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BLACK RAPIDS TRAINING SITE, Alaska -- When military professionals take to the battlefield, a single opponent is usually enough. Adding a second foe is never a good thing. But for the untrained or inexperienced, mountainous terrain and extreme cold weather can quickly become a more deadly adversary than enemy forces.
For example, in World War I fighting in the Austro-Italian Alps, more soldiers were killed by avalanches and cold weather than by bullets. In December 1914, nearly 190,000 Turkish troops attacked the Russians in the Caucasus – and lost 86 percent of their forces to Russians using the weather and mountainous terrain to their advantage.
With statistics like these in mind, U.S. Army Alaska’s Northern Warfare Training Center hosted military mountaineering and cold regions experts for a four-day collaborative exchange, March 21-24, at the Black Rapids Training Site.
The Cold Regions/Military Mountaineering Collaborative Training Event brought together military partners from eight countries and other U.S. military organizations to talk about specialized training and equipment necessary to survive and thrive in austere environments.
Representatives attended from the Canadian Forces Land Advanced Warfare Center, the Chilean Army Mountain School, the Finnish Jaeger Battalion, the German Gebirgsjager Mountain and Winter Warfare School, Great Britain’s 24 Commando, the NATO Mountain Warfare Center of Excellence, the Slovenian Multinational Centre of Excellence for Mountain Warfare and the Nepalese Mountain Warfare School.
U.S. partners included representatives from the U.S. Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, the 5th Ranger Training Battalion, the 10th Mountain Division, the 1st Special Forces Group Advanced Skills Company, the 10th Special Forces Group, the Army Mountain Warfare School and the Alaska National Guard.
“Our task is to transform the challenges and limitations of the mountain environment into opportunities to be exploited,” explained Italian Col. Alberto Zamboni, Deputy Director and Chief of Staff of the NATO Mountain Warfare Center of Excellence in Slovenia. “We find that we have to fight with two enemies, the environment and the opponent. As with all militaries throughout history, we do not want to fight two enemies at the same time, so we have to find a solution, all the details all the tweaks that allow us to use the environment as a friend, not as an enemy.”
Lt. Col. Thomas Salberg, commander of the United Kingdom’s 24th Commandos, agreed.
“This is very much learning how to coexist, in the first instance, with the environment, which then allows us to utilize specialist skills in order to get sort of a tactical advantage and allow us to fight the actual enemy rather than the environment and the enemy,” he said. “This is an opportunity for us to understand what other people are doing in this area.
“We’ve just come back from a pretty significant deployment to Norway, and we’re looking at how our techniques and procedures are developing and where there’s similarities and differences with our partners so that we can maximize our operational capability.”
For some participants, like Lt. Col. Hugo Julio-Schweitzer, commander of the Chilean Army Mountain School and the Mountain Warfare Training Center, the tactics and techniques are vital for peacetime use as well.
“This is a great opportunity for me to exchange experiences and compare procedures in order to improve our organization,” he said. “In our case, the Chilean army forces, we don’t have any threats in our mountain region, but we have to face, on an almost yearly basis, natural disasters in our mountains. For us, it’s a task for our troops to be prepared to use our military capabilities to support our local authorities.”
The exchange of ideas extended far beyond PowerPoint presentations and classroom discussions.
“Outside of the meeting room there’s a lot of bi-lateral talks where we talk about best practices. This offers an outstanding opportunity to talk, during the breaks, during the meals, in the evening, about a lot of experiences,” said Col. Michael Varter, Germany Army Training Command. “And also this gives us the opportunity to ask about possibilities to use one of the training facilities of our friends, if we could send an instructor from our different schools to the other’s in order to enhance their professional skills. I think it’s very enriching what we are doing here.”
Hands-on sharing included opportunities for skiing, snowshoeing and viewing USARAK cold weather transportation and sustainment platforms such as the Small Unit Support Vehicle, snow machines and other all-terrain vehicles.
“We have done some skiing and snowshoeing, I’ve been in some of the vehicles, but for example it’s not just skiing, it’s skiing with partners using different equipment and slightly different techniques and being able to see how they react and their successes and limitations,” Salberg explained. “Some are more focused on alpine skiing but stepping out in a boot that probably wouldn’t necessarily fight through a building once they got somewhere, while others are more focused on a cross country ski for a flatter environment that allows them to operate in a slightly different way.
“It’s just understanding those subtle differences and understanding the different target audiences those skis and equipment are aimed for. That’s been really useful to see the differences we’re taking in those areas.”
As hosts for the symposium, the Northern Warfare Training Center also benefits from the ongoing interactions.
“For us it’s the exchange of how our peers conduct training. Obviously they are experts at what they do, and it makes us better instructors here at NWTC to see what techniques they utilize, different experiences they deal with in their courses, how they teach their students,” explained Lt. Col. Mick Braun, NWTC commandant. “I know in Nepal they operate at altitude a lot higher than what we have here, in Finland the temperatures probably get a lot colder than they do right here, and it is overall knowledge we gain that makes NWTC better.”
This year’s event was the second of its kind, and most attendees agreed they would like to see the collaboration continue.
“We are very keen to make the most of this opportunity and continue to share,” Salberg said. “There’s no point in us individually learning lessons that our partners have already learned. I think undoubtedly this sort of cooperation is the way of the future.”
| Date Taken: | 03.22.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 03.30.2016 13:53 |
| Story ID: | 193886 |
| Location: | BLACK RAPIDS TRAINING SITE, ALASKA, US |
| Web Views: | 80 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, USARAK hosts international mountain, cold region military experts, by John Pennell, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
