Eyes on Balad

Logistics Support Area Anaconda, 50 miles north of Baghdad, is the major sup­ply hub for all mil­i­tary oper­a­tions in Iraq. All day every day, Army CH-47 Chinooks and Air Force C-17 Globemasters criss­cross the sky. Every night, Army trans­porta­tion com­pa­nies sor­tie mile-long con­voys to every cor­ner of the coun­try. The pas­sen­ger ter­mi­nal is the sec­ond busiest in the entire U.S. mil­i­tary. The bot­tom line: Anaconda is really, really busy and really, really impor­tant — and just a few well-placed mor­tar rounds could put a lot of kinks in a lot of plans here.
The tedious, dan­ger­ous job of polic­ing the sur­round­ing coun­try­side and the nearby Shiite town of Balad has fallen to the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, now on its sec­ond rota­tion in Iraq. A task force built around 3rd Battalion of the brigade’s 29th Field Artillery Regiment is respon­si­ble for the coun­try­side while the 1st of the 8th Infantry’s task force keeps an eye on Balad proper. That’s a com­bined 1,500 sol­diers over­see­ing an entire city and hun­dreds of square miles. “Spread thin” is an under­state­ment.
But these are a new breed of task forces. Between deploy­ments, the 4th ID reor­ga­nized from three to four brigades, or so-called “Units of Action”, adding ded­i­cated recon­nais­sance bat­tal­ions and pick­ing up a lot of neat new toys, includ­ing Raven aer­ial drones, the Forward Battle Command Brigade and Below (FBCB2) bat­tle­field inter­net, a bunch of new armored vehi­cles and new sen­sors. Plus, both task forces here ben­e­fit from the Air Force, Army and even Marine Corps sur­veil­lance assets — RC-12s, F-16s, F/A-18s, Predator drones, etc. — based at Anaconda and other nearby air­bases.
On a patrol with 3–29 on Feb. 2, Staff Sgt. John Lohnes nav­i­gated using the FBCB2’s touch-screen dig­i­tal map while AH-64 Apaches and OH-58D Kiowa Warrior heli­copters swooped over­head and Ravens droned invis­i­bly in the dis­tance. “It basi­cally makes it eas­ier to track my own posi­tion,” Lohnes says of FBCB2. But it does so much more. Every FBCB2-equipped patrol is vis­i­ble as an icon on the map. Simply by touch­ing the screen, Lohnes can pull up imagery of par­tic­u­lar points of inter­est. And he can send and receive secure Instant Messages from the task force com­mand cen­ter, where a bunch of offi­cers sit in front of plasma screens dis­play­ing imagery from Predators and tower-mounted sen­sors called “J-Lenses”.
The Army of the future is on dis­play here in muddy north-central Iraq. I’m embed­ded with 3–29 and 1–8 for the next cou­ple of weeks. Stand by …
– David Axe

February 6th, 2006 | Axe in Iraq (and Elsewhere) | 18302 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/02/06/eyes-on-balad/Eyes+on+Balad2006-02-06+12%3A29%3A33murdoc You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.