In 1978, the Defense Department conducted an exercise to simulate what would happen if it needed to mobilize all U.S. forces globally in the face of an existential conflict.
It didn’t go well.
The 21-day exercise, dubbed “Nifty Nugget,” brought two dozen military commands to bear to support a notional conflict in Europe. Due to major holes in planning, communication and logistics, up to half a million troops were late to the fight, and the conflict resulted in 400,000 U.S. casualties. While the exercise did result in useful insights, such as helping to prompt the creation of U.S. Transportation Command in 1987, the concept of a mass mobilization exercise was summarily shelved.
Until now.
In the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Donald Trump in early December, a provision calls for a study modeled on Nifty Nugget and focused on Reserve force mobilization “to assess the capability of the Armed Forces to respond to a high-intensity contingency in the Indo-Pacific region.”
The law requires the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs to collaborate with the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to assess the military’s ability to “rapidly mobilize, 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.”
The requirement comes as China’s threats to invade Taiwan intensify. While the U.S. has maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” over whether it would come to Taiwan’s aid militarily, the prospect of a Taiwan invasion has long been considered a potential trigger for major war.
The mandated study also needs to include an evaluation of strategic lift, sustainment and logistics capabilities; analysis of interagency coordination procedures; an evaluation of joint and allied interoperability “with particular attention to coordination mechanisms with Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and Taiwan”; and the creation of an inventory of the civilian job and education skills within the military’s Reserve component.
These skills include foreign language and cultural proficiency; advanced degrees and academic credentials; skills in high-demand fields such as cybersecurity and data science; and private-sector leadership experience.
A report from the study, due two years from now, must include findings and recommendations, including best practices, and a data analysis that shows how many reservists are likely to be available to reinforce active units in combat in the first 30, 60 and 90 days of a major war in the Pacific, as well as the number of reservists likely needed to shore up sustainment operations at home.
This requirement comes on the heels of a 2024 report from the Center for a New America Security that assessed the ability of the U.S. to mobilize and deploy conscripts if a major war required the country to activate the draft for the first time since the Vietnam war.
That study found, in a best-case scenario, that it would take about seven months to mobilize 100,000 conscripts. Without perfect conditions, such as all conscripts responding to their draft notices, it might take as long as three-and-a-half years to reach that target, the study found.
While renewing a draft would entail more robust challenges than a mass activation of reservists who already have military training and have in the past met standards, the groups share common obstacles — like getting a huge surge of personnel up-to-date on medical and dental deployment prerequisites.
The report called for the National Security Council to begin holding full-scale mobilization exercises across the government every two years to ensure readiness for war.
Katherine Kuzminski, the primary author of that report, told Military Times that although she wasn’t sure of the impetus behind the new NDAA provision, she had briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2024 about the findings of her report and emphasized the value of bringing back mobilization trials.
“When Nifty Nugget was run back in 1978, the headline from it was, it was a total failure,” she said. “But as an exercise, it was not a failure. The point of the exercise is to expose where all the gaps and problems would be if you were in a crisis situation, and we wanted to find those. That was the point.”
The addition of the study requirement in the defense policy bill, Kuzminski said, tells her that lawmakers are taking the prospect of a major conflict in the Indo-Pacific seriously. It also, she added, surfaced a critical component of warfighting that can sometimes be downplayed: the human cost of war.
“When I was digging into what existed about manpower mobilization, is that every open source war game, at least, was looking at, you know, what are the impacts on ships and tanks and equipment? But there was nothing along the lines of, what are the manpower requirements for an actual no-kidding conflict in the Indo-Pacific,” she said. “And that leads to another really unsavory thing you have to think about, which is, what would the casualty rates be.”
Another element addressed in the CNAS report that may feature in the Defense Department analysis is the role of technology and a changing world, and how factors like social media might affect the likelihood of conscripts and members of the Individual Ready Reserve to comply with a mobilization mandate when their country calls on them.
“I think there are a lot of gaps, and seams that will be uncovered in a 2025 scenario, just like we had in 1978,” she said. “And I think that coverage of the gaps and seams being identified can’t be framed as like the military is failing. No — that’s why we’re running this exercise: to identify where those gaps and seams might be.”
As far as the origins of the bizarre Nifty Nugget name, Kuzminski’s research remains inconclusive.
Read the full article here
