Idaho Army National Guard Soldiers with the 1st Battalion of the 148th Field Artillery Regiment and their counterparts from California, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin trained in June with the Royal Moroccan Army in the northern Sahara Desert as part of Exercise African Lion ’22. African Lion is a multinational, combined joint exercise. Almost 4,000 U.S. service members and more than 4,000 troops from Brazil, Canada, Ghana, Morocco, NATO, Netherlands, Senegal, Tunisia and the United Kingdom are participating in U.S. AFRICOM’s largest annual exercise. The battalion fired the M795 high explosive rounds and the M825 white smoke rounds from the M109A6 howitzers. Idaho’s battalion shipped multiple M109A6 howitzers, HMMWVs, a palletized loading system and a maintenance field repair system across the sea for the exercise. A team from the battalion was sent to help load and unload equipment onto a ship. “One of our mission-essential tasks is to be able to deploy and perform expeditionary...