At Andy Andrews’ amusement park, bullets whiz, grenades and
mortar shells hurtle everywhere. Killers lurk around the corner.
Andrews, resting on his cane and dragging on a cigarette, directs
the horror show. But this is no Disneyland, MGM or Universal Studios,
although many of the pieces of this amusement park came from there,
and paint balls replace real bullets. This is where U.S. Army soldiers
train for urban combat missions. At the Zussman Village, 40 minutes
away from Fort Knox, Ky., soldiers get to experience a fictionalized,
but realistic, urban war.
Andy Andrews is the range manager at the training site. He oversees
the entire operation, from set-up to cleanup. The facility prepares
troops for what the Army calls MOUT, or military operations in urban
terrain. “When you hear on the news that we have deployed
our soldiers into a city, we have deployed them into a potential
buzz-saw,” said Andrews.
MOUT-type conflicts are what the Pentagon expects U.S. forces to
be fighting in the foreseeable future. It’s a complex environment
for any military force. “Where they send us, law and order
is broken down,” Andrews said. “It’s dirty, it’s
nasty.”
To make it look like real war, the training site is smothered with
dirt and mud, the grass grows tall and the sewer system is not maintained,
“because this is how we are going to do this for real,”
Andrews said. “If you saw pictures from Bosnia and Kosovo,
did you see mowed lawns?”
Parts of the Zussman Village have a cluttered south-eastern-European
village flavor to them. In 1988, Maj. Gen. Tom Tait came up with
the idea to build an urban training site at Fort Knox. Andrews said
they worked on the idea for several years, before construction started
in 1997.
“We went to all MOUT sites, we gathered lessons learned from
MOUT deployments from Panama forward, some were even from World
War II,” Andrews said. “We talked a lot to our allies
who have a lot of experience in MOUT. We learned from what the British
have learned in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Syria.”
When the main buildings were completed in October 1999, Fort Knox
opened the site to selected units. “Seriously, the city will
never be done,” Andrews said. The entire range spreads out
on 53,000 acres, which can handle aircraft landings. The 30-acre
city area is surrounded by 14,000 acres, which Andrews called “complex,
nasty terrain with severe elevation changes.” Another 7,000
acres are used for live firings. So far, construction costs for
the site exceed $15 million. The cost of operating the site is $800,000
annually.
“We are the Army’s best junk men. We take everybody’s
junk,” said Andrews. An industrial area and a junkyard full
of rusty wrecked cars greet those entering the village. The railroad
at the outskirts of the village has three tracks so far, but three
more are to come. The goal is to be able to conduct train-wreck
exercises. A Third-World slum will also sit in the vicinity of the
railroad. “Environmental problems become tactical issues,”
said Andrews. Behind the industrial area, there’s also a simulated
drug lab trailer.
In the main village, a three-story government building is complete
with a basement and underground parking. According to Andrews, no
floor in that building looks the same. It has 45 rooms and about
60 doors. “It would eat up one whole company before it can
clear up that structure,” Andrews explained. Across from the
government building is a 30-room hotel that also has a basement
linked to the sewer system.
Andrews appears particularly proud of how bad it looks. “Ours
is dirty, wet; there’s an opening into the sewer system down
in a ravine. Mother Nature populates the sewer with whatever Mother
Nature wants to lay in there, even possums.” And “yes,”
he added laughing, “I spent good government dollars buying
rubber snakes and little brown piles to go down in the sewer.”
Spitting distance from the hotel is Andy’s, a café
bar or brothel, depending on the situation. The building also holds
several stores. Andrews emphasized that looting has been, and could
be, a big problem among American troops sent on missions. During
the exercises, all the stores hold “good stuff in there to
see if they steal; we take good pictures of that and show them to
their captains,” said Andrews. “It’s hard to win
the hearts and minds and support those who have asked us into their
country when we are stealing from them, so we help commanders train
that out,” Andrews said.
A bank and a radio/TV station are neighboring Andy’s. The
station can broadcast in almost any language. Often, one can hear
Russian and Hebrew, Andrews said. Across from the broadcast station
is an office building that has been damaged in a supposed attack.
In one of the rooms, the floor has caved in. Andrews explained that
soldiers sometimes fall down where the floor ends. “It normally
takes about three loud, blood-grueling screams, before everybody
gets to realize, umm ... got to look down.”
Trainees call this building the Funhouse, said Capt. Patrick Walden,
the MOUT observer/controller team chief. “You can hurt yourself
in this building, but it’s realistic,” said Walden.
All soldiers are required to have full gear and protective pads
during their training.
A pond separates two townhouses from the office building. The townhouses
have both attics, basements and plenty of rubble. Altogether, the
site has three townhouses and four single-family houses. There’s
also a convenience store and a service station. The gas station
can blow up in an instant, sending balls of fire all around. A few
house structures and cars are also rigged to explode throughout
the training site. The fire is made with propane gas, carefully
engineered through a maze of pipes.
A church was erected at the opposite end of the road from the hotel.
Its steeple is a high point for snipers, said Andrews. Right between
the church and the service station, a tall water tower serves as
the commanding station for the exercises. A two-story school building
with 13 classrooms stands at some distance from the clutter of the
town center. Andrews described it as so real that they had 65 school
children in there for one of the exercises. A hodge-podge of chaotic
noise—talk, screams, cries—envelopes the surroundings.
A medium-sized soccer field lies on the other side of the school.
Andrews explained soccer fields naturally are going to be used to
lure the other side into the open. The training site also has a
cemetery and an electrical sub-station.
The designers and trainers at the Zussman village have paid attention
to the smallest of details, from certain holes in the ground to
odors and sounds of planes, helicopters, tanks, gunfire, bomb attacks
and civilian unrest. “We use the odor of rotten bodies, the
odor of sewage and contaminated water—nothing stinks worse
than that,” said Andrews. “We overload the sensory input,
sight, sound, smell; we have a lot of things that move, make noise;
we have things that make them afraid for their lives. They’d
better get used to it, because that is where we are going to send
them.”
For a day of fun at the Zussman village, units not stationed at
Fort Knox have to pay a total of $1,800. “That is an average
training day at a fairly good intensity level,” said Andrews.
For those who want to use the site “cold,” as Andrews
puts it, it could be as little as $500, depending on the number
of people. The site can host up to 1,500 people at one time.
Sgt. 1st Class John Keith is one of the trainers. He explained
the site was designed so that there is no limitation, only the units
themselves set limitations. Walden agreed, “If they need to
blow up something, they can...we break the windows, throw the desk
down the stairs, cut the wires,” he said.
Andrews explained that many units first focus on the “crawl,
walk, run” training that hones in on individual techniques
in an urban environment, and then they combine that experience with
tactical knowledge.
“We are not a training center,” Keith said. “It
is not mandated that every unit come to this site and train on a
certain mission. We are a training facility that has assets to help
them train on their training plan. But there are a lot of additional
things that can be thrown in the mix to make it more interesting
and tougher.”
For example, he said, in Korean villages, almost every family has
dogs that bark all the time. “If I wanted to move with any
stealth, I’d have to neutralize the dogs,” he explained.
“Most people don’t even think about that, because they
are so fixated on the patrol, or moving from building to building.
“When you spend all that money to come here and train at
this level, you should add to it as much realism as the site would
offer and capitalize on the whole training concept,” he said.
Andrews told the story about trainees from an Army division in
Fort Drum, N.Y., which was experienced in MOUT. After 30 minutes
at the site, they asked if they could take out the furniture from
the buildings—they were too confusing—and shut off the
sound system because it was too hard to concentrate. “We make
them train to a reality standard,” said Andrews, who refused
to honor their requests. Commanders sometimes try to get the blueprints
of the buildings before they come to the training. “They are
trying to cheat and have an advantage against the [opposing force]
OpFor,” said Andrews, who does not release any of the structure
plans.
“We’ve seen units that get frustrated and use high-powered
weapons, to turn the tide in their favor, when we know in reality
those kinds of engagements would not be allowed by our State Department
or policy makers,” said Keith. “An urban environment
is a three-dimensional battlefield,” said Walden. “There
is no line that says the enemy is on that side, and that the friendlies
or your allies are on that side.”
In MOUT, the success ratio is much different than in traditional,
open combat. “Our soldiers, our tanks are the best in the
world, what they can see on the battlefield they can kill,”
Andrews said. “Until they get into the city.”
In conventional battles, Andrews explained, supplies, ammunition,
refuel stations and medics are in the rear and safe. In MOUT, the
ammunition use is so extensive that the soldiers have to move those
supply points closer to the troops. “You are on the third
floor of a building; your unit has just about been decimated; you’ve
got wounded; you are out of ammo, and you call the reinforcement
of another unit to pass through to you,” Andrews said, setting
up a potential scenario. “Think about it, we are talking about
a building with a couple of elevator shafts, maintenance stairwells,
how does one unit pass through another?”
In urban combat, soldiers have to watch in every direction, said
Sgt. 1st Class John O’Boyle, who trained at the site. “It’s
a lot more physically demanding, running around. You have more obstacles
within the site, a lot of jumping through windows, doorways, climbing.”
said O’Boyle. “If you go through the sewer network for
about 100 meters, you get tired.”
The hardest part of a fight, O’Boyle said, is to take the
first building, “They have to be really careful when they
go in there,” he explained. “The bad guys are going
to know which are the good angles to hide, where the shadows in
the rooms are, and they are going to take [the good guys] out from
100 meters away. ... It’s like fighting in the trenches, when
you look the guy in the eye.”
Specialist Richard Hebert was part of the OpFor in several exercises.
He said that it was fairly easy to take out 80 percent of the forces
when they landed.
Hebert said about the enemy troops, “They are not going to
fight like we will. They are going to do the sneaky things. ...You
can’t let your guard down. You have to expect the unexpected.
Something will always be around in every corner.”
During one exercise, the Blue Force (friendly) units sent in platoon
after platoon into one building. The soldiers would stand in front
of the windows as they were clearing out a room. “You would
just look at the little silhouette in the window, shoot it and throw
it out of the game,” Hebert said. “There could be someone
hanging from the ceiling or at the top of the stairwell, waiting
for you to come up, and no one is going to look up there. But you
have to because they know the city so well.”
One of the biggest challenges in urban warfare is operating the
main battle tanks. In one of the exercises, the infantry had too
many vehicles coming through. “As long as you got spots doing
360 degrees around, you could tell where they were coming from and
focus your defense against that,” Hebert said. Tanks are threatened,
Andrews explained, by things and people they can’t see. In
an open-area battle, a tank can kill everything in sight. In urban
combat, its capabilities are limited, said Andrews. Moving along
sometimes is restrictive for a tank. Piles of rock and bricks, rubble,
can damage the tracks. Some obstacles may even immobilize the tank
and then it can become an easy target.
“With an M-1 tank [in the city] soldiers can’t walk
alongside; you can’t walk behind it, because there is 900-degree
exhaust coming out of there; you can’t ride on top of it,
and if it fires a main gun, you become marshmallow,” Andrews
said.
A tanker needs to experience this kind of environment, and “he
needs to learn to work in a combined arms team, where the infantry,
the engineers and the armor or cavalry work side-by-side,”
said Andrews. “Everybody in the military will tell you the
wonderful term ‘combined arms.’ Doing it is another
issue. Training it is another issue. That’s a lot of resources
to get together at one time and one place. It’s not cheap;
it’s time consuming.”
Troops also find it difficult to maneuver when there are civilians
around. Keith explained that it is hard for the Army Rangers—who
are elite combat soldiers—to deal with civilians. “You
got to learn to put your weapon down a little bit, relax a little,”
said Keith. “It’s not natural for them to be willing
to do that.”
The National Guard units appear to do well in urban environments,
Keith noted. Not only are they street smart—because they usually
live and operate in an urban environment—but they are part-time
civilian-soldiers, he said. In places such as Bosnia and Kosovo,
“they are walking around with their weapons slung on their
back; they are talking to the civilians and getting along with them.
As civilians are getting more rowdy or more insurgencies begin to
happen, they take the appropriate response,” said Keith.
First Sgt. Robert Wilson said that the Army needs to focus seriously
on MOUT, because it hasn’t trained like that since World War
II. “Right now, we are very weak when it comes to fighting
in an urban environment,” he said. “I don’t think
the force, as a whole, is prepared to conduct major operations in
an urban environment.”
But Andrews said that he believes sometimes there are no right
answers for military operations in urban terrain. “There are
less wrong answers,” he said. Decisions are made on the fly,
in split seconds and have a life-long impact.