the established mission plan, tank crews are ordered to move to another range. Once there, they perform a set of strenuous physical activities to elevate their heart rates. Then, they load ammunition and drive to a battle position at another location. “At that point, we start squelching the radios, causing confusion inside the platform, and then we expose multiple targets at them, which, out of 10 targets, only a handful are actually enemy,” Reffeor said. “They all have to work together as a team in a degraded environment. The ultimate goal is to refocus, slow the environment down, control [their] emotions and be able to execute under stress like you would do in combat.”

The point of the stress shoot is to give leaders needed experience to make decisions in the moment, to manage chaos, because “at the end of the day, that’s kind of what the battlefield looks like, chaotic,” Reffeor said. “Our leaders love it. I won’t lie. The soldiers love it.”

Rapidly Deployable

Sets and reps also have boosted the division’s ability to quickly pack up and ship out from Hunter Army Airfield near Fort Stewart, and the practice has increased readiness on the ground, Norrie said.

Using the division’s 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team as an example, Norrie said the brigade rapidly deployed to Europe when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and has practiced rapid deployment repeatedly.

Norrie said the same “package” of equipment that was deployed to Europe, which includes sustainment, Mission Command, communications and all the brigade’s equipment, has rapidly deployed on training missions seven times in the past 18 months, including to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, landing at Bicycle Lake Army Airfield.

The 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team’s soldiers “quickly configured their vehicles and went straight into the box ready to fight,” Norrie said. He added that the brigade’s soldiers and equipment package then was flown to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team soldiers trained with soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division. The same rapid deployment has been practiced with several flights to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, he said.

“We’ve practiced ... even just flying [the brigade out] and then returning it, just to refine all of our own garrison- and installation-level systems and processes,” Norrie said. The practice deployments are “strengthening our DNA” among personnel who support deployment training, he said.

In addition to enhancing the division’s ability to refine its rapid deployment capabilities, the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, known as Raider, last fall was designated as the first mechanized transformation in contact brigade.

Driven by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, transformation in contact is a modernization effort to get new technology and equipment into the hands of soldiers for feedback after testing under combat conditions. The initiative also challenges leaders to practice innovative tactics, techniques and procedures they will need to survive in large-scale combat operations.

As a transformation in contact brigade, Raider relayed to the division lessons learned during a recent rotation at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Germany, and that information was integrated into Marne Focus in real time.

Those lessons included the use of drones, integrating cyber and electromagnetic tools, the size of command posts, how to issue orders, combining or increasing mass at the point of contact, “as well as looking at how we’re organized,” Norrie said.

With the volume of practice deployments increasing, and the expansion of field training, Norrie said there has been a corresponding increase in pride among the division’s soldiers, evidenced by “really, really high” reenlistment rates.

In fiscal 2024, the retention rate was 121.8%, and the division, whose retention rate as of April was 108.2%, is “on a glide path to exceed retention” this fiscal year, division spokeswoman Lt. Col. Angel Tomko said.

“They’re really proud to be part of the XVIII Airborne Corps,” Norrie said of the division’s soldiers. “It’s the only mechanized unit on the East Coast. We’re quietly forging the future of armor.”