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7 June 2016

It’s Rucksacks and Foxholes as Army Goes Old School for New Conflicts

JUNE 3, 2016 

FORT STEWART, Ga. — When Staff Sgt. Chris Brown headed into the swamplands of Georgia for a military training exercise early this spring, he found himself missing his time in Iraq and Afghanistan — and the relative comforts he had enjoyed there at the height of both wars.

Without running water, he now had to bathe with baby wipes and shave without a mirror. He had no idea how his favorite basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, was faring in the playoffs. And the food was so bad that he relied on peanut butter crackers and lost 10 pounds.

“When we were out there, they tasted amazing,” said Sergeant Brown, who went to the gym twice a day when he was overseas to make sure he did not put on too much weight from the dining hall and its honey buns and muffins.

While some American military personnel, in particular Special Operations forces and a number of Marine and conventional Army units, operated out of small, spartan outposts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bulk of Army troops lived on bases that had running water, electricity and housing units. Some larger bases even had wireless internet, televisions, gyms and coffee shops. Civilian contractors guarded the bases, cooked meals and transported ammunition, food and fuel.

But now that the American footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan is far smaller, the Army has begun planning for its next conflict. No matter where and when it occurs, it will almost certainly be fought under more austere conditions. To prepare for this, nearly all Army units are refocusing their training on being self-sustaining, or “expeditionary,” as their commanders put it.

Specialist Jasmine Denson watched the tree line during six hours of guard duty in a foxhole during expeditionary skills training exercise at Fort Stewart, Ga. Credit Stephen B. Morton for The New York Times 

What that means is that a generation of soldiers with more battlefield experience than any since World War II is getting back to basics: learning how to cook their own meals, cover their faces in camouflage paint, dig foxholes and latrines, lay concertina wire and live out of their rucksacks.

The training, known as Decisive Action Training Environment, or D.A.T.E., is designed to prepare units for a variety of contingencies, ranging from humanitarian missions to traditional combat. The Army created the program in 2012, shortly after the United States pulled its last troops out of Iraq, to replace its counterinsurgency training, known as COIN. But the Army’s training cycles take several years, and in part because of budget restrictions, many soldiers are just now learning the new approach.

Among them was Sergeant Brown and many of the 500 other soldiers from the Third Sustainment Brigade who specialize in supplying infantry and tank units and who went out in April to a desolate patch of land in the middle of this sprawling fort for the training exercise. Instead of the metal housing units with beds that were used in Iraq and Afghanistan, they slept on cots in tents covered in camouflage netting. In place of a massive dining hall, they ate bland food while sitting on the floor of a tent.

There were no contractors to protect them, so they had to do patrols through the dense woods around their outpost, and they had to rely on themselves to fix any broken equipment.

“You find yourself doing a lot more coaching than you would in other situations because you are the one of the few who remembers what it’s like,” said Col. Jered P. Helwig, 42, the brigade commander, adding that this type of training was typical when he joined the military in the 1990s.

The training teaches soldiers skills like laying concertina wire and living out of their rucksacks. Credit Stephen B. Morton for The New York Times 

Cpl. Amy Alexander, who has worked in an office for the past six years as a human resources specialist, said that the Army’s new approach to training had taught how to operate in the field for the first time in her career.

“It was a lot harder than I thought to dig your own foxhole,” said Corporal Alexander, 23. “With the way the Army is changing, we have to be able to deploy into any place and set up where we are. So we all needed to know how to man our own fighting positions and pull security.”

The Army’s heavy reliance on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan was partly for political reasons. The Bush and Obama administrations set strict limits on the number of troops assigned to the mission in each country, and contractors helped keep the numbers low. At times, there were as many contractors, numbering in the tens of thousands, in the war zones as there were uniformed service members.

Life on military bases became so comfortable that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal ordered in 2011 that all Burger Kings, Dairy Queens and Pizza Huts on bases in Afghanistan be closed because, one of his deputies said in a memo at the time, “this is a war zone, not an amusement park.” A year later, General McChrystal’s successor, Gen. David H. Petraeus, had them reopened as part of an effort to improve the troops’ quality of life.

With so many jobs being done by civilians, the Army sent soldiers into Iraq and Afghanistan who were trained to do one task: conduct counterinsurgency operations, including patrols and raids.

A private finished digging a foxhole. Credit Stephen B. Morton for The New York Times 

“Over the last decade and a half, we have known when we were going to deploy, we knew where were going and we knew who we would be working with and we knew the type of enemy,” said Brig. Gen. Douglas C. Crissman, the deputy commanding general for support of the 3rd Infantry Division, who commanded units in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s not that we neglected something, we just concentrated on what was in front of us.”

Planning was also straightforward during the Cold War because the Army assumed it would fight a land war against the Soviet Union. The Army’s new assessment is that the United States faces unpredictable threats that will require varying responses.

“In order to prepare for that level of uncertainty, and to be ready, you got to go focus on fundamental things that apply across the whole problem set,” said Maj. Gen. James E. Rainey, the commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, which is based at Fort Stewart.

Army commanders have not always spent so much of their time thinking about what their forces should be prepared to do. During times of peace, the Army in the past would revert to a smaller force, said Richard Kohn, a military historian and professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But, he said, those times are long gone.

“It realized it was in continuous change and it had to reconsider and review its defense posture and both the size and disposition it would need for its future wars,” Mr. Kohn said. “The concept began that the peacetime Army was a planning institution.”

Sergeant Brown said that several weeks after his unit conducted its training mission, he found some leftover peanut butter crackers and decided to see how they tasted.

“I was like, ‘This tastes awful,’” he said. “You’ll eat anything when you’re out there.”

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