Photo By 1st Sgt. Justin A. Naylor | Soldiers simulate loading a wounded troop into a medical transportation vehicle during...... read more read more
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FORT HOOD, Texas— Whether conducting a cordon and search of a village looking for high-value targets or conducting route reconnaissance and engaging in a moving firefight from their vehicles, a scout squadron must be able to perform at a high-level regardless of their mission.
For soldiers of the 4th Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, situational training exercises on Fort Hood, Texas, in mid-October were an opportunity to fine-tune their fundamental skills and ensure they are ready to conduct a full spectrum of combat operations.
Three different lanes were set up for the training; cordon and search, zone reconnaissance and platoon live-fire.
During the training, leaders focused on creating a realistic series of events that replicates how missions will occur downrange.
For the cordon and search event, this meant conducting simulated key leader engagement where they collected information on targets and then put together a plan.
“This replicates the sequence of events that a unit would typically go through,” said 1st Sgt. Michael Williams, Headquarters and Headquarters Troop. “They get evidence and then they act on it.”
After receiving information from the engagement, the soldiers cordoned off a small section of a village and raided two buildings searching for a high-value target. During the operation they also had to react to small-arms fire, clear a building, search a detainee and get him safely to a transportation vehicle for further questioning.
Unlike previous training events where soldiers focused on one small aspect, such as cordoning a village or detainee operations, this training required the soldiers to perform multiple tasks concurrently.
“If you train things as individual actions you lose the continuity,” said Williams.
“For the first time, they are having to put the pieces together,” said Lt. Col. Paul Garcia, the squadron’s commander.
For the route reconnaissance mission, soldiers in vehicles practiced bounding movements up a road while marking out dangerous obstacles and destroying enemy forces that engaged them; a much more traditional scout mission than cordon and searching.
This squadron has been doing a lot of counter insurgency training the last six or seven years, but they also need to focus on their traditional tasks, explained Garcia.
“For the junior soldiers, this gets them focused on their core competencies,” said Capt. Jonah Martin, the commander of B Troop. “No matter what theater they go to they are going to need to know how to do these tasks.”
The training also gave leaders an opportunity to set support systems in place that they will use in future training and when deployed.
This is a chance for the platoon leaders to practice using the assets they have available to them within the troop, such as mortarmen and medics, explained Martin.
To support their soldiers while they moved through the lane, leaders called in indirect fire to suppress an enemy attack from a ridgeline. Platoon leaders also had to coordinate with two Apache helicopters that were providing aerial fire. An ambulance pick-up site also had to be set up to receive wounded individuals.
For the platoon live-fire, a patrol of humvees and Bradley Fighting vehicles made their way down a lane while engaging a varied assortment of targets.
Leaders had to plan out attacks using both types of vehicles to engage different types of targets, with the superior fire power of the Bradleys focused more on armored vehicle threats.
“This is the stuff that we need to understand how to do as scouts,” said Garcia.
This is a very good bridge between what they learned during smaller squad-level training and the kind of platoon, troop and squadron-level training they will be doing at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, La., explained Martin.
Although the squadron doesn’t know what their job will be next time they deploy, training like this helps prepare them to take on anything.
“It doesn’t matter where we go, if we’re proficient in our core skills it translates to success in any task we do,” said Garcia.
| Date Taken: | 10.13.2010 |
| Date Posted: | 11.02.2010 13:26 |
| Story ID: | 59293 |
| Location: | FORT HOOD, TEXAS, US |
| Web Views: | 23 |
| Downloads: | 4 |
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