Studies Aim to Refocus Urban Training, Tactics

By MARGARET ROTH, SeaPower Correspondent

As enemy insurgents continue to harass and kill U.S. troops in Iraq with suicide bombs and makeshift explosives, a major effort is under way at home to determine how U.S. forces can better prepare for such unconventional threats in the future.

The Defense Department is studying a broad spectrum of training needs, broken down into five areas of interest to combatant commands, to build on the U.S. military’s experience in a world no longer defined by massive, organized enemy forces or traditional strategies and tactics.

The five areas of study are:

Joint, interagency, intergovernmental and multinational training, being looked at by the Center for Naval Analyses;
Joint urban operations, by Rand;
Information operations, by Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.;
Stability and support operations, by Camber Corp.; and
Counter-transnational threats, more simply known as asymmetric warfare, or the use of low-technology warfare against a highly superior enemy. This is being studied by the Institute for Defense Analyses.

The ultimate goal of the studies, all of which have an anticipated completion date of mid-2005, is to create a road map for focusing training more on joint operations and less on service-specific requirements, and set spending priorities as early as fiscal year 2007, said Daniel E. Gardner, a retired Navy commander who is director of readiness and training in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The Defense Department is seeking a Joint National Training Capability and a Joint Knowledge Development and Distribution Capability, the latter meaning “being able to make knowledge available at the right place at the right time, in the right amount to the right person.”

In the long run, Gardner said, a third major development, the Joint Assessment and Enabling Capability, will enable DoD to evaluate how the other two capabilities are meeting the current needs of U.S. troops.

Among the specific questions the studies aim to answer are:

Whether the military needs new training areas for realistic joint urban operations, and where those should be;
How best to involve naval ships;
How best to use technology to improve joint battlespace communications;
And how the U.S. military can increase its troops’ awareness of foreign cultures and languages.

The studies overlap in many ways, notably in the areas of joint urban operations and asymmetric warfare, said Air Force Col. Frank DiGiovanni, associate director for joint training and ranges in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The old concept of urban operations, called MOUT for military operations in urban terrain, is officially passé, he said, “because when you think MOUT, you think mostly ground operations and not really integrating your air assets and your precision-strike capability.”

Joint urban operations, the preferred new way of thinking, embrace the integration of ground and air assets, as well as issues of resupply, medical evacuation and navigation, DiGiovanni said.

“Being able to talk the aviator’s eyes on the target is very, very difficult in an urban environment,” DiGiovanni said, because it relies on words to describe distinct spots in what can be a dynamic environment.

Simulation is one possible way to train for this, he said. So is “building artificial things like Shughart-Gordon,” an enclave of 25-30 buildings at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, La., designed to replicate a Third World village. It is named for Master Sgt. Gary Gordon and Sgt. 1st Class Randall Shughart, Army Rangers who were given posthumous Medals of Honor after being killed defending a downed Black Hawk helicopter pilot in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993.

Other possibilities include abandoned towns in sparsely populated states that would welcome the military presence or military bases designated for closure. But before decisions can be made, there are environmental factors to consider, as well as the cost of getting troops to and from the facilities.

“The use of real, live cities really provides the best practice,” DiGiovanni said. In addition, “if you have heat sensors or electro-optical sensors or night vision goggles, you need a real target set that’s warm, that has things moving around in it, to really, truly target it and see what it’s going to look like in combat.” The Defense Department “is going to look at all the alternatives and develop modules that the commander can customize to his particular urban ops team.”

Building a realistic training ground is one thing. Understanding the threat and replicating it is another, and it will be a major challenge in developing joint training that is relevant to modern-day threats.

“One of the things that we want to do … is to really define asymmetric warfare in the current context,” DiGiovanni said. “What’s going on in the world right now, and what does that mean?”

While the U.S. military and intelligence communities study the threat of improvised explosive devices in what DiGiovanni described as a “Manhattan Project level of effort,” the Defense Department also is focusing on how to train troops to think and adapt quickly enough to keep up with an unconventional and unpredictable enemy, if not gain an advantage.

That means in training, “there has to be some expectation of experimentation,” he said. “When you look at the traditional level at which we train, it’s against known tactics, techniques and procedures. You have to tell the training audience that it’s OK … to try some things new to counter this asymmetric capability.”

To illustrate the need for quick coordination of resources, Gardner cited an August exercise, during which military planners found that they needed to refine their thinking on how best to secure local military bases and the civilian community during an attack or security alert.

“When the initial event occurred, the bases basically locked down,” Gardner said. Meanwhile, the civilian community needs the military’s assistance to deal with the security emergency. “We found some places where there need to be some different routines, standard operating procedures put in place,” he said.