I was asked by several fellow Kossack's to write this diary due to my knowledge of the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. I was one of the original Non-Commissioned Officers asigned to NTC when it was created back in 1981 as the nation's premier desert training facility. It is approximately 1,000 square miles of desert terrain in the Mojave Desert of Califonia, near the town of Barstow.
The 4th Brigade of the Second Infantry Division stationed at Fort Lewis, was scheduled to travel to NTC in April 2007 for a month's training in terrain similar to what they will face in Iraq. Due to the escalation that has now been changed and they will instead deploy to Iraq in March, without the needed training.
This in MY opinion will put the soldiers at severe disadvantage due to the difference in operating vehicles at
Fort Lewis which is a heavy forest environment, with open areas, plains in the training area, that are wide open, approximately 1 mile by 5 miles, which do not have any of the gullies called "wadi's" they will face in Iraq, these are ravines created by flooding which carve deep and wide thruout the desert terrain. Some of these "wadi's" are large enough to hide entire mechanized infantry companies in.
The STRYKER vehicle's are different than normal armored vehicles the soldiers are use to dealing with, such as the Bradley fighting vehicles the Army has been using and still uses in infantry units other than Stryker Brigades. This article from the WAPO in March 2005 shows some of the problems with the use of the Stryker vehicles
The vehicle is known as the Stryker, and 311 of the lightly armored, wheeled vehicles have been ferrying U.S. soldiers around northern Iraq since October 2003. The Army has been ebullient about the vehicle's success there, with Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, telling the House Armed Services Committee last month that "we're absolutely enthusiastic about what the Stryker has done." Soldiers emerge from a Stryker during a battle with insurgents in Mosul, Iraq, in February. An Army study criticizes the vehicle's performance. (Jim Macmillan -- AP)
But the Army's Dec. 21 report, drawn from confidential interviews with operators of the vehicle in Iraq in the last quarter of 2004, lists a catalogue of complaints about the vehicle, including design flaws, inoperable gear and maintenance problems that are "getting worse not better." Although many soldiers in the field say they like the vehicle, the Army document, titled "Initial Impressions Report -- Operations in Mosul, Iraq," makes clear that the vehicle's military performance has fallen short.
The internal criticism of the vehicle appears likely to fuel new controversy over the Pentagon's decision in 2003 to deploy the Stryker brigade in Iraq just a few months after the end of major combat operations, before the vehicle had been rigorously tested for use across a full spectrum of combat.
The report states, for example, that an armoring shield installed on Stryker vehicles to protect against unanticipated attacks by Iraqi insurgents using low-tech weapons works against half the grenades used to assault it. The shield, installed at a base in Kuwait, is so heavy that tire pressure must be checked three times daily. Nine tires a day are changed after failing, the report says; the Army told The Post the current figure is "11 tire and wheel assemblies daily."
This recent article in the Tacoma News Tribune explains why the Brigade is going to try and replicate the training they could have received at NTC in April, by trying to do it at Fort Lewis before they deploy to Iraq in April, instead of their original date of May.
A Fort Lewis Stryker brigade will leave for Iraq in April instead of May as part of the "surge" of U.S. forces aimed at reversing sectarian and insurgent violence in Baghdad.
The 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division will skip a previously scheduled trip to the Army’s National Training Center in Southern California and instead conduct its last pre-deployment rehearsals at Fort Lewis, a brigade official said Thursday.
The unit of some 4,000 soldiers will be the fifth Stryker brigade to go to Iraq, but the first without the benefit of a test run "in the box" at either Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert or the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La.
Maj. Jim Brown, the brigade’s executive officer, acknowledged Fort Irwin offers "a great benefit" to units getting ready to deploy.
But he said officials believe they can replicate the conditions at Fort Lewis and clear up the brigade’s last maintenance and training issues here.
"I personally have no doubts that we will able to close those gaps and we’ll be ready to go," Brown said at a Fort Lewis news conference.
Officials said the change in plans moves the brigade’s schedule up by only a few weeks.
The deployment cycle, in fact, has already begun. The brigade’s commander, Col. Jon Lehr, and several senior leaders left Thursday for a previously scheduled reconnaissance trip to Iraq. They’ll be gone several days.
I have been assigned to both bases Fort Lewis twice once assigned to Company C 2/47th Infantry North Fort Lewis in 1974 and 1975. Then again on main Fort Lewis with 2/1 Infantry in 1979 thru 1981, I left there to arrive for the opening of the National Training Center in May 1981. The training available at NTC can NOT be done at Fort Lewis, they can not make a desert out of Fort Lewis, and there are many differences to operating in the two different environments.
There is also the risk to the soldiers being imbedded with Iraqi units who operate out of pick-up trucks and not armored vehicles that American units use as this
article explains and expounds on other problems with the escalation
Key to any policy of "train and retreat"-euphemism for "cut and run"-in which the administration embeds trainers in the Iraqi military as it reduces its combat forces (while at the same time increasing overall troop levels) is air power. Both Secretary of Defense-designate William Gates and Iraq Study Group co-chair Lee Hamilton made this abundantly but under-reportedly clear in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. According to Gates, "The Iraqi forces clearly have no logistical capability of their own. They have no air power of their own. So . . . we are still going to have some level of American support there for the Iraqi military and that could take quite some time . . ." Hamilton was more blunt: "I think you will have to have substantial capabilities to protect those advisors . . . when you put these men into Iraqi units they're very exposed and you have to do everything you can to protect them . . . . I think we used the word support and perhaps we weren't specific enough in some respects, but air support is clearly needed in large quantities, maybe needed even in larger quantities, if we go to this embedded idea so that equipment has to be available and the people have to be trained for that." Translation: American advisers will be in place to call in air strikes against suspected insurgent targets and the U.S. air force, which has operated within Iraq since 1991, will be on hand to carry them out. The U.S. will take some heat for collateral damage, but it will be the Iraqis who get blamed for calling in the air strikes.
I realize the war is being badly managed and now in a rush to get more feet on the ground quickly, they are denying the soldiers very vital and badly needed essential training in the proper environment. Our soldiers deserve the best training and all the protections they need to keep them alive.