Sim Iraq

There’s a lit­tle piece of Iraq in the Louisiana swamps. Shambling build­ings, for­lorn Arabs, pesky media, insur­gents and BOOM! — even sui­cide bomb­ings. At the Army’s Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Ft. Polk, what was once a Vietnam War-​​style train­ing ground for light infantry has, since 2001, trans­formed into a high-​​fidelity sim­u­la­tion of urban counter-​​insurgency oper­a­tions.
Brigades bound for Iraq rotate through JRTC for month-​​long exer­cises. They per­form pre-​​planned mis­sions and react to chang­ing cir­cum­stances. They’re observed and graded every step along the way.
The detail is amaz­ing. Actors por­tray every­day Iraqis and tribal lead­ers. Reporters from local papers fill in for the inter­na­tional media, fil­ing sto­ries that appear in news­pa­pers pub­lished within the sim­u­la­tion. If the news is good, the pop­u­lace stays calm. If the news is bad, you might have bomb­ings, snipers, riots. Or the local insur­gent cell might just decide to mix things up, drop a mor­tar on your base or assault your out­posts. There’s real­is­tic pyro for every­thing.
And did I men­tion that every­one is equipped with MILES gear — basi­cally military-​​grade Laser Tag — so that sol­diers know when they’ve been hit or when they’ve acci­den­tally gunned down a French reporter or an Iraqi baby? When some­body gets hit, the observers send him to a hold­ing area and stick a sensor-​​equipped med­ical dummy in his place. The dummy gets evac­u­ated and treated just like a real patient. And if the docs screw up and the dummy “dies”, then the brigade per­son­nel shop has to file the paper­work to get a replace­ment sol­dier, at which point the guy in the hold­ing area gets to re-​​enter the fight.
Amazing.
Jason Hartley’s blog Just Another Soldier has some great anec­dotes from JRTC:
Tomorrow we go into the box for our final train­ing exer­cise before going into com­bat. Here at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, the sce­nar­ios that units go through are all pretty much unwinnable. I dont think any­one has ever beaten JRTC. But thats kinda the point. You will lose. Its just a mat­ter of how long you can hold out before los­ing and how grace­fully you lose. This, appar­ently, is a good way to assess the battle-​​readiness of the brigades that come to be given a stamp of deploy­able before going over seas. The guys that are posted here, the Geronimo Joes as theres known, spend the bet­ter part of the year in the field play­ing the oppos­ing force (OPFOR) for unit after unit that comes down here to be tested includ­ing the Rangers, Special Forces and all man­ner of bad ass. Even these elite units get their asses handed to them most the time. Geronimo Joe knows how to play the game really well. They know these train­ing areas like the backs of their hands, their MILES laser equip­ment is zeroed per­fectly and they know how to fight in such a way that will inflict the max­i­mum amount of dam­age with the min­i­mal amount of effort. The mis­sion we are tak­ing part in involves my entire brigade and is going on right now. My com­pany will be reliev­ing the guys that are out there now. So far a key logis­ti­cal bridge has been destroyed, the Brigade Sergeant Major has been killed, three Bradley fight­ing vehi­cles have been destroyed by IEDs, two sol­diers have been cap­tured and a mas­sive car bomb recently killed 47 sol­diers. (Just so things are clear here, none of this is real, its all a train­ing sim­u­la­tion.) My job will essen­tially be to keep a small town safe. This entails quite a bit of work and the way they have things sched­uled, I dont think they expect us to eat, sleep or poop for five days straight.

If all goes well, I’ll be headed to Polk in June to play in JRTC. And in July I should be going to Twentynine Palms, California, to par­tic­i­pate in Mojave Viper, the Marines’ ver­sion of JRTC. Stay tuned.
P.S. — The Brits have their own, some­what hum­bler JRTC at a place called Catterick. Check out my story in The Village Voice.

April 21st, 2006 | Training and Sims | 3162No Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/04/21/sim-iraq/Sim+Iraq2006-04-21+15%3A36%3A36hambling You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.