training

July 2007

Army, Air Force Should Combine Combat Training

By Grace Jean

AVON PARK AIR FORCE RANGE, Fla. - To reflect the way the services are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials are attempting to integrate aviation training into pre-deployment exercises at the Army’s National Training Center in Fort Irwin, Calif.

“Fort Irwin has got an awesome training complex. But the training objectives are very brigade-focused. They’re not focused on integrating aviation and partnering aviation with ground maneuver. And that’s the end state that I want to achieve,” says Marine Col. Lawrence Roberts of Joint Forces Command’s Joint Fires Integration and Interoperability Team.

To a degree, the Air Force’s Green Flag exercises are combining air and ground training at NTC, but Roberts says the training objectives are still largely ground-focused. The airmen who call in close air support, known as joint terminal attack controllers, or JTACs, lack the quality and intensity of the training they receive at smaller-scale events.

Roberts says it’s possible to improve the training that JTACs have at the large desert range while pacifying soldiers’ concerns about having their training disrupted by aviation.

“Let’s build a mission thread so that aviation is actually part of your brigade training. Your brigade staff better integrates aviation, and the air guys better understand what’s going on on the ground,” he says. Atlantic Strike is a good example of the small-scale, JTAC-centric training events, he says. It ought to be a stepping-stone to a larger pre-deployment exercise.

“This ought to be the warm-up game, the practice. Then they go out to NTC and now they’re in the finals before they go to the championship game, in combat,” says Roberts.

“The western range is a phenomenal capability, but we have to have a joint context that becomes the forcing function that makes our joint services come together in one training area. That’s what we’re striving to do,” he says.

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Please email your comments to GJean@ndia.org

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