By Robbin Laird
The public account of Desert Forge 2026 describes a statewide training event built around a notional cyberattack, telecommunications outages, and an attack on a power-distribution station near Hawthorne. Those events were scenario injects. The exercise was designed to expose weaknesses and opportunities inside the formation: how leaders make decisions under pressure, how units communicate and operate when systems are disrupted, and where training, equipment, relationships, and processes need to improve. Public reporting called it the largest and most complex Army-led exercise in Nevada in more than twenty-five years. The visible field phase concluded June 18.
That distinction matters. In the scenario, the governor tasked the Nevada Army National Guard to re-establish interagency communications and secure essential energy infrastructure. That was the problem presented to the force, not the exercise’s real-world mission. The command used the scenario to create friction and reveal how well the organization could understand the situation, coordinate across units, sustain operations, and adapt when assumptions or systems failed.
An Infrastructure-Defense Exercise
Desert Forge gave resilience a practical test, but the primary object of that test was the Guard itself. Simulated communications and infrastructure disruption created pressure on command and control, tactical communications, coordination, sustainment, and decision-making. The value of the scenario was what it could reveal about the formation: which capabilities worked, where dependencies created risk, and which gaps leaders had not yet recognized.
This was not simply a civil-support drill or a rehearsal to validate a known response plan. It was a field environment for testing the force, learning from failure, and finding opportunities to improve warfighting readiness. The same ability to command, communicate, move, provide medical support, and sustain operations matters at home and abroad. Desert Forge used a domestic scenario to examine those capabilities under pressure.
The participating organizations gave the exercise breadth: Nevada Army National Guard units, outside formations, local hospitals, Naval Air Station Fallon, and the Navy’s Resolute Hunter Exercise. Units and specialties trained together in and around Hawthorne, while other Desert Forge-related training connected activity in Nevada and California with live-fire training in Idaho and partner work in the South Pacific. Those efforts should be described with care so the article does not imply every activity occurred at one site or at the same time. The central lesson was organizational: readiness depends on units and partners understanding how to work together, while commanders identify the seams and constraints that still need attention.
Beyond a Civil-Support Drill
Desert Forge was broader than a civil-support exercise. Its component activities developed deployable combat and support capabilities while helping leaders find weaknesses and opportunities within the Nevada Army National Guard. Joint Force Headquarters deployed to serve as the exercise’s command-and-control headquarters. Sustainment was part of that test: the 17th Sustainment Brigade, its 17th Special Troops Battalion, and the 757th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion participated. The 17th Sustainment Brigade and 17th Special Troops Battalion had recently returned from a CENTCOM deployment. The standard was not whether every task looked successful. It was whether the exercise exposed what the organization needed to learn and change.
The Nevada Army National Guard Medical Detachment trained on medical evacuation, triage, mass-casualty response, and preventive care in field conditions. It also worked with the 991st Aviation Troop Command on air-medical evacuation. These activities exercised medical capabilities relevant to both state missions and deployed operations. In Desert Forge, the focus was how teams performed in field conditions, coordinated with aviation, and identified what needed to improve.
The training brought different components and specialties together with aviation assets and tested their ability to work within a shared operational design. It also gave leaders a chance to examine how joint integration functioned in practice.
The 609th Engineer Company conducted cliff-rappelling training in rugged terrain near Bridgeport, California. The published account connected vertical-mobility skills and mountainous-terrain competence to readiness for missions at home and abroad. As with the medical and aviation activities, the training developed deployable capability while contributing to the broader purpose of Desert Forge: exposing strengths, gaps, and opportunities for the Nevada Army National Guard to improve.
The Command-and-Control Challenge
Command and control connected many of the exercise’s training events. Simulated telecommunications outages created a contested communications problem. A Combined Arms Rehearsal at Hawthorne brought leaders and key personnel together to synchronize operations, confirm objectives, and coordinate participating units before execution. These events provided opportunities to see how well the organization shared information and translated intent into coordinated action.
The challenge was not only whether individuals could perform their specialties. It was whether units could build a shared picture, communicate when systems were degraded, understand authorities and priorities, and coordinate under pressure. By bringing aviation, engineers, medical personnel, sustainment units, military police, signal organizations, civil affairs, psychological operations, and civilian partners into the training environment, Desert Forge exposed the relationships and dependencies that readiness requires. The after-action work must turn those observations into specific changes.
Brig. Gen. Randy Lau’s public description of the exercise emphasized decision-making under pressure, experimentation, learning from mistakes, disciplined initiative, and continuous improvement. That framing captures the intent: readiness cannot be measured only by completion of a checklist. Leaders have to create realistic friction, recognize what it reveals, and adapt the force. Desert Forge was designed to make those lessons visible inside the Nevada Army National Guard.
Behind the Exercise: Brigadier General Randy Lau
Brig. Gen. Randy Lau is the Land Component Commander of the Nevada Army National Guard. He assumed command on September 8, 2024. His assignments have included command of the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, service as Nevada Army National Guard G-3, Deputy Director of Operations for the Nevada National Guard, and Chief of Security Cooperation with the 40th Infantry Division’s Task Force Spartan in Kuwait. His experience also includes recruiting and retention, personnel, and State Partnership Program leadership.
Lau commanded the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team from April 2021 to November 2022. He later served in Kuwait with Task Force Spartan from October 2023 to April 2024. He holds a master’s degree in National Security Studies and Strategic Studies. In his civilian career, he works as the ASEC Site Lead at Naval Air Station Fallon, supporting the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center. His experience across Army, joint, and Navy settings informs his emphasis on learning across organizational boundaries. The article should avoid suggesting that one exercise or one concept alone drove that approach.
It was in Afghanistan, he told me, that the doctrine he had been taught simply stopped working: “I don’t know how MDMP works for COIN. It didn’t make sense to me… We didn’t use MDMP because the problem is very dynamic.” That experience was later sharpened at the Naval War College, where a professor walked him through the distinction between complicated and complex problems, a distinction, Lau says, that has driven everything about how he now runs his command.
The Cognitive Shift
Lau’s framework is practical: complicated problems may have a known solution, while complex problems require leaders to learn and adapt as conditions change. For the Nevada Army National Guard, that is a relevant way to think about readiness because most Soldiers also have civilian jobs and family responsibilities. The exercise therefore had to test how the organization functions under real constraints, not just how it performs when every system and assumption holds.
Communications were a major constraint in Desert Forge, but they were one part of a wider readiness test. Simulated outages challenged leaders and units to maintain command and control, make decisions, and coordinate action. The exercise also exposed questions about training, equipment, sustainment, dispersed operations, and organizational habits. The point was not to prove that a single capability was the center of gravity. It was to learn where the formation was strong, where it was vulnerable, and what it needed to do next.
The exercise also reinforced the need to operate with discipline when leaders and command posts may be observable or communications are contested. Desert Forge 27 will build on the lessons with a focus on building adaptive leaders and organizations. Planned areas of emphasis include contested communications, counter-uncrewed aircraft systems, and stronger staff and legal preparation. Those objectives should be presented as the next iteration’s learning priorities, not as proof that every gap from Desert Forge 26 has already been solved.
Progress Over Perfection
Lau’s message to leaders was progress over perfection. The purpose was to create enough room for people to act, learn, and improve instead of waiting for perfect conditions or fearlessly polished execution. Progress did not mean lowering standards. It meant using the exercise to identify a weakness, make a correction, and build proficiency through repetition. The article’s specific anecdotes and direct quotations should be checked against the interview recording before publication.
The clearest illustration was his medical teams. Lau had his clinicians, who had never done it before, pick up and relocate a battalion aid station under simulated drone threat and run night triage in the field. His framing to them: “There’s no front lines. You are the line.” That is not something you can rehearse at a tabletop exercise or in garrison — it has to be lived, with the friction and pressure that come with it.
Naming the Method: Operational Discovery
What Lau is doing, and what we landed on a name for during our conversation, is best described as operational discovery: using exercises not to validate a known solution but to surface, deliberately, what a formation doesn’t yet know it needs. Send people into the field with broad intent rather than a checklist, bring them back, and debrief hard on what they found, what equipment gap cost them time, what piece of information would have changed their response, what assumption turned out to be wrong.
That is a different orientation than the one implied by the public record alone. Read from the outside, Desert Forge looks like a rehearsal of known tasks — medevac, engineering, aviation integration, communications — performed at unusual scale. Read from the inside, through Lau’s own framing, it is something closer to an experiment: a deliberate effort to expose gaps that a command team does not yet know it has, using friction and dispersed, contested conditions to force those gaps into the open.
The Army’s senior leaders spent last week’s AUSA Annual Meeting in Washington making a version of Lau’s argument. Acting Secretary Adam Telle announced a “manufacturing rodeo” for early 2027, in which industrial-base suppliers will compete in an event meant to stress-test supply chains and “find the weak links.” Acting Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve’s new “How the Army Fights” guidance names endurance, the ability to sustain combat power over distance and time in contested conditions, as one of four elements of land power. Lt. Gen. Mac McCurry, who led the Army’s futures command until this week, warned that “often, we leap straight to material solutions, so my focus is on the mission.” Desert Forge applied the same logic at the state level. It used friction to find weak links before a crisis does, and it tested the medical, signal, engineer and sustainment work that makes up endurance. It also started from the mission rather than from a list of equipment. Most of the discussion in Washington was about the Indo-Pacific and acquisition. Nevada’s exercise is a reminder that the Guard tests these ideas on the homeland mission, in a formation where most Soldiers also hold civilian jobs.
What Desert Forge Must Produce
Lau was direct about where he thinks this sits in the national defense hierarchy: “When it comes to defense of the homeland, we are probably priority one for the country.”
It’s why Nevada is also preparing, alongside NORTHCOM, for an exercise called Vision Guard Defense on the authorities question that actually determines whether any of this training translates into action: what threshold triggers a Title 10 federalization, and how does a Guard commander avoid the paralysis of “the plan meets reality” while waiting for that call to be made.
The public record, for its part, points to a further test of the same logic at greater scale. Vigilant Guard 2027, which Nevada is scheduled to host as a full-scale exercise involving local, state, private-sector, nongovernmental, and federal partners, will be the next indicator. If Desert Forge was a proving ground for a more integrated Nevada Guard and, on Lau’s own account, a deliberate exercise in operational discovery rather than checklist validation, Vigilant Guard should test whether that integration, and that discovery-driven habit of mind, can be extended across the much wider ecosystem required to manage a genuinely complex homeland emergency.
Bibliography
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Bennett, Crystal, Sgt. “U.S. Army Soldiers Assigned to the Nevada Army National Guard Participate in a Combined Arms Rehearsal (CAR).” Photograph. DVIDS, June 16, 2026. https://www.dvidshub.net/image/9752197/us-army-soldiers-assigned-nevada-army-national-guard-participate-combined-arms-rehearsal-car.
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Sosa, Blanca, Sgt. “Desert Forge 26: 991st Aviation Troop Command Joint Training.” Video. DVIDS, June 13, 2026. https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1010799/desert-forge-26-991st-aviation-troop-command-joint-training.
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