Nifty Nugget Exercise Returns After Nearly 50 Years
A decades-old military readiness exercise is set to return after nearly 50 years, following language included in the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2025. The exercise, known as Nifty Nugget, was last held in 1978 and focused on testing the ability of the United States to mobilize, deploy, and sustain large-scale forces in response to a global crisis. Now, Congress is mandating the Department of Defense to either revive the exercise or develop a contemporary equivalent to assess U.S. strategic mobility and preparedness.
As reported in the Military Times article titled “What is Nifty Nugget? NDAA revives 47-year-old military exercise,” the revival of the Cold War-era simulation stems from growing concerns about potential large-scale conflicts in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Lawmakers and defense officials argue that such an exercise is necessary to improve synchronization across the Departments of Defense, Transportation, and Homeland Security—particularly in scenarios requiring interagency coordination to swiftly move personnel and material from U.S. soil to overseas theaters.
The 1977 and 1978 versions of Nifty Nugget were intense simulations involving civilian agencies alongside military commands. The exercises highlighted serious deficiencies in the infrastructure and bureaucratic processes at the time, notably in the ability to coordinate between federal departments and commercial transportation partners under stress. Analysts viewed the assessments from those Cold War-era drills as a wake-up call, illustrating systemic weaknesses that had not been adequately addressed.
Today, many of those logistical and interagency frictions remain. The Pentagon’s increasingly urgent focus on the possibility of simultaneous conflicts—such as a Chinese military move on Taiwan or a Russian expansion of its ongoing war in Ukraine—has led defense strategists to renew emphasis on large-scale mobilization drills. Modern warfare, they argue, demands more than tactical readiness; it also requires fast, large-scale movement of personnel, equipment, and supplies—something the U.S. military has not stress-tested under real-world conditions since the end of the Cold War.
The NDAA language does not prescribe an exact timeline for the launch of the new Nifty Nugget or its successor, but it calls for a demonstration exercise in the near future to evaluate the nation’s ability to operate in a contested logistics environment. The legislation also emphasizes the importance of involving commercial transportation providers, state and local governments, and strategic infrastructure partners in the drill—a hallmark of the original Nifty Nugget’s design.
This effort is not only a logistics test. It is a broader reflection of shifting defense priorities. Beyond overseas combat capabilities, the exercise aims to expose vulnerabilities at home—in ports, railways, airports, and cyberspace—that could be targeted in a future conflict. U.S. Transportation Command has welcomed the directive as an opportunity to identify critical gaps and improve coordination across the vast network that supports military power projection.
As geopolitical tensions rise, defense leaders view this initiative as a necessary pivot toward whole-of-nation readiness. Advocates say that only through large, multi-agency exercises akin to Nifty Nugget can the country fully understand—and begin to close—the gaps in its global warfighting capabilities. The stakes, they argue, are too high to remain untested.
