They peered down into a manhole.

They were deciding how to place a dummy – a simulated casualty who needed to be retrieved.

They were 2 explosive ordnance disposal Marines, an Air Force technician and a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialist.

“Let’s put the robot down there,” said one of the Marines.

“Will it fit?” asked the Airman.

“Good question… Do you have a ruler?”

“We can measure it with my rifle,” a Marine said.

“Works for me.”

They pooled tools and resources, attaching one of the robots to a multi-pod pulley system and lowering the robot into the manhole.

“I really didn’t expect them to put the robot down there,” said one of the observers with a laugh. “But if it works…”

This is exactly the sort of collaboration and innovation that the designers and supervisors of the exercise had hoped to see.

“Every scenario can be reset and rerun,” said US Marine Corps Master Sgt. Jason Hilker, a technician with the 3rd Marine Logistics Group. “We aren’t telling the Marines how to solve the problems - we aren’t here to influence their decisions. We are only presenting problems. I want to see what they come up with.”

For US Marine Corps Master Sgt. Joshua McLeod, the company design and control chief and the primary designer of this year’s exercise, the key words were integration and innovation.

“One of the problems that we had is that we don’t have a lot of training aides,” McLeod said.

“I can’t just dig through a dumpster now and make an IED [Improvised Explosive Device] out of it. We have to actually have real-world training items to do that, and that’s very difficult to do, and expensive. We were able to manufacture about 300 foreign ordnance items scaled to form.”