 Push forward to the edge of the wood line! Three sections firm! A British platoon commander is leading his men through a forest in Bavaria. They're launching an attack on a village to clear it of insurgents. They're taking part in a live fire exercise involving 19 NATO and partner nations. This training event is the biggest multinational exercise held here in Germany since reunification. The platoon commander is going to give a quick set of battle orders for these sections to move forward here. And then the forward section is going to be launched onto the houses. You smoke to give them some cover and then they'll start clearing through the buildings to the forward edge of the village. And then from there they'll then press on. Dubbed Sabre Junction, the exercise is hosted and organized by the US Army Europe's Joint Multinational Training Command in Grafenwehr. The vast training area of Grafenwehr and Hornfelds to the south and much of the civilian landscape between them has been turned into a virtual battlefield for the whole month of October. This is not a pre-deployment training for Afghanistan, but it does draw heavily on lessons learned from that conflict and from Iraq. Sabre Junction aims to prepare troops for any kind of future conflict that requires a multinational response. This event prevents potential adversaries of the future just through the ability for the nations participating to show readiness to take on new challenges. Again, criminal or insurgent, conventional, even electronic warfare or cyber warfare type scenarios are being worked out in this exercise to a low scale. And it's those types of things that as we practice, we get better. As we get better, we prevent a risk to any adversary that they may not be willing to take. As the British platoon advances, German fighter jets above drop live bombs on targets in the Grafenwehr training area. The exercise requires a lot of coordination between the different nations. It's meant to be as realistic as possible without hurting anyone. We can see a press target here. What is this? Why is it here? It's a class of friendly target and it's a judgmental target, so we train the soldiers not to engage obviously people like friends, press or civilians. The exercise involves 4,200 US troops and some 1,800 soldiers from other NATO and partner nations. The main objective is enhancing their interoperability. The business of fighting as coalitions, whether in a formal alliance like NATO or coalitions of the willing, will always involve burden sharing and working very closely together, so at the tactical level, manoeuvring through each other's battle space. And if we develop the understanding and the capability to work properly with one another, all the issues, the frictions of war, will be much more easily resolved. As the Brits continue their advance in Grafenwehr, 100km further south in the Hornfelds training area, US and other NATO forces are preparing a similar operation to free a village. American, Czech and Bulgarian soldiers are playing in surgeons. I'll link up with you. They expect to be attacked by a unit of the second US cavalry regiment. They've been waiting for three days and it could happen at any time. For them, training interoperability is mainly about communicating with each other in English. It's available for us from these exercises that we work in international environment. We have Task Force, which consists of Czech company, American company and Bulgarian company, which is for us demanding and also is good to train communication between those different units. Playing the enemy helps the soldiers to understand what they're up against in counter-insurgency operations. But the US command leading this attack must be much more methodical and careful in his approach. As a military commander, he's using all of his combat functions, all of his combat power available to him to include us. You hear the aircraft that is a friendly aircraft flying overhead, which means that the US commander has eyes on the objective right now. He's identifying the enemy positions that are the most threat to him and he's using all of his assets to remove the most lethal targets from him now in a deliberate fashion so that he doesn't put American soldiers in harm's way as he makes his approach into the city. And so the waiting game continues. The soldiers get ready for a long night. They'll be sleeping in shifts, if at all. Most of them expect the attack to happen around four or five in the morning. At least that's when they would do it. I'm Mike Muhlberger reporting for the NATO Channel from Grafenwehr in southern Germany.