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M60 armored vehicles, ASTROS rockets, and jets taking off far from the sea turned Formosa (GO) into a simulated war field for decades, but in August 2025 the budget, COP 30, and the crisis with the United States brought down that year’s edition
Operation Formosa put the Goiás savanna on the military map of the planet. In September 2024, between the 4th and 17th, about 3,000 military personnel from 10 countries occupied the Formosa Instruction Field in Goiás, in the largest land exercise of the Brazilian Navy, according to DefesaNet. Less than a year later, in August 2025, the unthinkable happened: the following edition was canceled, breaking a sequence that had been ongoing since 1988.
According to Poder Naval, the cancellation announced on August 20, 2025, combined budgetary restrictions, the prioritization of Operation Atlas alongside the Army and Air Force, the allocation of resources for COP 30 in Belém, and the diplomatic crisis with the United States, which had already withdrawn its marines from the exercise.
A piece of war in the middle of the savanna
Since 1988, every year, the Brazilian Navy does something that seems contradictory in terms: it takes its amphibious assault force to the dry heart of the Central Plateau, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest beach. The Formosa Instruction Field in Goiás became the address where Brazilian marines rehearse war on a real scale, with space to maneuver armored vehicles, fire real artillery, and coordinate combat aviation.
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The logic is simple: no barracks by the sea offers enough free area to move thousands of men and dozens of vehicles with live ammunition. The savanna does. And that’s how the operation consolidated itself, according to Poder Naval, as the largest land exercise of the Navy in the Central Plateau, repeated without interruption for more than three decades.
The edition that brought together the USA and China in the same field
The September 2024 edition elevated the exercise to another level. According to DefesaNet, in addition to the approximately 3,000 Brazilian military personnel, the operation received representatives from 10 countries, including South Africa, Argentina, France, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Republic of Congo.
The detail that made the edition go down in history is in two names on the list: United States and Chinese marines participated together in the operational part of the exercise, a very rare meeting between the two largest military powers in the world within a training in the interior of Brazil. While Washington and Beijing faced off on all geopolitical boards, their marines shared the same Goian savanna under Brazilian coordination.
The arsenal that parades in Goiás
The list of equipment for the 2024 edition, according to DefesaNet, looks like a real war inventory. On the ground, M60 combat vehicles, JLTV and Piranha armored vehicles, the Amphibious Tracked Vehicle, and UNIMOG trucks. In artillery, the ASTROS system, rocket artillery capable of saturating entire areas dozens of kilometers away.
In the air, it is even more impressive: AF-1 Skyhawk fighters from the Navy, the KC-390 Millennium cargo aircraft, and the A-29 Super Tucano attack turboprops from the Air Force, as well as the R-99 surveillance aircraft. It is the rare occasion when the air power and ground power of the Brazilian Armed Forces operate integrated, with live ammunition, in a single tactical scenario.
Live fire and chemical warfare: what is really trained
Operation Formosa is not a parade. According to DefesaNet, the 2024 program included live fire, tactical pre-hospital care, orientation and navigation with armored vehicles, airspace control, and even recognition of nuclear, chemical, radiological, and biological agents, the type of training that only makes sense when the possibility of conflict is taken seriously.
Each of these disciplines requires heavy logistics: real ammunition, fuel, field hospitals, secure communications. It is precisely this cost that transforms the exercise into an expensive event, which would end up weighing on the 2025 decision.
There is also a valuable side effect that does not appear in the budget. Operation Formosa functions as a doctrine laboratory: it is there that manuals are tested against reality, that young officers command real troops for the first time, and that mistakes come at no cost, without loss of life. No army learns war in a classroom, and the Goian savanna was the most realistic simulation room that the Brazilian amphibious force had at its disposal.
The 113 first female marines in history
The 2024 edition also marked a silent milestone. According to DefesaNet, the first class of women from the Marine Corps graduated in July of that year, with 113 graduates, and 91 of them were presented to the Operational Sector, the branch that goes into the field in exercises like Formosa.
After more than two centuries of exclusively male troops, the Brazilian amphibious force began to include women in its operational line in the same year it held its largest multinational edition. Two records in the same season.
The cancellation of 2025: when money spoke louder
Then came August 2025. According to Poder Naval, the Navy announced on the 20th the cancellation of the edition scheduled for September, an unprecedented decision in the series started in 1988. The mobilization was already underway, with approximately 2,000 military personnel, more than 100 vehicles, and 8 helicopters deployed, when the order changed.
The reasons, according to Poder Naval, form a budgetary and political knot: the priority given to Operation Atlas, a joint exercise of the Navy, Army, and Air Force, the reservation of resources for the structure of COP 30, scheduled for November in Belém, and the guidance of priorities from the Minister of Defense, José Múcio Monteiro.
The withdrawal of American marines
An extra element made the cancellation even more symbolic. According to Poder Naval, the diplomatic crisis between Brazil and the United States led to the suspension of American participation, with the withdrawal of US marines who would act as observers of the exercise.
The same training field that a year earlier had Americans and Chinese training side by side became a portrait of the new geopolitical board: military cooperation, which seemed shielded from politics, was one of the first casualties when the relationship between the two governments soured.
What replaced the canceled exercise
The effort was not completely wasted. The mobilized structure was absorbed by Atlas, the joint exercise of the three Forces that began to concentrate attention and budget, according to Poder Naval. In practice, the Navy exchanged its own showcase exercise for an integrated operation with the Army and Air Force in the Midwest.
For the marines, the change has an invisible cost: each year without Formosa is a year without the only environment where the amphibious force trains completely, with live fire and integrated aviation, and the experience accumulated over 36 uninterrupted editions cannot be improvised back.
What remains for the next editions of Operation Formosa
The defense sector’s expectation is that Operation Formosa will return to the calendar when the budget allows, especially since the Training Field is still there, ready, and so is the troop. History is in favor: no institution abandons for free an exercise that survived all crises since 1988.
The question that the cancellation exposed remains: how much is it worth, in public budget, to maintain an amphibious force trained on a real scale? If the answer takes time, the Goiás savanna will remain silent. Leave your opinion in the comments: is cutting military exercises an economy or a risk?
