For the fourth consecutive year, the Army Contracting Command will conduct the premier Department of Defense contracting readiness exercise for military and civilian personnel.

Formerly called Joint Dawn, the military readiness exercise is called ACC MRX-2013 and will be conducted at Fort Bliss, Texas Jan. 15-31.

"We're expanding the scope of this year's training," said Col. Timothy Strange, MRX-13 officer-in-charge and commander, 412th Contracting Support Brigade, Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, Texas. "Participants can look forward to working on more than 100 contracting actions each, not to mention some hard-to-handle situational scenarios."

The number of exercise participants has increased each year. In 2010, 34 contingency contracting officers attended the training held at Fort Riley, Kan. In 2011 at Fort Campbell, Ky., the training attracted 115 participants and in 2012 at Fort Bliss, Texas it had 159 military and civilian trainees. Exercise coordinators expect more than 200 participants at the coming exercise.

The last exercise had a real joint flavor as Soldiers, Marines, sailors, airmen and civilians worked and trained beside one another.

"We're coordinating with the Air Force and all the other services to see if they want to participate in either a cadre or trainee status. When deployed we tend to work in a joint environment and we want to make this training as close to what a person would experience in theater," Strange said.

Currently in the planning stages, Lt. Col. Joshua Burris, commander, 905th Contingency Contracting Battalion and the exercise coordinator said they have three goals at this stage.

"We're forming and preparing the cadre organization to support the training of 204 participants. Second, we're making sure our list of scenarios reflect the current Afghanistan mission and contracting priorities and we want to ensure our plan reflects the proper warrior training tasks
to prepare our trainees to survive on the battlefield," Burris said.

Personnel with a common access card interested in attending the MRX-13 training can go to https://ecc.aep.army.mil/412th/ACCMRX13/default.aspx for more information.