FORT IRWIN, Calif. — Combat rehearsals that replicate conditions in Iraq provide valuable training for troops who have yet to experience the real war. But these training drills don’t have much new to offer to combat veterans, according to soldiers participating in a recent exercise here. The Army has spent millions of dollars during the past two years revamping its training facilities to turn them into realistic replicas of the battlefield. These efforts have paid off for troops such as those from the 1st Platoon, A Company, 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment.
Several soldiers in the platoon who already have served tours in Iraq, however, find that the training cannot recreate the stress level experienced in actual operations. A simulated mortar attack, for example, does not even come close to the acute anxiety of real war, says Cpl. Seth Toy, whose squad is attacked in such a manner one night while sleeping outside its Stryker combat vehicle during the training rotation. The instinct to run from simulated munitions doesn’t come to troops such as Toy who already has served in Iraq.
But soldiers who have been trained here before cannot help but notice how much the training environment has changed. In 2003, the brigade came through for an exercise, but it was based on a Cold War scenario that did not prepare the unit at all for what it encountered in Iraq later that November, says Capt. Duane Patin, the battalion’s acting executive officer.
This time around, the brigade encounters scenarios ripped from news headlines, ranging from diplomatic negotiations with village leaders and hostage rescue operations to secular uprisings and counter-insurgent operations.
Here, at the National Training Center, commanders anticipate that most of the training in the foreseeable future will focus on urban combat.
“My number one priority here at National Training Center is a large MOUT [military operations on urbanized terrain] facility,” says Brig. Gen. Robert Cone, the commanding general of Fort Irwin and NTC.
Spread out across the training center’s 1,100 square miles are 12 towns made of numerous shipping containers, with doors and windows, and wooden outbuildings. The largest town, Tiefort City — known as Medina Jabal during training rotations — has 100 such structures.
“All the units that train here say, ‘This is great, but we didn’t find any in Iraq that was that small,’ ” says Cone. “You need to build us a place that can stress us as a brigade.”
To that end, the center is planning to add 200 new buildings to the town that will extend its boundaries across the desert valley to represent a large Middle Eastern city. The buildings will have steel frames with reconfigurable interiors and will resemble infrastructures such as consulates, palaces and even a university.
“That will give us capability to do a brigade-level MOUT operation,” says Col. David Hogg, commander of the NTC operations.
The center has received $12 million to begin the two-year project, and commanders say they will continue working on additional funding.
Occupying a space larger than the state of Rhode Island, the National Training Center is often the last stop before troops deploy. Though it is one of the largest such facilities in the country, leaders plan to expand the property not only to add more fidelity and options to training scenarios but also to anticipate the growing need for larger operating areas for units such as the Stryker brigades, which are covering wide swaths of battle space in Iraq.
“When you realize that we have brigades over there that are dealing with 5,000 square miles and I’ve only got 1,000, this place has got to be cutting edge. We’ve got to stretch it out a little bit,” says Cone.
For the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division rotation, planners faced a challenge of how to extend the exercise beyond the confines of its property.
“They wanted a long approach into the box. I couldn’t give them hundreds of miles, but I could give them 40 miles through desert that we’ve never used,” says Hogg.
It required negotiations with California’s Bureau of Land Management and an energy company to secure a southeast portion of the Mojave Desert for use. But the effort was well worth it, says Hogg, because it allowed the operations group to take a test run of some of the things they can do in the future with that land.
Hogg envisions using the extra space to establish an international border that troops could train on, whether it’s deterring insurgents from smuggling in goods or people across the border, or conducting cross-border missions.
Along with the land expansions, a new facility is being built on post to accommodate the operation group’s command and control center.
“The new building will give us a lot more capabilities. We will have a wi-fi connectivity with the [operator-controllers] out in the box, so they can get real-time video, they can get products and they can ship things back and forth between the analysts who are back here in the sterile environment,” says Hogg. “It will help facilitate lower echelon after-action reviews as well as the battalion and brigade reviews.”
Fiber optic cables will be installed to improve connectivity and a new communications system will be stood up to allow better crosstalk between the operations group and the operator-controllers out in the desert who are evaluating the units, he says.
One of the biggest criticisms heard from the 3/2 soldiers during the rotation is that the training at NTC is too concentrated on brigade-level operations.
Standing up in the gunner hatches of their Stryker, Pfc. Eric Trameri and Toy discuss the value of such training for soldiers like themselves who operate in squads that rarely interact with brigade or even battalion tactical operations centers. During their mock medical evacuation mission, Trameri says he is skeptical, and says he thinks the training his Stryker unit received in Yakima, Wash., was better.
“We focus on the battalion and brigade level simply because we’re one of the few places that can stretch a brigade across 1,000 square miles and give it 12 towns. But in a war where the center of gravity is platoon and squad operations, we reinvested our funding strategy for instrumentation to really raise the fidelity of training at the individual platoon and squad level,” says Cone.
He says the team is looking for new training equipment to replace the multiple integrated laser engagement system gear that soldiers wear in training.
For the past 18 months, the NTC has hired hundreds of people of Iraqi descent to play the roles of townspeople, mayors, imams, policemen and interpreters. Cone says he also has hired contractors to fill the roles of non-governmental organizations, such as the international committee of the Red Cross.
Medina Jabal, the training center’s largest town with about 100 buildings, is home to the opposing force’s main operations center.
Each training day, there are a number of events scheduled, such as an uprising, a suicide bomb, or an exchange of information, explains Lt. Scott Adair, a member of the Nevada National Guard’s 1st Squadron, 221st Cavalry — one of several Army units playing the opposing force.
“Every day here is supposed to be the worst day ever in Iraq,” he says.
Soldiers from his unit fill in dual roles as insurgent commanders and villagers. Augmented by the 250 Iraqi volunteers, they help fill out more than 2,200 roles required for scenarios during the 3/2 Stryker brigade rotation. Like the militias in Iraq, they are allowed to freelance.
Standing outside the Kamel Dog Café in the center of town, Staff. Sgt. Timothy Wilson plays a food vendor named Latif Abon. He will conduct a reconnaissance operation today under the guise of selling food to figure out a way to teach the troops inside the brigade’s nearby headquarters a lesson.
“Their main weakness is they need to check people more closely,” he says. “The bad guys will befriend them in theater, but that doesn’t mean they can be trusted.”