Iraq/Afghanistan lessons drive US Army training changes

The Economist has a good article on how the US Army is adapting their training from the real-world lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq (behind the subscriber wall, unfortunately):

Car bombs are not the only bit of Iraqi-Afghan verisimilitude the brigade experienced at Fort Polk's Joint Readiness Training Centre (JRTC) last month. Attacks with simulated roadside bombs (known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs), rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and small arms, using special effects and lasers, are unrelenting.

The assailants — 160 American soldiers dedicated to the task, and dressed accordingly — come in two forms: al-Qaeda terrorists, based in an off-limits bit of the wood called Pakistan, and Taliban insurgents living in 18 mock villages. Another 800 role-players live with them, acting as western aid workers, journalists, peacekeepers, Afghan mayors, mullahs, policemen, doctors and opium farmers, all with fake names, histories and characters. Some 200 bored-looking Afghan-Americans are augmented by local Louisianans in Afghan garb. A clutch of Vietnam-veterans with missing limbs, splashed with fake blood, make terrific bomb victims.

Fort Polk has seen huge changes in the past two years. Designed for light infantry and special-forces troops, it has always dealt with some parts of guerrilla warfare, such as booby-traps and RPG attacks. But in the past the "insurgents" wore blue armbands to distinguish themselves, a tactic strangely shunned by America's enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan. There also used to be no more than 50 civilian role-players on the battlefield.

The changes are expensive — the basic cost per brigade of a month at the JRTC has gone up from $2m to $9m. And similar changes are under way at the army's two other Combat Training Centres (CTCs), where the army simulates battalion- and brigade-sized battles. Fort Irwin, California, used to be dedicated to tank battles. Two years ago, not a single building dotted its 600,000 acres of desert. Now there are a dozen mock villages and plans for a $50m mock city. Two Hollywood companies have been hired to improve the army's flashes and bangs, and to give acting classes to the role-players.

Of course, The Economist being a British publication, they can't help but include some "helpful" contrasts:

In their routine planning and training, the British expected to find civilians on their battlefield; the Americans did not. The British taught the virtue of restraint, to limit civilian casualties and the strategic damage they cause. American soldiers were trained to wipe the enemy out. British soldiers were trained in crowd control and basic forensic skills; American soldiers rarely were. In April 2003, nervous American soldiers fired into a crowd of protesters in Fallujah, killing and maiming scores. Within weeks, the Iraqi town had risen against the occupation, culminating in two terrible battles last year.

In more peaceable southern Iraq, meanwhile, the British acted on their training. Their first aim was to win the civilian population's trust. One way was through information operations (IO), which means, at the crudest level, generating good public relations for the army. "The Brits do this as a matter of course; they had a much finer appreciation of the culture in Iraq," says Lieutenant-Colonel Chuck Eassa, deputy-chief of IO at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, the home of the army staff college and other cerebral institutions. For the American army in Iraq, he says, IO was a "low-density skill set". Each division of 19,000 soldiers had only two IO officers.