Machine guns fire red tracer rounds at enemy vehicles with an illumination flare overhead, Sept. 27, 2009 at U.S Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, Calif. The 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, concluded the second phase of the Clear, Hold, Build Exercise after five days of combined arms urban operations. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Brian A. Tuthill
A young Marine from whom I have one degree of separation notes this about the "Enhanced Mojave Viper" training of the type conducted in the picture above. He's getting ready to head to Afghanistan and just completed a rotation at 29 Palms...
"Enhanced Mojave Viper was pretty terrible. We didn't really get a lot of relevant training done. 2/3 of it was focused on fighting a conventional war. 1/3 on COIN. A lot of downtime. The last Mojave Viper wasn't great but it felt a lot more relevant. I know some generals somewhere don't want the Marine Corps to lose its amphibious or conventional warfighting capability but there is a time and a place.
In a year 2.5 divisions are going to be in garrison in CONUS, as far as I know, due to the force cap and the SOFA [Status of Forces Agreement] with Iraq. They can train to fight the Red Army in the Fulda Gap in Germany. I dont need to be trained to fight a conventional force(two notional soviet- style mech bns) during my pdt [Pre-Deployment Training]. The COIN part was good but not enough focus was placed on that."
Someday you'd think we'd learn. The same complaints were made by troops training stateside during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
Not that I don't think we don't do it a lot better these days than we have in the past.
On an unrelated note - I could make room for one of these, I'm thinking, here in the barn at the Castle.
Sgt. 1st Class John Borchardt operates the VRCT .50 caliber virtual machine gun while Staff Sgt. David Simmons is at the controls of the VRCT Husky vehicle-mounted mine detector. Both Soldiers are observer-controller-trainers with the 181st Infantry Brigade.
Seriously, thank you, for all that you have done for all of us *GRUMPY OLD VETS*, not just Grumpy. If we can laugh a little bit, it is the best medicine in the World. ; ^ )
http://www.moteinteractive.com/tutorials/gameDev/battlezone2.gif
COIN use, at the troop level, is nearly 100% common sense and requires no more real training than a few lectures on how not to be a complete and total asshat among the indigs. Anyone how's made it past basic and infantry training, and spent more than a few months in the FMF, and doesn't have their head already wrapped around the COIN concept is a FAIL. Such fails can't be fixed. Find em, get rid of em. Send em off to logistics or admin.
The only real complexity in COIN ops is at the battalion level and above where decisions have to be made. All the rest of it is SNCO and NCO leadership with some O type management thrown in at the company and platoon level. If you've got NCOs and SNCOs that don't fully comprehend the COIN issues by now, you've got embezzlers in the ranks stealing paychecks.
Folk do love to throw that COIN term around like it's some magic talisman, dont they?
What does need to be trained is live fire and move to contact while under fire. That's killing work and can lead to dieing when done sloppy. That needs to be trained at every possible point in a grunts life, since those skills can erode. And, when you need em, you either have em or you die.
One of our HUGE problems in this war, besides giving over operational command to an incompetency like the ISAF with its rotating vanity commands, individual little fiefdoms set up by each "contributing" country, and the egregious surrendering of all possible momentum from day one of it's installation as a command, is this "UN Peace Keeping" mindset that far far far too many associate with counter insurgency, counter guerrilla warfare and disaggregated enemy organization warfighting.
You know. The UN Peace Keepers. Like those who served as human shields for Hezbollah, those who were chained to their vehicles to serve as human shields for the Serbs, those who had to stand around with their hands in their pockets and escort Serbian death squads through their UN "Sanctuary Zones" to pick the day's murder/rape material, etc and so on.
You can not, will not, ever never, win a war unless you close with and destroy the enemy. That's a fact. All the whining, pseudo philosophizing, wish it wereing wont change that.