Photo By Sgt. Garett Hernandez | Commanders and command sergeants major with 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st...... read more read more
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FORT HOOD, Texas — Teamwork, dedication and time are three essentials that leaders from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team “Greywolf,” 1st Cavalry Division sought and used to their benefit in planning and carrying out what many have hailed as an enormous victory in troop training at the U.S. Army’s National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California.
Anchored with a team composed of roughly 5,000 troopers from Fort Bliss, Fort Hood, Fort Riley, and a myriad of National Guard and Reserve units, the Greywolf brigade deployed to NTC mid-April as individual units from 12 different states. Over time the collection of units became a task force of determined Soldiers working together to fight as a team and win against a capable opposing force during a “Decisive Action” rotation.
“We fought what the Army calls now a Decisive Action fight,” said Col. Matthew Van Wagenen, commander of the 3rd ABCT. “So what you have is a full scenario that really encompasses a full-up war with all of the elements of keeping the peace and dealing with irregular threats all put together.”
A newly designed type of training scenario design, Decisive Action rotations integrate tank-on-tank battles used back in the ‘80s and’90s with key elements of counter insurgency and stability operations training that U.S. Forces have learned over the last 10 years of war. Greywolf leaders say it wasn’t an easy task and point to teamwork as the lynchpin that secured their success.
“The teambuilding at both the battalion level and the company/battery/troop level was essential, and that’s what we spent the most time doing,” said Van Wagenen. “When we came out here everybody knew each other, and it wasn’t a pick-up team. Instead it was a well-integrated team where everyone knew everybody’s capabilities and limitations. That’s what made the biggest difference out here.”
Van Wagenen said the efforts to build Task Force Greywolf began back in November 2014 when members of the burgeoning team started coming together to train and get to know one another during a series of command post exercises and training events that took place on Fort Hood, Fort Bliss and Fort Riley.
Together, the newly formed Stryker-Armored Brigade Combat Team became an experimental first, not only as a unit, but also as an organizational test for the Army that sought to integrate common systems and fight and win together on a modern battlefield.
“This was really the first rotation that General MacFarland, the III Corps commander, wanted to put together, which was a hybrid rotation,” Van Wagenen said. “It was very difficult to put together, but really the proof of principle – the test – went extremely well. The strength of the organization spoke for itself out here.”
Van Wagenen said team members from across the force helped to deliver the victory his troops went after at NTC – also known as “the box” – by essentially being able to shoot, move and communicate at all stages of operations.
“We define success three ways: first was maintenance, the second one was communications, and the third way of success was sustainment,” Van Wagenen said. “This translated into tangible results by delivering maximum combat power during live-fire and during every fight out here we took to the opposing force. We did that successfully out here for every mission.”
Lt. Col. Steven Erickson, commander of the 215th Brigade Support Battalion and native of Columbus, Georgia said the actions of his Soldiers sustained the Greywolf brigade and directly contributed to the success of its maneuver mission.
“The sustainment network on the battlefield is enormous,” Erickson said. “The great work by our sustainers ensured our tanks, Bradleys and Strykers were able to stay in the fight. The more combat systems in the fight, the higher the morale of the sustainer.”
He said sustainers had to become effective in synchronizing logistics across various unit levels on the battlefield to understand what each needed and then get those items to the end user at the right time. With the efforts of sustainers across the brigade, Task Force Greywolf maintained a 90 percent operational readiness rate every fight for all main fighting vehicles; an extraordinary task that helped keep the brigade on the right side of the fight.
“I am proud of every sustainer in the brigade. These are the unsung heroes of the battlefield,” Erickson said. “They break their backs to ensure the right part is in the right place and placed on the right piece of equipment to ensure that the combat systems are ready and serviceable to enter into combat operations.”
Van Wagenen said getting to a level of proficiency took many months of collective training, both on the virtual side, constructive side, and the live side to build a team that could effectively compete on the battlefield.
“It was a long road to war that involved the distributed environment through three different FORSCOM posts,” Van Wagenen said. “The key element to this was getting leader involvement all the way down to first sergeant and company command level. That’s how we built the road to war and really what lead to success out here at NTC.”
Traveling more than 1,100 miles throughout the box in his up-armored Humvee conducting battlefield circulation to visit his troopers during the monthlong training rotation, Command Sgt. Maj. Scott Peare, the 3rd ABCT senior enlisted adviser, said he trusted leaders throughout the brigade to do the job they had trained to do.
“Everywhere I went, every Soldier I talked to, every formation that I was able to visit, the Soldiers had a winning attitude, they had a high level of motivation, and they were just determined to get after it,” Peare said.
“You gotta have a level of trust and confidence in the subordinate battalion command sergeants major. It was about getting out to ‘the box’ and empowering first sergeants to do what they do in providing purpose, direction, and motivation.”
Illustrating that diehard motivation, Peare cited an attack on day 14 of training that burned into his mind the positive effects that leadership and teamwork played in the success of the 3rd ABCT training rotation.
“As we attacked the opposing force, we had a squad of Soldiers that breached a tank ditch by hand. I’ve never seen that before in 29 years,” Peare said. “These guys didn’t have the tools with them – the dozers or anything else to go into the trench – these guys jumped out of the back of their Strykers and Bradleys and filled in this ditch with e-tools and shovels. To me, on Training Day 14, that highlights the spirit of the team we brought out here to NTC.”
Junior leaders like Sgt. Peter Scanlon, a cavalry scout with the 6th Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment said he came to NTC for his second training rotation as a leader and learned firsthand what a force-on-force battle might look like. As a reconnaissance Soldier, Scanlon and other scouts get out in front of the brigade to obtain information on the enemy to prevent them from gaining information on his unit.
“I was a driver during my first rotation, so my understanding of what was going on was pretty naïve,” said Scanlon, a native of Fountain, Colorado, who has about four years of service underneath his belt. “This rotation, I was granted the opportunity to be section leader for a dismount section. It was an intense lesson to learn, but a fun lesson.”
Like other battalions the 6th Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment focused on equipment maintenance and basic Soldier skills; however they had the added responsibility of mastering the fundamentals of reconnaissance and security.
“One of the points we enforced is the squadron operates as a team and the shared understanding that we would be in front of the brigade providing security and intelligence,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Todd, 6-9 Cav senior enlisted adviser. “We set the conditions for Greywolf, understanding that in order for us to succeed each Trooper had to be in the fight every day 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and 366 on a leap year.”
“What we dealt with out here was criminal networks, insurgent groups, a peer-on-peer tank-on-tank threat, really all put together,” Van Wagenen said. “It was a blended scenario that really taxed the 1st Cav Soldiers to the max.”
With the mission of providing the Greywolf team with a solid understanding of enemy locations and strength prior to conducting the main attack, 6-9 Cav. must be able to communicate with units throughout the formation. The brigade signal team made that task possible.
Leading the 3rd ABCT communications team, Capt. Julie Leggett noted that integrating her many systems across the brigade was a complex undertaking that required months of thorough pre-planning in order to achieve the type of success the unit sought. She had the added challenge of bringing aboard several new systems from outlying task force members who were not already in the brigade structure and of making all of the subordinate units talk with each other and with the brigade.
“While units have often achieved difficult network integrations during long combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, those integration challenges are compounded in a Decisive Action environment with a fluid battlefield,” Leggett said. “We overcame those network integration challenges through early planning, testing, and training. Our strong teamwork at every level and across every unit was the greatest contributing factor to our overall success.”
Through the efforts of the communications department to monitor, harden and protect the network using the enactment of strict policies and user education, Leggett said the system remained remarkably strong against the enemy forces that tried unsuccessfully to gain access to the brigade’s servers.
“The ability to communicate enables all the warfighting functions, especially in an environment where forces are separated across remote locations on the battlefield,” she said. “I think being able to organize and train together prior to an operation will likely become the new standard as units continue to prepare to face new enemies on short notice in a Decisive Action environment.
“A 1st Cav, III Corps effort came together out here. What I think that we were able to achieve out here was that we were able to do all of it at once really quite remarkably,” Van Wagenen said. “The team effort out here really holds what the future is – a dynamic task organization, and that’s kind of the vision that we want to take the force to in the next couple of years.”
| Date Taken: | 05.16.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 05.16.2015 02:31 |
| Story ID: | 163548 |
| Location: | FORT HOOD, TX, US |
| Hometown: | COLUMBUS, GA, US |
| Hometown: | FOUNTAIN, CO, US |
| Hometown: | SUNMAN, IN, US |
| Hometown: | WITCHITA, KS, US |
| Web Views: | 2,959 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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