FEATURE ARTICLE

July 2005

Marines Seek Better Training, Gear for Urban Combat

by Harold Kennedy

The U.S. Marine Corps—famed for its trademark beachhead assaults—is shifting its emphasis to preparing leathernecks to fight in urban areas, in addition to deserts, mountains and jungles.

Traditionally, the Marines have focused on taking the beach and the terrain directly behind it, not city streets. “The last time we fought in an urban environment was in Hue [Vietnam] in 1968,” said Capt. Michael Little, of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va.

Now, in Iraq, most of the fighting—for the first time in almost four decades—is taking place once again in the country’s towns and cities, forcing the Marines to reconsider their concepts, training and equipment, Little told National Defense.

“Of all the environments you might face, the urban is the most complex,” he said. “It’s asymmetrical. It’s multi-dimensional. You have to be concerned about what’s beneath you—in the sewers—and what’s above you—not in the airspace, but the floors above you.”

The Marines are convinced that urban combat similar to that taking place in Iraq is the wave of the future. “Seventy five to 80 percent of the world’s population lives within 50 miles of a coast,” Little said. “If the Marine Corps is going to continue to accomplish its mission, it has to be able to operate in urban environments.”

With this in mind, the Marine Corps is introducing new packages of training for virtually all leathernecks, said the Warfighting Laboratory’s chief of staff, Col. Douglas J. Jerothe. The Marines established the lab in 1995, two years after 17 U.S. special operators perished during an aborted raid in Mogadishu, Somalia, leading to the collapse of a United Nations peacekeeping operation.

The lab’s mission is to improve naval expeditionary warfare capabilities. In 1999, it launched Project Metropolis after an exercise documented a need for Marines to have more training in city-like settings.

Since then, ProMet, as it is called, has developed a two-week basic urban-skills training, or BUST, course. Until recently, BUST was restricted to a small number of Marines.

In 2004, however, Marine leaders decided to offer it to all of the Corps’ four divisions, air wings and force service support groups. “Eventually, every battalion will receive the training,” Jerothe said.

BUST focuses on those combat skills required to succeed in an urban environment, including specific techniques for patrolling, clearing rooms, dealing with improvised explosives, dispensing first aid, handling detainees, collecting intelligence, conducting sniper operations and interacting with local populations.

U.S. troops must master such skills in order to succeed in operations such as Iraq, Jerothe said. “We’re fighting an insurgent in Iraq who is learned, who has seen our weaknesses and who is going to use those weaknesses against us,” he said. “One of those weak spots for us is fighting in his cities. We’ve got learn how to do it.”

To conduct its training in a more lifelike setting, the Corps has begun holding exercises at two former Air Force installations, George Air Force Base and March Air Reserve Base, both in California.

“They’re much more complex than most MOUT (military operations in urbanized terrain) facilities,” Little said. “The average MOUT has 20 to 30 buildings in a space of 200 meters wide and 200 meters long. That’s not a lot of maneuver space.

“Both of these places have abandoned office buildings, hangars, barracks and base housing, all within a square kilometer,” he said. “You can get a whole battalion in there and train in a much more realistic urban environment.”

Large, complex MOUT facilities are necessary to prepare troops for what they are going to encounter in Iraq and similar future battlefields, Little said. In 2004, he traveled to Iraq, as the ProMet’s infantry representative, to get a close-up look at the complex operating situation.

“The battles of Fallujah, Najaf and Ramadi all involved multiple battalion operations,” he said. “There were six battalions operating in Fallujah.”

Another lab program that will pay dividends in urban combat is an effort to improve the fighting capability of small Marine units, said retired Marine Col. Vince Goulding, director of the lab’s Sea Viking Experimentation Campaign. The lab was established to help the Corps develop new training and equipment for joint assaults, he said.

Sea Viking has developed a concept called “distributed operations” that the lab had planned to try with a single platoon in a Marine expeditionary unit deploying from Japan to Iraq in 2006. However, the Marine commandant, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, liked the idea so much that he ordered it implemented throughout the Corps, starting later that year, Goulding said.

Distributed operations is a concept that envisions enabling small units—rifle platoons, squads and fire teams—to operate more independently, he explained. “In complex terrains—like cities—small units need to able to operate on their own.”

In block-to-block fighting, small units often find themselves out of communications with battalion or even company-level headquarters, Goulding said. “They need to be able to perform many of the functions usually done by higher levels, such as calling in fire support.”

The term, distributed operations, is widely misunderstood, Goulding said. “It is not about teams, dispersion or clandestine operations. It is about improving the education, training and equipment of Marines in small combat units.”

The concept is not new, Goulding said. He currently is researching Army Gen. George Crook’s use of distributed operations in the 1880s against the Apache war chief, Geronimo.

Distributed operations are intended to improve the ability of small units to locate, close with and destroy enemy forces, Goulding said.

“In Iraq and Afghanistan, we have 19-year-old lance corporals making life-and-death decisions for their teammates,” he said. “We have to make sure they have the training and tools they need.”

The distributed operations concept seeks to “instill a patrolling culture,” Goulding said. “Every Marine unit needs to be able to move, communicate and shoot at the same time. That’s what we were doing in Vietnam. We’ve kind of gotten away from that.”

To increase small unit mobility, the lab envisions equipping them with a new class of highly mobile light trucks called internally transportable vehicles. The Marine Corps and U.S. Special Operations Command had been planning to acquire fleets of such trucks, which are small enough to fit into the cargo bay of V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and CH-53 Sea Stallion heavy-lift helicopters.

The Marines, who had the lead in the program, cancelled those plans in 2002 because of delays in the V-22 program. Recently, however, they apparently have had a change of heart. In November 2004, the Marine Corps Systems Command, at Quantico, awarded an $18.3 million contract to General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The contract calls, in part, for General Dynamics to deliver four prototype ITVs to the Marines in 2005 and eight in 2006, enough to equip an infantry battalion. The plan is to arm the ITVs with heavy or medium machine guns and use them to perform raids and reconnaissance patrols, Goulding said.

The distributed operations plan also includes providing a “rifleman’s suite” of equipment, including:

• An M-16A4 rifle with a collapsing stock, resulting in a shorter weapon more suitable for combat in tight urban spaces.
• Day and night rifle scopes and a bipod for improved marksmanship.
• A flash suppressor to help the shooter conceal his location.
• An ergonomically designed bayonet with a cutting edge, enabling it to do additional service as a camp tool or fighting knife.
• A personal role radio, a small transmitter-receiver that allows squad members to communicate with each other over short distances—even through walls—without shouting or hand signals.
• A compass and global-positioning system device, to help individual Marines determine his location and that of the enemy.

Every Marine needs a compass and GPS,” Goulding said. The plan would have one man in each squad who calls in fire, vastly increasing the number of Marines with such responsibilities. Currently, he said, only three in each battalion are so trained.

The job would not necessarily go to the squad leader, but “whoever can do it best, whether a corporal or a private,” Goulding said.

These changes will require enlisted personnel—especially non-commissioned officers—to perform some of the functions previously restricted to lieutenants and captains, Goulding said, and they will need more training.

The concept calls for “minor tweaking” of the platoon organization, shrinking the squad size from 14 to 12. The two men taken from each of three squads would be used to create a second command group to help run the platoon.

The first group would include the platoon commander, his radio operator, a rifleman and the unit’s logistics specialist. The second group would be headed by the platoon sergeant, who would control two riflemen and a corpsman (the Marine term for a medic). The second command group, if necessary, could replace the platoon leader’s unit. Or, if ordered to do so, it could conduct operations independently of the platoon leader.

Overtime, distributed operations will require a reappraisal of the skills necessary for infantry operations, Goulding said. “The manpower piece is problematic. How do you professionalize the infantry?”

Infantrymen are called “grunts,” he noted. “The image is this is unskilled labor. It’s not. It’s very skilled work.”

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