 US Marines with 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division Participate in a Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response Exercise During a Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, December 8, 2023 The Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation involves a range of scenarios and challenges. That tests the unit's ability to plan, coordinate and execute complex missions including offensive and defensive operations, logistics and communications. The Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation begins at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, December 8, 2023 The Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation begins at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, December 8, 2023 Sergeant Moreau, Golden Valley, Minnesota, Squad Leader for Combat Engineers, 1371 Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation, otherwise known as a McCree, is basically a big field operation that can be done all the way down at a platoon-sized company, or in this case a battalion, just to test the individual Marines' abilities to perform their tasks and work together with adjacent units. The importance of a McCree is to ensure that all the training that the Marines have done during the entire workup has been retained and that all that knowledge and information is still fresh in their minds so that when we do get deployed and get put on to a real mission, the Marines aren't confused on what to do and that everything is good to go. Marines need to be ready to deploy at all times because we don't know what's going to happen anywhere in the world and we go everywhere like we see stuff just kind of pops up and then Marines are there so we need to be always ready to fight the fight. We faced a couple of challenges from air inserts to now working with local nationals and dealing with them and doing like a humanitarian aid mission so setting up our entry control point at that end and then organizing the distribution area over here and making sure that they're getting the help they need while also ensuring the safety of our Marines by setting up wire and like other kind of wired obstacles down there. Nothing we do in the Marine Corps is easy. Everything comes down to discipline and drilling that into your Marines. If they have discipline, we can do everything that we need to do easily. So just hard work and discipline. This training contributes to the overall warfighting capabilities of Second Mardiv because we're operating at a battalion level right now and we have other adjacent units around us also from Second Mardiv. So being able to integrate with them and work in a larger AO, we've been spread out over 60 miles over the last couple of days so still being able to keep that contact and ensure that we're still working together over that distance is huge. McCree contributes to the lethality of a unit by ensuring once again that all the training that we've done up to this point is still sticking with them and also even though we've done all this training during the workup and we're still doing it now, there's still kinks that we need to work out and figure out some things that aren't working, maybe some things that are, start doing those a little more and if we have things that aren't working, what can we do to change those to make ourselves better and more of a lethal unit?