Another bite of the Nifty Nugget: US revives large-scale mobilisation exercise

In 1978, the US conducted its first full-scale simulated mobilisation exercise in many years, replicating what would happen if it needed to rapidly respond to a major conflict.

Dubbed Nifty Nugget, the 21-day war game brought together 24 military commands and 30 civilian agencies in an effort to notionally reinforce US combat forces in Europe.

The results were sobering. Major holes in planning, communication and logistics resulted in up to half a million troops being late to the fight, and 400,000 notional US casualties.

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Learning from past mistakes

While the exercise yielded some insights, most notably contributing to the creation of the US Transportation Command in 1987, large-scale mobilisation exercises were subsequently suspended – until now.

Early last month, president Trump signed the fiscal year 2026 National Defence Authorisation Act, passed by the US Senate. The legislation authorises more than $900bn (£669bn) in defence spending and covers the majority of the US defence policy landscape.

Within the 3,000-page legislative document was a provision for revisiting the Nifty Nugget model, only this time focusing on reserve force mobilisation to assess its ability to respond to a future threat in the Indo-Pacific – a region that has been the central focus of the Trump administration for several years.

The law requires Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, Dan Caine, to collaborate with the Commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command to assess the ability to "rapidly mobilise, deploy, and sustain active and reserve component forces in response to a conflict scenario involving the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, or similar Indo-Pacific flashpoint".

Heightened tensions in Indo-Pacific 

Among the objectives of the new Nifty Nugget will be an evaluation of "critical logistics vulnerabilities, mobilisation bottlenecks and command and control challenges" as well as an evaluation of joint and allied interoperability, with close coordination with Japan, Australia, the Philippines and Taiwan.

The creation of an inventory of civilian jobs and education skills will highlight the talent among its reserve forces, including those with foreign language proficiency, technical skills in cyber security and data science, and those with private sector leadership.

It comes amid rising concerns over China's threat to invade its neighbour, Taiwan. Likely in response to the recent $11.1bn (£8.26bn) arms package deal between the US and Taiwan, China recently conducted a live-fire exercise, codenamed Justice Mission 2025.

It involved the launch of dozens of rockets into the waters to the north and south of the self-governing island, while encircling it with the deployment of fighter jets, navy ships and coastguard vessels.

The US has long since maintained its policy of "strategic ambiguity".

And while it has provided Taiwan with defensive arms, it has not explicitly said it would intervene if the island did come under attack.