COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
U.S. troops to forgo training in rush to Iraq
Associated Press
February 26, 2007
Rushed by President Bush's decision to reinforceBaghdad with thousands more U.S. troops, two Army combat brigades
are skipping their usual session at the Army's special training
range in California.
They are now making preparations to leave their home bases.
Some in Congress and others outside the Army are beginning to
question whether that decision means the Army is cutting corners in
preparing soldiers for combat.
The desert training was designed specially to prepare soldiers for
the challenges of Iraq.
Army officials say the two brigades will be as ready as any others
that deploy to Iraq, even though they will not have the benefit of
training in counterinsurgency tactics at the National Training
Center at Fort Irwin, California, which has been outfitted to
simulate conditions in Iraq for units that are heading there on
yearlong tours.
Democratic Sen. Patty Murray said Monday she worries about the "less-
than-ideal training situation" for the 4th Stryker Brigade of the
2nd Infantry Division, which is based in her state and is one of the
two brigades that did its final training at home.
That brigade is to go to Iraq in April, one month earlier than
originally planned.
The other is the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, based at
Fort Stewart, Georgia, which is due to go in May for its third
combat tour since the war began in 2003.
Instead of going to the National Training Center first, it imported
personnel and equipment -- even Toyota pickup trucks like those used
by Iraqi insurgents -- from the training center at Fort Irwin for
two weeks of final rehearsals that begin Wednesday.
"The preferred method is to have them come here," a spokesman at the
National Training Center, John Wagstaffe, said in a telephone
interview Monday.
The main advantage that cannot be replicated in a home station
exercise is the vast spaces of the National Training Center, which
is located in the Mojave Desert, and the weather and other
environmental conditions that so closely resemble much of Iraq,
Wagstaffe said.
"Your weapon won't jam from sand at Fort Stewart," he said.
Murray said she does not doubt the ability of soldiers to adapt.
"They have done everything we have asked of them," she
said. "However, I am deeply troubled by the president's escalation
plan and am committed to questioning the new demands it places on
service members."
On a visit to the brigade's home station at Fort Lewis last week,
Murray asked the top commander there, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, whether
the soldiers' preparation for Iraq was adequate without going to the
National Training Center, according to a Fort Lewis spokesman, Lt.
Col. Dan Williams.
Williams said he attended Dubik's meeting with Murray.
Dubik assured her it was, Williams said.
The general told her he was confident "that they were ready to go"
to Iraq even if they had not had 1,300 soldiers imported from the
Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk to play the role of
Iraqi insurgents and civilians and to observe and control the
mission rehearsal exercise.
"They went through all the things they know they're going to do in
Iraq," Williams said.
Some outside observers say it was inevitable that, in a pinch, the
Army would tinker with training.
"It tracks with what we should expect when we hurry the units up in
their last three months" before a deployment, said Kevin Ryan, a
retired brigadier general and former Army planner who is now at
Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs.
Army commanders are compelled to make "economies," he said, when an
accelerated deployment plan forces them to compress some aspects of
training.
Ryan said he doubts this approach will significantly detract from
the soldiers' degree of preparation for Iraq.
"`Adequate' is probably a good description of what that training
is," he said.
"It's not the premiere kind of situation that commanders would
prefer, but it is adequate." Daniel Goure, a military analyst at the
Lexington Institute, a think tank, said, "This shouldn't have a
decisive impact, although it carries a modicum of risk."
The two units that are skipping their National Training Center
sessions are among five Army brigades that are being dispatched to
Baghdad on an sped-up schedule as the centerpiece of Bush's new
approach to stabilizing Iraq.
The first to go, in January, was an 82nd Airborne brigade specially
designated for short-notice deployments; it did no full-scale final
exercise before deploying to Kuwait and then into Iraq.
The next two did their final training sessions at the National
Training Center. One unit is entering Iraq now, and the other is due
to arrive in March.
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