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    WAR Lane

    WAR Lane

    Photo By Sgt. 1st Class Roger Dey | Humvees approach a simulated roadside bomb hidden on the back of a guard rail as the...... read more read more

    FORT HARRISON, MT, UNITED STATES

    07.20.2011

    Story by Sgt. 1st Class Roger Dey 

    Montana National Guard Public Affairs Office

    FORT HARRISON, Mont. --The sight of soldiers encumbered by body armor, weapons and helmets, politely removing their boots before squeezing through the undersized door of a small hut is somewhat peculiar. They carefully take seats on an ornate carpet, around a tea set perched precariously on an upturned bucket. As they speak with leaders of a village referred to as Herat, it becomes apparent that the fight against insurgents has evolved.

    Inside the hut, the meeting, or shura, ranges from talk of access to water and education to insurgent activity and possible roadside bombs in the area. Outside, a few yards away at a makeshift market in the shade of an overpass, Habib, the local butcher seems eager to sell anything from a goat’s head to worn tires. He touts the quality of his goat meat to an American soldier who is milling about smartly.

    “Very fresh, very fresh, very nice,” he says with a broad smile.
    The soldier, one of about a dozen providing security for the shura, declines the meat but asks casually about conditions in the area, hoping for helpful information.

    Most of the soldiers here are new at this, but they are learning the basics of counterinsurgency quickly amid a cluster of high-density plastic foam buildings carved to resemble the mud-covered stone huts of Afghanistan.

    Outfitted with authentic rugs and tea sets, and occupied by “locals” like Capt. Mario Negrette, a training assister who plays Habib, Herat village is part of Fort Harrison’s new Improvised Explosives Device Defeat Lane.

    But you won’t hear it referred to as simply an IED Defeat Lane by members of the Montana National Guard’s Pre-deployment Training Assistance Element, the team responsible for training Montana Guardsmen for combat.

    “It’s not just an IED lane,” said Maj. Mike Beck, the officer in charge of the PTAE. He and the PTAE soldiers refer to it as the Warrior Action/Reaction, or WAR Lane. “IEDs might be part of it, but it’s the entire counterinsurgency experience.”

    IED-defeat lanes have been a fixture of Army training since the early days of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the threat evolved and IEDs became the leading killer of American service members, the need for improved training became evident. At mobilization stations and active duty posts, lanes were improved to incorporate buildings and role-players to give soldiers an idea of the complexity of deployed environments.

    “To implement the principles of counterinsurgency you need to travel from location to location, and while doing this you might have to react to contact,” said Beck, who spent time patrolling Samara and Hawija, Iraq with Company B, 1st Battalion, 163rd Infantry in 2004 and 2005. “Contact could be an IED, could be sniper fire, could be just a hoax IED. So it’s really an action/reaction lane, not just reacting to IEDs.”

    First Lt. Jeremy Lee, a member of the 484th Military Police Company who took part in the Big Sky Warrior Academy, agreed.

    “It’s well rounded. You’re not just focused on going down a road and you know you’re going to get hit … and you push through it and that’s the end of the cycle” he said. “They actually incorporate the villagers; you have to actually extract intel.”

    The development of a realistic, full-spectrum training lane came about in 2009, after the Montana State Legislature designated $750,000 to improve training for deploying Guardsmen. Col. T. J. Hull, the Montana National Guard mobilization readiness officer at that time took the lead on the lane’s development. Hull consulted with Beck, Command Sgt. Maj. Larry Irvine, the PTAE’s senior noncommissioned officer, and other PTAE members as he created a plan incorporating the existing Tactical Training Base and Military Operations in Urban Terrain sites.

    Hull also drew on the expertise of the Counter IED Mobile Assistance Training Team from Fort Lewis, Wash., which specializes in IED defeat training and was training soldiers on Fort Harrison at the time he was refining the plan.

    “They said you ought to have some traffic circles and some choke points where you have guard rails, and it might be nice to have a pedestrian bridge,” Beck said of the CMATT input on the plan.

    The resulting lane was completed in 2010, covering roughly 460 acres. With two traffic circles, three village sites, a stretch of divided highway, choke points, culverts and an overpass created by the repurposed Williams Street Bridge, the WAR Lane allows units to train on nearly the full range of warrior tasks and battle drills.

    Developing the lane into something more comprehensive than simply IED defeat is important to trainers like Beck and Sgt. 1st Class Stephen Tichenor, a Special Forces veteran with two tours in Afghanistan under his belt.

    “IEDs … you can train for that all day long and still never know what you’re gonna get,” said Tichenor, the Fort Harrison Training Site Operations and Training Specialist. “Just have the basic skills down on how to react, how to work as a team. The biggest thing is to avoid them if at all possible. How you avoid them is to make friends with the locals, because 90 percent of the time if they think you’re on their side they’re gonna let you know where they are or inform you prior to getting hit.”

    Although the training at Fort Harrison is often a precursor to more intense training at mobilization stations, Tichenor said the limits are defined by the effort and complexity units want to build into their training scenarios.

    “[Our] perspective on it is, if there’s a scenario they want to run, we want to facilitate it,” Tichenor said.

    The multiple environments of the WAR lane, combined with new Improvised Explosive Device Effects Simulator system, with large and small simulated IEDs, booby traps and a “suicide” vest, allow units to train on everything from bare-bones IED defeat to complex, full-blown counterinsurgency operations.

    “With the MOUT site, the paved areas, the choke points, and moving up into Cherry Creek, with a little more open terrain, you really can hit about everything,” Tichenor said. “I know that all the [mobilization] stations have some sort of IED lane, and they’re fairly sophisticated,” Beck said. “I’ve seen the one at Camp Shelby, and I know Fort Lewis has a sophisticated lane as well. None of the lanes I’ve seen are any greater caliber than what we have right here in Montana.”

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    NEWS INFO

    Date Taken: 07.20.2011
    Date Posted: 09.16.2011 17:38
    Story ID: 77162
    Location: FORT HARRISON, MT, US

    Web Views: 191
    Downloads: 0

    PUBLIC DOMAIN