ARTICLE

February 2004

Army Training to Shift Emphasis to Dismounted Soldier

by Sandra I. Erwin

The Army’s training programs have been too vehicle-centric and have not focused enough on the dismounted soldier, particularly in urban combat. That will change in the future, said Brig. Gen. Stephen Seay, Army program executive officer for simulation, training and instrumentation.

“We have focused too much on the Bradley and Abrams. … We lost track of the soldiers coming out of the back,” he said in a presentation to the Soldier Tech conference, in Arlington, Va., hosted by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement.

Technologies that can track soldiers and their movements are key to improving training, said Seay. “All soldiers will be instrumented, so we can run them through the virtual domain.”

In large-scale exercises at the Army National Training Center, for example, commanders track vehicles, but not soldiers.

“As we look at our way in the future, we want to make sure all soldiers are seen. When they go to take over a building, how do they train to do that?”

Other needed upgrades in Army training include better facilities for urban combat rehearsals, said Seay.

Current Army urban training sites (called MOUT, for military operations in urban terrain) are not necessarily representative of current battlefields, he noted. During the 1990s, the Army opened major MOUT sites at Fort Polk, La., and at Fort Knox, Ky.

“The military construction Army MOUT facilities are fairly rigid, European style architecture. That is not where we are fighting. That wasn’t in Mogadishu, surely not in Haiti, Iraq or Afghanistan. … We have to give soldiers a better representation of the environment where they enter.”

In MOUT training, “you have split seconds to make decisions on friend or foe,” said Seay. “The training is what makes soldiers understand whether and when to pull the trigger.”

During the past two years, Seay’s office has accelerated the construction and delivery of makeshift urban training facilities that soldiers deployed in South Asia and the Middle East could use to hone their skills.

The Army set up facilities in Kuwait and Afghanistan. Most recently, Seay received an order to do the same in Baghdad.

“We are going to put a virtual capability on the ground in the facility in Baghdad,” he said.

At the training sites in Afghanistan, robotic cameras and helmet-mounted displays help soldiers prepare to navigate and search caves.

Combat training centers such as the NTC always will continue to be relevant, Seay said. The enhancements he recommends are intended to supplement the current training.

A commander of U.S. Army forces in Iraq noted that the training his unit received was appropriate for the mission, but as the conflict drags on, it will push the Army to reevaluate its priorities.

“We need to figure out the training tools we need,” said Col. Arnold Neil Gordon-Bray. “After Iraq, we are going to have to re-tool and grow our leaders.”

Bray is the director of the Joint Army Experimentation Directorate at the Training and Doctrine Command. He served as commander of the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division in Operation Iraqi Freedom, between February and July 2003.

In comments to the Soldier Tech conference, Bray said that more training is needed for platoon-level units and below in urban combat, trench operations and rules of engagement.

The Army needs portable training systems to rehearse high and lower-end skills, he said. Current devices, such as the Fire Effects Trainer, the Forward Observer Trainer and the MPRI MOUT trainer, are useful but not portable.

In conflicts like Iraq, he added, it is important for both junior and senior officers to understand the political issues and the impact of the media on policy and military operations.

Leader development programs must focus on helping soldiers get through what Bray called “ROE transition periods,” when the rules of engagement change relatively quickly, without warning.

“We need to develop training systems that challenge leaders and teams to think out of the box comfortably,” he said.

Training has to adapt to the realities of today’s battlefields, Bray said. During exercises at combat training centers, soldiers often complain that the opposing “Red Force” cheats and employs backhanded tactics. In fact that is a good thing, he said. “The OPFOR cheats, but so does the enemy.” As seen in Iraq, suicide bombers and guerillas disguised as civilians have become commonplace.

Asked whether the Army should consider deploying peacekeeping units exclusively trained for post-combat operations, Bray said that would not make sense.

“We can’t afford two armies,” he said. A peacekeeping Army is not a good idea. “You’ll need the same skills as you do in the high-end force.” The key, he said, is to focus on “training agile minds and developing agile minds.”

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