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Tradition Left in the Dust

Mar-24-2004 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT , General Military , Iraq News

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By Esther Schrader, Times Staff Writer

Flushed and sweating, Leonard Bentley is shaken.

The 21-year-old Army specialist has just watched six fellow soldiers fall to bullets from an unseen gun. He is being taunted in Arabic by an angry mob. Helicopters hum overhead, mortar fire is exploding around him, a turbanned kid has brazenly stolen his stores of food and water and his commander is nowhere to be seen.

"I feel exposed. We're always taught to seek cover. Here you're in the middle of the street, you have windows and doorways everywhere. You don't know what to do," the Dallas native says.

Just as Bentley was jolted by events in this simulated Middle Eastern city deep in the Louisiana woods, so was the entire U.S. Army after it rumbled into Iraq a year ago. [...]

Army leaders have figured out how to learn from mistakes so quickly that the day after Iraqi insurgents began stringing bombs from overpasses to hit convoys, the people at the Army's National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, in the California desert, were stringing fake bombs from overpasses in a mock city.

"When I was a captain, battle training was very predictable," said Col. Robert Brown, standing outside a mock Iraqi city at Ft. Polk as the infantry brigade he commands — the 1st Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division — waged battle inside with Arabic-speaking role players.

"I used to know exactly what we would do in a training exercise six months in advance. It was like you were in a football game and you knew what plays your opponent was going to run. But now you get out on the field and the other team might play soccer, or it might play lacrosse, or it might cheat.

"Our Army trained for a checklist mentality," Brown added. "Now we can't rely on the checklist." [...]

Some soldiers were trained to fight in urban environments. Some new technology was advanced. Under the former chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the concept of a light, self-sufficient brigade — dubbed Stryker — was born. It would rely on smaller, more agile armored vehicles equipped with advanced satellite-guidance systems.

But like most new ideas in the Army, Stryker moved forward in fits and starts. Traditionalists worried that the units would undermine the need for heavy tanks and artillery. Other services, particularly the Air Force — with allies among powerful defense contractors and lawmakers — competed with the Army for dollars. Money for the new brigades and other innovations was always short. The wars the Army talked about seemed amorphous and far away. [...]

The Army deployed its first Stryker brigade to Iraq so fast that soldiers didn't realize until they got there that they couldn't fit into their seat belts in full battle gear. Immediately, mechanics refitted the Strykers with aircraft-style harnesses.

The last paragraph in particluar seems like a stretch - is it really accurate to say the brigade was deployed "so fast"? Anyway, the article is worth reading just to learn more about the training troops are receiving based on lessons learned in Iraq.


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