Here's a similar article on an Alaskan Army unit training for Iraq...
ROAD TO WAR: War zone choices
Soldiers can defeat their best intentions if they fail to grasp social, economic and political realities in Iraq
By TATABOLINE BRANT
Anchorage Daily News
Published: July 2, 2006
Last Modified: July 2, 2006 at 06:22 AM
This is one in a series of stories following an Army airborne brigade as it trains for deployment to Iraq later this year.
It took three practice runs, hours of shooting blanks and trudging around in heavy armor before Charlie Company was allowed to fire real bullets at the bad-guy targets popping up in the field. They should have been exhausted by the time they loaded their guns.
But they weren't. Real ammo? It energized them. It focused them. They put their hearts into it. Afterward, as the smell of gunpowder hung in the air, they smiled.
One thing you can say about infantrymen: They like to blow stuff up. Give them a clear target and some weapons, and chances are they won't let you down. It's what's they're trained to do and they're good at it.
They're soldiers, after all. Warriors.
But as these and other paratroopers at Fort Richardson ready themselves for the complex battlefield of Iraq, they've got some adjusting to do.
Little is clear-cut on the streets of Baghdad or Karbala. The bad guys blend in with the good guys, and force can turn people you need against you. Gray situations abound, and it is often young men new to the field who are left to navigate them. Stakes are high for wrong moves.
So how do you train conventional warriors for the ambiguous situations waiting for them halfway around the world?
Lt. Col. Dave Buckingham must answer that question. He commands the 3-509 Geronimos, one of six battalions in Anchorage's new airborne brigade. The 3,500-member brigade is headed to Iraq in early October.
For months now, Buckingham and his boss, brigade commander Col. Michael Garrett, have tried to prepare their paratroopers by putting them in the middle of situations full of complicated choices.
Buckingham's platoons have visited mock Iraqi villages where they must figure out who to trust, how to barter for information, when to use force and how much. His men practiced what to do if a gun battle erupts around a mosque. The paratroopers have been pushed mentally and physically to teach them how to keep their emotions in check.
The training hasn't always gone smoothly. People curse. Officers argue with their sergeants about what the right move is. One guy questioned why he ever took that signing bonus.
Last month, Buckingham pushed his officers -- the guys who will be on the ground leading the enlisted men when trouble starts -- in a new direction. He wanted to crystallize their thinking about the world they are about to enter. He set up a week of lectures about guerrilla warfare and told the men to hit the books.
At a kickoff barbecue at his home on Lazy Mountain in Palmer, Buckingham told his men he grew up in an Army that did not always push officers intellectually or ask them to consider the nature of the conflict at hand.
"Guys, that's screwed up," he said. "It's screwed up for a big-wars Army and it's even more screwed up for a small-wars Army."
It's easier to shoot than think, Buckingham said. But an irregular war like Iraq demands more than just mindless raids. Officers need to think through situations, analyze them quickly and be ready to teach younger soldiers why using force isn't always the winning way.
"I'm uncomfortable with it," Buckingham said. "I would guess that you're uncomfortable with it. But it's critical for what we are about to do."
A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD
Seven months ago, a British army general who had recently served with American forces in Iraq published a damning critique of the U.S. Army's handling of the war there.
One of his main points: The Army, trained for conventional warfare, was too quick to consider force the answer to a situation and failed to understand its downside.
"If I could sum it up, I never saw such a good bunch of people inadvertently piss off so many people," the general, Nigel Aylwin-Foster, told New Yorker magazine recently.
Aylwin-Foster's critique, widely circulated within the Army, was assigned reading for Buckingham's officers. So was a book on counterinsurgency warfare. The use of force was a persistent topic of discussion.
Standing in front of a classroom on Fort Rich recently, guest lecturer Tarak Barkawi told the officers that a mortar shot that takes out insurgents and also kills civilians can set off a wave of grief and anger that makes the insurgency stronger. That is a particular danger in Iraq, he said, where kinship ties are typically more active and extensive than in the West.
"Force becomes a very, very, very double-edged sword," he said.
Barkawi, a lecturer in international security at the University of Cambridge in England, is Buckingham's friend and former teacher. He specializes in small wars and training foreign security forces, which is a key element of the U.S. mission in Iraq. Buckingham asked him to come to Alaska to talk to his officers.
In counterinsurgency operations, Barkawi told the men, actions that don't look offensive in traditional military terms can actually pierce the heart of the insurgency by drying up recruits and producing intelligence leads. Sprucing up a playground, having tea with the mayor, sending a platoon to live in a village simply to be a presence there: All these things can succeed where a grenade cannot.
"You are separating those people from the insurgency," Barkawi said. "You are sucking the life out of the insurgency."
When it comes to gaining the trust of a population, Barkawi told the officers, even the gear soldiers wear for protection -- helmets, goggles, armor, pads -- can be an obstacle. "Just putting that get-up on, you are separating yourself," he said. "You look like Darth Vader."
One officer said there hadn't been enough training for small-war stuff like negotiating with mayors.
"You know what," Buckingham said. "Make it up. We don't have the doctrine for it."
He urged his platoon and company commanders to research scenarios waiting for them in Iraq and incorporate them into their training. "We simply can't afford to keep a big-wars Army on ice for 50 years and that's all we do," he said.
Officers serving in Iraq could face "a daily, minute-by-minute use-of-force question," Buckingham said. He told his men there would be times when the situation was black-and-white and other times when it was highly subjective. The officers need to learn how to carefully weigh consequences, he said.
"Sir, are we teaching hesitation?" a company commander asked.
"Yes," Buckingham said. "And you don't like it, do you?"
"No, sir."
There's no avoiding the pressures awaiting the 3-509, Barkawi said. It can erupt in situations like the one alleged to have occurred at Haditha, where Marines are accused of killing civilians in revenge for the death of a comrade by a roadside bomb (military and congressional panels are investigating).
"That's the kind of pressures that this kind of war puts your Army under," Barkawi said.
Resisting the urge to take revenge for fallen comrades -- a natural military reaction to casualties -- is one of the most difficult pressures faced by professional soldiers in Iraq, Barkawi said.
Maj. Paul Edgar, Buckingham's second-in-command, told the men they need to be especially vigilant against bad judgment given that the battalion is short on seasoned enlisted soldiers, the guys who normally help guide the less experienced troops in combat.
Barkawi told the officers the insurgency in Iraq is largely de-centralized, with some groups forming allegiances out of convenience. In order to drive a wedge between groups and bring people to their side, he said, the officers must understand where Iraq's cultural, political, economic and social fault lines lie.
He asked the room of officers if they knew which of the two major branches of Islam the terrorists group al-Qaida is aligned with. Only a few hands went up.
Barkawi looked at Buckingham.
"That has got to be fixed," he told the commander.
10 SECONDS TO DECIDE
Buckingham appreciates what his men are up against.
A 41-year-old career officer with combat experience in Panama, Macedonia, Iraq and Afghanistan, he said he is determined to help mold the next generation of Army leaders and to give his men the tools they need to lead and succeed in Iraq.
"There's a risk with every action we take," Buckingham said in an interview. "The difficulty of it is the platoon leader, platoon sergeant or junior officer might have 10 seconds to make that decision -- or less."
At one of the lectures, Buckingham told his men a story. It happened in Afghanistan in 2002, he said, when he commanded a British paratrooper company of about 150 men. One night, a British sniper shot and killed a taxi driver who was out after curfew, rushing a pregnant woman to the hospital.
Buckingham said the sniper wasn't part of his unit, but the shooting took place in his area of operations. When British military police showed up, they wanted Buckingham's men to take the body of the dead taxi driver to their base for a few days, until investigators could get there to do an autopsy.
They were just following standard procedure.
One of Buckingham's senior enlisted soldiers didn't think that was a good idea. The locals were upset about the shooting, and their customs called for the body to be buried before nightfall. Taking it away could incite a riot and turn the locals against the troops. The sergeant called Buckingham.
Buckingham said he used what he had been taught about the local area and its customs to analyze the situation. He concluded his sergeant was right. He had to stand up to the British police officer, a person who outranked him.
That took moral strength, Buckingham said. He told his men that this -- the ability to think through a situation and then have the courage to stand up for what they know is right -- is the No. 1 skill they will need in Iraq.
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