Study: Nearly 15,000 went to war without anti-IED training

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The anti-IED instruction at Fort Irwin’s National Training Center is the best the Army has — a true-to-life piece of the battlefield, mocked up in the Mojave Desert. But tens of thousands of troops have gone to war without this sort of training, a USA Today investigation shows.

In the war’s early years, troops were deployed with little or no knowledge of IEDs, even as the devices came to account for 60 percent of combat deaths.

Even today, many troops head to Iraq without the best available training. Three of the 22 Army combat brigades now in Iraq — nearly 15,000 troops — didn’t have time to visit Fort Irwin or one of the three other combat training centers where brigades are supposed to do final pre-deployment exercises. Regardless of where they train, most soldiers and Marines still practice without the armored vehicles, electronic equipment and other tools they will rely on to avoid and survive IEDs in combat.

Fort Irwin has almost no armored Humvees, though commanders concede that the top-heavy vehicles are far harder to control than standard Humvees in the abrupt maneuvers often needed to survive an IED attack. Camp Shelby, Miss., a National Guard training site, uses fake “surrogates” to simulate the electronic jammers that block the wireless signals insurgents use to detonate IEDs.

Across the Pentagon’s entire training complex, there are no more than a few of the new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, that are being rushed to Iraq as the latest response to the IED threat.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Mattis, selected in September to head the U.S. Joint Forces Command, told Congress in his confirmation testimony that all troops are prepared when they reach Iraq.

But Mattis acknowledged that “units are challenged in their readiness by equipment needs ... and [lack of] time to train.” Many don’t get to practice with the equipment they’ll use in combat because there’s only enough to supply troops already in the theater, he said, and don’t they reach a combat-ready state until “just in time” for their deployment.

It’s impossible to assess the costs of inadequate training: There are no statistics on how many of the 1,600 troops killed by IEDs might have lived if they had been better prepared. Commanders and rank-and-file troops alike acknowledge that they’ve had to play catch-up in training for the IED threat.

In recent years, that training has evolved and improved dramatically, but “it hasn’t been quick enough,” said Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, commander of the 1st Army, which trains all National Guard and reserve troops in the mainland U.S. “It’s gotten better and better, but we’re still a long way from perfect.”

Army Spc. Stephen W. Castner’s complaints about his pre-deployment training still haunt his father. Castner, 27, a veteran of four years active duty in the Air Force, was back in uniform in the spring of 2006 as a National Guardsman doing exercises at Camp Shelby.

Castner’s calls home were full of concerns, especially about the lack of realistic training for IEDs and the shortage of Humvees. His father, a former Army reservist also named Stephen, was so troubled that he wrote to his congressman, Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.

Two months after the letter went out, Spc. Castner was dead.

On his first mission in Iraq, his Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb while providing security for a long convoy. Blown into a marshy ditch, the truck went unseen in the smoke as the rest of the convoy passed. A short time later, commanders noticed it missing, but by the time they returned and called for a medical evacuation, 25 minutes had passed. Castner’s pulse stopped just as the helicopter got to the hospital; he died from blood loss.

In Nov. 2004, Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., visited Camp Shelby in his district where Guard soldiers get final training before heading to Iraq. The congressman, like Castner, didn’t like what he saw.

Some of the most significant changes in training at Shelby and other installations stem from the work of a Pentagon office called the Joint IED Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO.

In the past two years, JIEDDO has spent $500 million on IED training-related initiatives. It has developed simulated jammers that look and operate like the real thing. It has issued IED “smart cards” that soldiers can carry as a handy reference on how to spot and handle different types of devices, and it has created Web sites where troops can get the latest information on IEDs.

Perhaps most important, JIEDDO has helped funnel intelligence on IEDs from Iraq to units at home that are training for deployment.

“JIEDDO has an extraordinary flexibility to react quickly to emerging needs, including training needs,” because it isn’t subject to some of the requirements that the services plan their spending far in advance, said Col. Michael Mahoney, JIEDDO’s operations chief. “Whether it’s a new jammer or improvements in armored vehicles ... you must train for those capabilities.”

These days, training installations get the latest IED intelligence from Iraq on a near-daily basis. At Fort Irwin, trainers “can get [information from the theater] on training Day 2, and on training Day 5. It’s in the [exercise] rotation,” said Maj. Brent Dixon, a training coordinator at the Army’s Combined Arms Center.

The bigger goal is to make training at Fort Irwin — with its mock Iraqi villages and 110-degree heat — even more realistic. Native Arabic speakers are hired by the Army to play roles as insurgents, as Iraqi troops and as bystanders during training exercises. They interact with soldiers training to interrogate troublemakers or to search Iraqi homes for IED components.

In 2004, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command began issuing a series of IED-focused “training support packages” to commanders. They’ve continued since, as often as every couple of months, tracking the steady evolution in the ways insurgents make and trigger IEDs.

Even so, at the end of 2004, when Staff Sgt. Scott Molle deployed, his training at Fort Benning, Ga., included “some IEDs, maybe on the side of the road, but ... most of the training we got, you could pretty much throw out the window as soon as you got [to Iraq]. It just didn’t compare to what was happening” there.

The lag in IED training mirrored the reluctance of top Pentagon officials to acknowledge the potency of the insurgency — and the persistence of the IED threat.

Even today, with far more robust instructional programs in place, there still isn’t enough time and money to make sure that war fighters get all the best possible IED training. The three brigade combat teams that skipped training at Fort Irwin didn’t have the 10 days it takes to get soldiers and equipment to and from the base. Instead, the training center dispatched teams of trainers, along with equipment and Iraqi role players, to put the three 4,500-soldier units through final exercises at their home bases.

Then there are the equipment problems.

The conventional Humvees that soldiers use for training at Fort Irwin were replaced in Iraq more than two years ago by a new, armored version that is thousands of pounds heavier, making it much more unwieldy and prone to rollovers. But as the Pentagon struggles to provide enough armored Humvees just for units in combat, there aren’t enough for training.

Lt. Col. Tom Perison, training operations branch chief at U.S. Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Ga., said all soldiers get some exposure to armored Humvees and other equipment as they rotate through Kuwait on their way to Iraq. However, tight funding and the priority of meeting in-theater demands make it impossible to provide trainees with the same IED equipment used in combat, he says.

There’s evidence that the services’ increased emphasis on IED training makes a difference. In the early months of the war, nearly every IED that exploded caused casualties, but today only about one in six IED detonations produce a death or injury, the Pentagon says. U.S. troops detect about half of all IEDs before they go off.

Views vary on Castner’s death. It will be up to the Pentagon’s inspector general to sort through the conflicting accounts and war-fogged recollections to determine whether better IED training would have saved Stephen Castner.

Sensenbrenner called the young soldier’s complaints about training “chillingly prophetic.” In a statement, the congressman said, “No American soldier should be sent to Iraq with inadequate training.”

In the initial investigation into Castner’s death, several soldiers spoke of confusion in the convoy after the IED blew his Humvee into the roadside marsh. Castner’s crewmates, two of whom also were injured in the attack, were unable to get him out of the vehicle for first aid. Even after other troops from the convoy returned and pulled him out, they did not put a tourniquet above the deep shrapnel wound on his thigh.

One of the soldiers who was in the Humvee with Castner — the Pentagon redacted his name from the report — later told investigators in a sworn statement that he would have been better prepared if he’d had “training on what to do when the vehicle is in water, and more medical training.”

The initial report on the attack, written by Col. James Haun, a commander with the transportation company in charge of the convoy, found that training was not a factor.

Castner’s father, a lawyer in Cedarburg, Wis., disputes that, citing witness statements, conversations with his son’s crewmates and lapses in the investigation.

“There were a lot of training failures,” he said. “The commanders lost command and control. ... They relied on extremely undisciplined, helter-skelter broadcasts over the radio to make assumptions that were totally incorrect about whether all vehicles were accounted for.


Article: http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...aining_071017/