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CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan – Afghan National Army soldiers will no longer have to rely on help from their coalition forces counterparts when their power generators break down in the field. Afghan soldiers throughout Helmand province are heading to Camp Leatherneck to learn how to perform maintenance and repairs on their own power sources.
The first Generator Operator Maintainer Course graduation was held at the Joint Security Academy Southwest here, March 9. Twenty-one ANA soldiers spent the past week learning how to repair and perform preventative maintenance on several different types of generators used at forward operating bases throughout southwest Afghanistan.
“This is going to give the Afghans a capability they’ve never had before in RC Southwest,” said Col. Robert G. Golden III, RC(SW) Afghan National Security Forces development director. “It’s going to help them sustain and maintain a lot of their infrastructure throughout the battle space.”
As more students graduate the class, Afghan soldiers will no longer have to wait for the nearest coalition force unit to send support. ANA units will be able to address the setback on the spot.
“Currently whenever a problem occurs with a generator, be it a maintenance issue or a repair issue, the coalition forces tend to roll in on that problem and help fix it,” Golden said. “So this will help give them the capability of doing it themselves, without having to have a generator go down for a period of time where they don’t have either sufficient lighting or electricity to communicate.”
Not only are the ANA soldiers being groomed to be a completely independent force through the repair course, they will also be given the keys to self-sufficiency in future “train the trainer” classes.
“Now that they have this capability, we’ll get some of these graduates to be in the field for a while and be working on the generators,” Golden said. “We will eventually tap back into those graduates that [we] saw today and have them come back someday and act as the trainers.”
The newly trained generator maintenance specialists will be providing both their home units and their local communities with a vital skill set.
“As some of these generator operators leave the force and head back to either their villages or their districts, they will be able to take this and help their communities as civilians,” Golden said. “They’ll be the local generator mechanic for Kajaki, Musa Qala, or Marjah. There’s a long-term enduring value to what they learn here today for their own societies after they leave the military.”
| Date Taken: | 03.10.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 03.10.2011 02:37 |
| Story ID: | 66762 |
| Location: | CAMP LEATHERNECK, AF |
| Web Views: | 147 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, First generator repair course graduates at JSAS, by Cpl Brian Gabriel Jr., identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
