The first Stryker brigade is preparing to put boots on the ground
again next summer. At Fort Lewis, Wash., where the brigade is based,
soldiers have access to several training facilities and technologies
that fuse intelligence from the theater directly into their training.
“What
we’re trying to do, in near real-time, is take lessons learned
from what’s going on in Mosul everyday, and crank it back
into the training we’re doing here,” said Bobby Jolley,
director of the Battle Command Training Center on post.
When the first Stryker brigade, the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division,
was on the ground in Iraq in late 2003, those involved in training
the second Stryker brigade—the Fort Lewis-based 1st Brigade,
25th Infantry Division—realized they had a resource in the
battlefield that they could tap. An operations center was established
in the mission support training facility (MSTF) to keep in daily
contact with the 3/2.
“We had commanders—senior commissioned officers, sergeant
majors, battalion sergeants, majors—from the unit here, that
was going over there, talking by video teleconference out of our
operations center on a daily basis,” said Jolley.
In a sense, the commanders were participating in a type of training
that the Army calls “right-seat rides” from around the
globe through the Jacobsen Operations Center, which was named for
a Stryker soldier who died in Iraq.
Units from the 1/25 would walk into MSTF and train on missions
that the 3/2 was actually conducting on the ground.
“We could go in there, and we could find out what was going
on, on the ground—here are the operations that they’re
doing. We could read their after-action reports or their operations
orders. We were able to take real-world intelligence, all the maps,
everything for the area that we were going into and actually work
through that process,” said Maj. Nicholas Mullen, rear detachment
commander of the 1/25. “The training was all at the secret
level, so we were using what we would use there. And it got us into
that mindset of, okay, this is where we are going.”
All of that training paid off when the second Stryker brigade deployed
to relieve the first brigade.
“The second brigade, when they got there, because of the
right-seat rides and because of the up-to-date training that they
had, became fully combat-ready in a much shorter period of time,”
said Jolley.
“That totally led to our success,” said Mullen.
When in theater, the second Stryker brigade found it could benefit
from the daily contact with the MSTF. Commanders could “reach
back” for resources not readily available on the battlefield.
The 1/25, for example, had a suspect in custody, but wanted additional
intelligence on some of his operations, said Jolley. The commander
requested assistance from the people in the center.
“And these guys here fingered him in a few hours. And therefore,
the brigade kept this guy in custody and was able to reach out and
get some of the other figures around him,” said Jolley.
“I’m very comfortable, when I go into theater, that
I can pick up the phone, or I can send an e-mail back to the people
at MSTF and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to do this operation,
and I’d like you to run a couple of courses of action in a
war game and tell me how they come out,’ ” said Col.
Steven Townsend, commander of 3/2.
As it trains up for deployment, 3/2 finds itself on the receiving
end of things at the training centers.
“What we’ve been able to do since we came back is go
back and use MSTF,” said Maj. Doug Baker, executive officer
of the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment. His battalion is able
to attain pertinent mission information from the brigade on the
ground, in this case, from 1/25.
“We get that order, their graphics, their mission and go
through the planning process and then have the company commanders
and the platoon leaders fight those fights in simulated 3-D.”
The brigade’s military intelligence company has ensconced
itself inside the Jacobsen Operations Center since it returned.
Everyday, it works on the classified systems, pulling intelligence
from 1/25 and building it for the brigade to use when it returns
to Iraq, he said.
In late August, two Strykers and a tactical operations center are
parked outside on the MSTF pad and plugged into system. Soldiers
from the 1-23 infantry stand in a circle, taking a break from the
training.
“These guys love to come here,” said Matt McCarthy,
the Science Applications International Corp. program manager at
MSTF. SAIC runs the facility.
Inside one of the many spacious rooms at the new $23 million battle
command training center, adjacent to the MSTF on post, eight simulators—each
composed of several touch-screen monitors, a steering wheel and
a joystick—sit upon tables arranged in a large, C-shaped pod.
With these virtual vehicle systems, soldiers learn how to navigate
the eight-wheeled, 19-ton Stryker, to use its weapons systems and
to use the commander technologies on board.
Tanks have full-immersion simulators, said William Belue, training
simulations team chief within the training integration branch at
the center. But “there is no such thing for the Stryker,”
he said. To get a similar sort of immersion experience, soldiers
can mount one of the $100,000 simulators inside a mock-up of the
Stryker vehicle and use that for training, perhaps in conjunction
with a firearms simulation exercise in one of the engagement skills
training sites located on post, he said.
Once soldiers have gained the basic skills on the Stryker, their
unit commanders can walk into the center and set up virtual training
exercises, said Belue. The simulations team will design scenarios
from scratch, based upon each unit’s needs.
Depending on the scenario and the desired quality of virtual environment,
it can take the team anywhere between a few days to several months
to craft a simulation, he said.
The system these designers use most is the joint conflict and tactical
simulations, or JCATS, said Jolley.
“What JCATS gives you is entity-level resolution, which means
the individual soldier, the individual Stryker vehicle, is modeled
in the simulation,” said Lt. Col. Mark Edgren, chief of the
mission support training facility. “It allows [soldiers] to
really optimize their training for a full-up battlefield condition.”
The designers incorporate vignettes based upon situations that
units have encountered in Iraq into JCATS to give soldiers applicable
training for deployment.
“There are situations that occur over and over—going
on patrol, clearing convoy routes. We apply the existing simulations
to them,” said Jolley.
“We created scenarios, where the young corporal was being
told: You’re standing on a corner. It’s two o’clock
in the morning. You’re running a checkpoint. There are two
cars screaming around the corner, coming at you. What do you do
now? And by the way, the CNN camera is running over there,”
said Col. Mike Peppers, director of the G37 Division at Fort Lewis,
which is responsible for training, readiness, force management,
strategic change and initiatives and analysis.
Soldiers are also taught how to handle duties three levels above
their own so that “platoon leaders can step up and become
company commanders,” said Capt. Teddy Kleisner, company commander
for Bravo 1-23.
“We try to place our leaders in very uncertain situations.
We continually throw curve balls at them, so what they find on the
battlefield is not exactly what they were told they would find on
the battlefield. They have to be able to react flexibly to what
they actually find,” said Townsend.
Behind the battle command training center lies a forest where units
can take their green tents, vehicles and computers, set up a tactical
operations center and plug into the center’s fixed tactical
internet and run simulations, said Edgren.
Between the two training facilities stands a tall communications
tower that enables the fixed tactical internet.
“That gives us a capability so that the Stryker unit can
train in the simulation center. They can train on the pad outside
there and that’s just plug and play because we have the tactical
interface points outside the building,” said Jolley. “Or
they can be in the training area, here at Fort Lewis. They can be
in the training center at [nearby] Yakima. Or for that matter, they
can be across the world.”
Part of the challenge of having a digitally-enabled force like
the Stryker brigade is that the retraining requirements for the
soldiers is greatly increased, said Jolley.
“Every week or two, there’s a new course that starts
covering all of the ABCS, Army Battle Command Systems, to train
not only the new soldiers coming in, but the new officers and NCOs
that are reassigned,” said Jolley. “That’s a departure
from Army doctrine, because individual training is typically done
in the training centers by the Training and Doctrine Command. Our
experience here is that that really doesn’t do the job,”
he said. Some soldiers come in with digital training; some don’t,
he explained.
In the case of the first Stryker brigade, the soldiers came from
various backgrounds, a mix of heavy and light units. But they all
needed to learn how to negotiate the Stryker’s communications
systems.
“We had to go to something called “digital university”
on North Fort,” said Jeffrey Du, brigade command sergeant
major for 3/2, as he surveyed soldiers from brigade’s three
battalions out on a field competing for the Expert Infantry Badge.
While digital training is obviously a necessity for the Stryker
brigade, maintaining infantryman training is also key.
“We have tried to get back to basics, and not have everything
Iraq-focused, because even though we are slotted to go back next
year, we could end up anywhere,” said Baker.
The brigade’s training focus has been on the individual soldier
from the start.
“Every soldier is trained as a potential leader. There are
no followers in Stryker Brigade,” said Lt. Gen. James Dubik,
commanding general of I Corps and Fort Lewis.