Quote:
Combat rehearsals that replicate conditions in Iraq provide valuable training for troops who have yet to experience the real war. But these training drills don’t have much new to offer to combat veterans, according to soldiers participating in a recent exercise here. The Army has spent millions of dollars during the past two years revamping its training facilities to turn them into realistic replicas of the battlefield. These efforts have paid off for troops such as those from the 1st Platoon, A Company, 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment...
Occupying a space larger than the state of Rhode Island, the National Training Center is often the last stop before troops deploy. Though it is one of the largest such facilities in the country, leaders plan to expand the property not only to add more fidelity and options to training scenarios but also to anticipate the growing need for larger operating areas for units such as the Stryker brigades, which are covering wide swaths of battle space in Iraq...
One of the biggest criticisms heard from the 3/2 soldiers during the rotation is that the training at NTC is too concentrated on brigade-level operations.
Standing up in the gunner hatches of their Stryker, Pfc. Eric Trameri and Toy discuss the value of such training for soldiers like themselves who operate in squads that rarely interact with brigade or even battalion tactical operations centers. During their mock medical evacuation mission, Trameri says he is skeptical, and says he thinks the training his Stryker unit received in Yakima, Wash., was better.
“We focus on the battalion and brigade level simply because we’re one of the few places that can stretch a brigade across 1,000 square miles and give it 12 towns. But in a war where the center of gravity is platoon and squad operations, we reinvested our funding strategy for instrumentation to really raise the fidelity of training at the individual platoon and squad level,” says Cone...
Quote:
As they train for combat in mock Middle Eastern villages, soldiers find that their fighting skills often cannot make up for a shortage of interpreters and a poor understanding of Iraqi culture. A team of soldiers from the Fort Lewis, Wash.-based 3rd Stryker Brigade, a part of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, is here at the National Training Center for a two-week rotation. They are about to launch a humanitarian aid mission at a refugee camp. The goal is to prepare soldiers to cope with the unpredictable hurdles that come with interacting with people from a different culture...
