Photo By Staff Sgt. Candace Mundt | Tactical military vehicles and trailers sit on rail spurs and in a staging area at...... read more read more
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FORT STEWART, Ga. – “You can’t move, you can’t fight; you can’t eat, you can’t fight; if you can’t drink water, you can’t fight,” said Capt. Christopher Mendham, officer in charge of rail load operations for 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division.
Movement operations for 2IBCT, Spartan Brigade, are being conducted to support the upcoming Joint Readiness Training Center rotation 15-10 at Fort Polk, Louisiana this month.
“One of the brigade’s mission essential tasks is to be able to deploy into an austere environment and redeploy,” said Maj. Andrew Kocsis, 2IBCT chief of sustainment. “For the validation piece, it’s important for the brigade to be able to rapidly deploy, build combat power, conduct reception staging and onward integration, and conduct its combat mission and then redeploy itself.”
The bulk of the deployment and redeployment hands-on mission will be conducted at Stewart’s Rail Marshaling Area. Mendham expressed the importance of logistical operations while standing in the RMA, looking forward, down two tracks stacked with vehicles that stretched so far, the end could not be seen.
“Each of these spurs has around 35 cars on it,” Mendham explained, a spur being a secondary track used to load or offload. “Depending on which kind of vehicle you put on, it can take a number of configurations, but the standard way to look at it is four trucks on one rail car, or two fuelers on one rail car.”
Altogether, Mendham said the brigade will move about 1,250 pieces of equipment on rail with six trains over six days. Originally, they planned to complete one train per day, but since his crews are ahead of schedule, Mendham believes his “phenomenal” teams could finish two days early.
“There’s about 400 Soldiers out here, all from different organizations,” Mendham said about the Spartan Soldiers and others supporting the brigade during the exercise. “They’ve all really impressed me.”
Supervising a large and unfamiliar group is its own demanding piece of the movement puzzle.
“Forming a team really quickly, ensuring that team is trained up to do a specific and fairly dangerous job, and making sure you put the right leaders in the right spot to manage those different nodes is probably the most challenging part,” Mendham said.
Soldiers on work and supervisory detail at the RMA wore helmets and reflective belts as mitigation to possible safety risks due to vehicles constantly moving from the preparation point to the spurs. In addition to the uniform, safety observers covered the area.
“I have 70 safeties per rail spur, so 140 safeties watching every inch of each vehicle’s movement all the way down,” Mendham explained “I also have a safety team walking around double checking all of their monitoring of their safety nodes.”
Before vehicles, trailers and other equipment considered “rolling stock” can be loaded onto the rail, they are thoroughly inspected by their units and again at the pre-staging area of the RMA. “You’ll see maintenance Soldiers looking at vehicles to ensure road worthiness and to ensure vehicles aren’t being put onto line haul or rail broken,” Kocsis said. “That would then become a bottleneck for us on the receiving end.”
In regards to logistical planning, each individual step during deployment, whether it’s to the imaginary nation of Atropia at JRTC or a real combat environment, is integral to tactical success.
“No matter where you’re going, it’s important to understand that you have to be tied in,” Kocsis continued. “You can’t plan the logistics in a vacuum and just make assumptions without being tied in to the operational picture and timeline.”
“You have to be linked into the operational plan, decisively, in order for the logistical plan to execute properly,” Kocsis said. “Case in point, planning out the railhead and what unit goes into the rail yard first, has a consequence operationally on the other end as to who comes off first or last.”
After 2IBCT Soldiers arrive at Polk, they will receive and begin redistributing their equipment, during which time Kocsis said the unit will be set up for success due to the efforts the Spartans put forth during the deployment process.
“We will defeat Geronimo,” Kocsis said in regards to the opposing, or enemy, forces at JRTC, by which he meant tactically and logistically.
| Date Taken: | 08.10.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 08.13.2015 15:26 |
| Story ID: | 173086 |
| Location: | FORT STEWART, GA, US |
| Web Views: | 110 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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