ARTICLE

March 2004

Real-World Missions Shape Army Training

by Roxana Tiron

The U.S. Army has reorganized its training centers to fill gaps in areas such as stability and support operations, according to senior officials. The revamped training programs draw from lessons learned from counterinsurgency operations in Iraq.

“If you were to go to the National Training Center [Fort Irwin, Calif.], you would see small villages in the desert that were not there a year ago,” said Gen. Kevin Byrnes, the commander of the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. “You would see cave complexes going in. You would see 1,500 members of our opposing force schooled in how to be occupants of a village.”

Those members of the opposing force learned how to “dial up or dial down” their temperament, how to deal with “technical vehicles” and how to disguise themselves as civilians, but still fight as combatants, Byrnes said.

“The NTC is no longer force-on-force in the numbers we used to fight,” he said. “It is no longer this brigade against this motorized rifle regiment.”

The “most dramatic” change in training has to be a “great emphasis on stability and support operations,” Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the commander of the Combined Arms Center, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., told National Defense. Wallace said he believes that it is important to reduce the “emphasis that we put on major fights, understanding that these are still combat operations and very lethal, but they are not the armored congregations that we put in the past.”

While Wallace called the preparation for stability and support operations a “major training innovation,” he said it has to be coupled with increased attention to military operations in urban terrain.

“We certainly see ourselves in more and more complex and urban terrain [where it is] very difficult to discern enemy from non-combatants, and our experience in Iraq bore that out,” Byrnes said at the Precision Strike Association’s Winter Roundtable.

The training scenarios at the NTC model brigades that enter a country with pockets of resistance and a possible conventional force “lurking around.” But it is a small guerrilla force, intermingled with many non-combatants, religious and local political figures, Byrnes said.

The scenario “is not mirrored against Iraq, but it is mirrored against an Afghan/Iraq type of scenario,” he stressed.

Byrnes disputed media reports that soldiers are sent to these operations without proper training. “We are not sending them unprepared, not at all true,” he said. “Now, we have not invested years of study how to operate in that environment, because our primary mission is the combat type of fight, but our soldiers are going there well prepared.”

Paul Mayberry, the deputy undersecretary of defense for readiness, said in early December that U.S. forces had to transition from 24/7 war operations to security and stability operations, undertaking assignments for which “they have little or no training.” The fact that training for such missions was so minimal is “unacceptable,” he said at the Interservice Training, Simulation and Education Conference.

In stability and support operations soldiers are given more wide-ranging missions, said Wallace, such as humanitarian assistance, economic development, providing security for local and regional governments. All that is done at lower echelons—squad and platoon level—so the people executing those missions “have to have a better understanding of the implications of what they are doing,” said Wallace.

“It is not anything different than what we have been doing in the Balkans, but we are expanding that Balkan experience to a more lethal environment. We are dealing with a different culture.”

However, cultural awareness, or the lack thereof, is the biggest hindrance in current operations. “I think we understand peacekeeping, I think we understand stability support operations,” said Byrnes. However, applying that understanding to a certain locality is a problem.

Language skills pose another obstacle, said Byrnes. “We are working very hard to try to learn some basics, and it is not enough,” he said.

Teams from the Army’s Center for Lessons Learned were embedded with troops from the preparation stage through the high intensity period of the Iraqi war, said Byrnes. After the fall of Baghdad, others were re-inserted to continue observations, he said.

In terms of stability and support operations, the teams validated techniques used for convoy security, the service’s insights in terms of the intelligence on the ground and its techniques to process intelligence, said Wallace. The teams also validated the utility of the blue-force tracking and battle-command systems, he added.

“Major efforts are under way to harvest those lessons,” Byrnes said. Veterans of the Iraqi war are making the rounds to all Army schools to address courses for E-5 up to the Army War College.

“We are putting a lot of stock in getting those veterans talking to those who are ready to deploy,” he said. TRADOC was supposed to release last month a “major work for internal consumption on the Army’s contribution to the joint fight in Iraqi Freedom,” Byrnes said. He called it a “major task,” which includes interviews with many general officers and “how they saw the fight,” he said. This publication is the precursor to the next volume on stability and support operations coming out next year.

“Lessons learned are coming back, and are produced and taught into our schools,” he said. “Communities of practice have sprung out on our Internet at ‘www.companycommand.com,’ lessons are being shared from soldiers in the theater about what they are seeing over there, and they are getting a lot of hits. We are sharing elements with other services as well, with the Marine Corps.”

During wartime, tactics, techniques and procedures no longer are developed at training centers, but rather are shaped by units in the field based on their combat experience, said Wallace.

“The fundamental understanding is that you need to learn from whoever has the best practices,” he said. “During peacetime, those practices show up in our combat training centers and routine training, but when you are at war the best practices show up in those forces that are deployed and conducted operations.”

It is not a fundamental change in terms of collecting lessons learned, but more of a “switch in focus,” said Wallace. “I think it is going to be that way, as long as we have folks deployed.”

However, Wallace sees a problem with the time it takes to turn a program of instruction around at the individual TRADOC centers and schools.

“You would think it would be fast, but if you need to add instruction resources and techniques, we are trying to figure out how to adapt as quickly as the enemy that we are dealing with,” he said. In the institutional Army, it takes 18 months to two years to do that, and “that is unacceptable” for an Army at war, he said.

He said that both TRADOC and the Center for Lessons Learned are looking at ways to change that.

Byrnes cautioned that there is “a digestive period” when it comes to new practices. “You can put the information out immediately, so anyone can get it,” but it takes time for it to become part of the culture and to be re-learned, he said in an interview.

During wartime, that process is a lot faster, he said. “In peacetime, the institutional part of the force leads change, but in wartime it is the operational force that leads change.”

At times of high operational tempo, there is tension between the front-line units that need people in the field and the institutions that want to send soldiers to school, said Wallace. The Army now is trying to strike a balance between the combat experience and the one they receive as a “product of the educational system, and at the same time maintaining the integrity of the institution,” said Wallace.

The institutions should be creating a knowledge base on which soldiers can adapt in various circumstances. “We have to understand the balance between training and education, being adaptive based on education and being capable based on training,” he said. “We are moving in that direction.”

The extended deployments have delayed some of the leader development programs that non-commissioned officers routinely attend, said Byrnes. “We are going to have about a two-year backlog, and that is just based on overseas deployment,” he said. “There will be a significant backlog for NCOs, and we are starting to see a backlog for captains’ career courses and a minor backlog for majors attending staff colleges.”

Nevertheless, that is “a small price we have to pay,” he said. Those soldiers will pass through their leader development classes, which will be updated based on “the environments that are taking shape in the future,” he said. The delay will not hurt their career progression.

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