The American military is playing all sorts of war games all year round, in locations all across the world, as a means to keep itself prepared for whatever may happen. Some of these locations are horrible places to be, while others true paradises. Few however compare to the Joint Pacific Alaskan Range Complex (JPARC).
Covering a total of 67,000 square miles (174,000 km) of the Alaskan wilderness, the place provides soldiers in the mood to play some games and test their equipment with all kinds of terrain imaginable, including rivers, mountains, and forests.
The place is suitable for conducting exercises that involve the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and is used each year by thousands of troops as they go about practicing their routines. Aside from the American military, government and non-governmental agencies, as well as foreign nations, from time to time, go there and do the same.
Needless to say that this means a lot of the most modern and potent hardware is tested there in various scenarios. But the place, like the entire Alaska, for that matter, is so spectacular that few human-made machines overshadow it.
Take the main phot of this piece, snapped back in mid-April over the Complex, and recently published by the Air Force. It shows two F-35 Lighting IIs of the F-35A variety flying together toward the Indo-Pacific region, as they were looking to modernize “defense capabilities in the region.”
Flown by pilots of the 354th Fighter Wing, stationed at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, and one of the first units to field large numbers of F-35s, the beasts are spectacular, flying over the snow-covered ground below.
But despite flexing their muscles in a very impressive way, and the detailed close-up that is this photo, that snow-covered ground below seems to be stealing the spotlight nonetheless, showing that not even war (games) can overshadow nature.
The place is suitable for conducting exercises that involve the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and is used each year by thousands of troops as they go about practicing their routines. Aside from the American military, government and non-governmental agencies, as well as foreign nations, from time to time, go there and do the same.
Needless to say that this means a lot of the most modern and potent hardware is tested there in various scenarios. But the place, like the entire Alaska, for that matter, is so spectacular that few human-made machines overshadow it.
Take the main phot of this piece, snapped back in mid-April over the Complex, and recently published by the Air Force. It shows two F-35 Lighting IIs of the F-35A variety flying together toward the Indo-Pacific region, as they were looking to modernize “defense capabilities in the region.”
Flown by pilots of the 354th Fighter Wing, stationed at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, and one of the first units to field large numbers of F-35s, the beasts are spectacular, flying over the snow-covered ground below.
But despite flexing their muscles in a very impressive way, and the detailed close-up that is this photo, that snow-covered ground below seems to be stealing the spotlight nonetheless, showing that not even war (games) can overshadow nature.