A barrage of machine gun fire filled the air as Fort Carson soldiers attacked a trench dug into an open field.
Shielded by a low rise, the machine gunners fired on an enemy hidden below ground. Then abandoning the natural cover, soldiers ran across the open field bordered by forest and up to the mouth of the trench.
“We just took it by force, with two men going down barrels up,” said Sgt. Myles Scrofne, with the 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment.
In other scenarios, Scrofne’s platoon has practiced throwing hand grenades over the side of a trench.
“We’ll peek and we’ll prep and throw and then roll back,” he said.
Trench warfare, reminiscent of World War I, is common on the battlefields in the Ukraine War where both Russians and Ukrainians have used them and created wide swath’s of no man’s lands patrolled by robots. The war has been a bloody conflict, with the Department of Defense announcing recently the Russians were averaging 1,200 daily casualties.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
A soldier with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Carson, left, and a Fort Johnson trainer take cover after setting off a grenade during weapons validation in preparation for live-fire training at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., Saturday, Nov. 2, 2024. About 4,000 soldiers and 1,100 vehicles from Fort Carson spent several weeks at the training center facing challenges meant to prepare them for large-scale war. (Parker Seibold, The Gazette)
The war games hosted at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana where Fort Carson soldiers spent several weeks this fall are aimed at applying lessons learned in Ukraine and other conflict zones to future warfighting challenges the United States might face.
A new player in the war, North Korea, sent in 10,000 troops to fight for Russia, and has also adopted trenches, digging them near its border with South Korea.
Deep and wide, the trenches provide cover and a tough target for mortar rounds that would precede ground troops, explained 1st Sgt. Christopher Wyatt, who works at the center where he is part of a team ensuring safety when troops are firing live rounds. Built like a maze, a trench in Louisiana is a permanent fixture, with concrete walls, unlike the muddy makeshift Ukraine defenses.
For the thousands of the soldiers with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, the trench was one of many challenges meant to prepare them for large-scale war, where historic strategy, like trenches, were combined with innovations including drones and robots in the intense training.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
Maj. Jayne Leemon, brigade legal officer, with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, applies face paint as a convoy of brigade headquarters staff prepares to move early in the morning, Friday, Nov. 1, 2024, at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La. (Parker Seibold, The Gazette)
In 70-degree weather, but with the humidity of a steamed up gym shower, the soldiers and their 1,100 vehicles sprawled out across the open woods and fields of eastern Louisiana, at the training center designed to challenge brigade after brigade with the latest trends in warfare. It’s a center that also hosts American allies for training.
Strykers and their crews were dispersed across fields and in the tree lines, as they would be in a real conflict, to help avoid becoming targets. The crews slept on the ground or in their vehicles, some days waking long before sunrise.
One convoy of brigade headquarters staff pulled out in the misty, mild early morning, the Humvees, eight-wheeled Strykers and large covered trucks, crawling along slowly, like huge turtles with angular cabs for heads. In the soft light of the vehicles, soldiers applied their green, brown and black camouflage face paint.
Reporters’ notebook: A taste of Fort Johnson’s challenges
In heavy body armor that can make you feel like a life-sized Lego character, my colleague Parker Seibold and I got a very small taste of some of the physical challenges facing the Fort Carson soldiers training in Louisiana at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson. My shoulders were screaming at me by the third day of wearing the heavy bulky vest, without any of the additional gear soldiers must carry.
For leadership, the training is a game of strategy planned out, at least in part, on a map that could carpet a small apartment. It is played out against soldiers stationed at Fort Johnson, who collectively fight as “Geronimo.” All the tactics and tricks of a regular battlefield are at play. When the conflict begins, soldiers are “shot” in an elaborate game of laser tag, where real guns are fitted to fire the lasers.
The training staff at Fort Johnson were also watching the Fort Carson soldiers’ every move, as coaches in the field and on cameras. For the soldiers, it’s like living on “The Truman Show,” explained 1st Stryker Brigade Commander Col. Tony Keller.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
Fort Carson soldiers with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team keep watch in a trench during training at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024. Both Russia and Ukraine are using trenches in the bloody conflict that recently passed its 1,000 day. (Parker Seibold, The Gazette)
Soldiers must plan for large-numbers of artillery, enemy drones that can pick up on signals from phones and other communication devices, and, as it turns out, change in their own ranks. In the future, those working in intelligence and combat engineers will be moving away from brigades up to the division level as part of the Army’s sweeping restructuring.
For several brigades, one of the challenges of that restructuring so far has been the phasing out of some cavalry units focused on reconnaissance.
The Army explained this year in a white paper that it would phase out 32,000 positions, in part because the force is designed for more troops than currently serve. While that may sound counterintuitive, the restructuring is meant to add people, but cut empty positions as it refocuses for large-scale war, the paper said.
The Army identified cavalry units, among others, for those cuts because they were designed for counter-terrorism efforts, the white paper said.
In the case of 1st Stryker Brigade, its previously assigned 2nd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, a group of several hundred people was inactivated in August and in its place Keller was relying on three platoons, which can have a few dozen people on average.
“I have to be very precise in where I’m putting these people,” Keller said. The small teams couldn’t cover the large geographic space in play so he hoped to supplement with 28-foot long Gray Eagle drones that can fly at altitudes up to 25,000 feet.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
Left: A car bomb explodes as soldiers with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Carson take an enemy village during training at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., on Nov. 3.
The loss of cavalry squadrons is a problem that four other brigades have also faced going through the training at Fort Johnson, said Lt. Col. Timothy Price, who advised Keller during the training as the brigade command and control taskforce senior.
From Price’s perspective, the work of reconnaissance and security, gathering information on the enemy without getting into a fight, is still critical.
“We have got to solve it long-term by retraining our infantry,” he said, which could take sending infantrymen to different schools.
At the same time, the training center is ensuring brigades are facing other constant challenges that soldiers did not see in Iraq and Afghanistan, a conflict where enemy fighters resisted only on land.
Now soldiers face threats all the time, including constant surveillance by drone.
During the training, Price said he saw Fort Carson soldiers dispersing well across the wooded landscape and using “periods of darkness to reset the chess board,” he said. For example, the troops would move a battery of artillery overnight.
Drones, decoys and signals
The signals put off by phones, Wi-Fi hotspots and other electronics are beacons in the modern fight, allowing enemy fighters to find individual soldiers.
Geronimo’s drones collect reconnaissance on individual signals from electronics, such as the name of a Wi-Fi hotspot. Such a name, if completely literal, can give away the location of a critical target, such as the headquarters of the brigade, Price explained.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
A member of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Carson holds a drone with a sniffer attached, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024, at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La. The attachment relies on a credit card-sized computer that can run sensors to pick up electromagnetic signals, a tool used to help with reconnaissance efforts. (Parker Seibold, The Gazette)
They can also drop explosives and while that cannot be replicated yet in the training center’s laser tag, the trainers tell soldiers when they have been hit, he said.
To counter Geronimo, 1st Stryker Brigade soldiers had to learn caution in using their electronics.
“How do you hide digitally? Some of it’s discipline. A lot of it is just turning off your phones and not using the things that are going to make you a target,” Keller explained.
Before the headquarters team pulled out, a soldier “shot down” one of Geronimo’s drones, by interrupting its signal, so it landed gracefully on the ground.
A Fort Johnson officer training coach advised the Fort Carson soldier not to break it and to turn it in.
When Keller heard about it, he pushed that soldier to ask for more information about an enemy since in a real battlefield they would want as much information as possible from that drone. He urged him to tell the coach what he would do in real life and get the data he could have received for real.
“You gotta think, like, five levels up, right?,” Keller urged.
The brigade can also gather information on their opponents with the newly formed small drone team that is working closely with snipers and cavalry scouts, a model informally called a hunter-killer platoon, explained Staff Sgt. Andrew Taylor, a sniper section leader with the 1st battalion, 38th infantry.
All those skill-sets together can help paint a picture of the battlefield, he said.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
Staff Sgt. Andrew Taylor, a sniper section leader with the 1st battalion, 38th infantry, poses for a portrait at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., on Oct. 31. In a model informally called a hunter-killer platoon, snipers are working with a newly formed drone team and cavalry scouts to gather information on their opponents.
The cavalry scouts use optics on their vehicles to observe, while snipers push closer, Taylor said. If snipers see something in the field they need more information about, they can ask the pilots to fly a drone over it.
“It keeps us safer and it gets honestly better intelligence in the end,” Taylor explained about drones. It was a benefit he experienced first hand deployed in the Middle East.
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Robert Dixon, an air defense system integrator, and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Daniel Crabtree, an electromagnetic warfare technician, helped to develop the new drone team and assemble their equipment, as part of an innovation cell that’s been active for about a year.
The small quadcopters are all outfitted with raspberry pi, a credit card sized computer that can run sensors to pick up electromagnetic signals. The innovation cell has also set up decoys using the same off-the-shelf computers and batteries that can make a drone believe it is sensing the electronics on a soldier.
“So on the ground, it’s an emitter … In the air, it’s a sniffer looking for those signals,” Crabtree said.
The drones still have to return to the pilots and get plugged into a monitor to deliver information and that can lead to a bit of delay that, Dixon said, he would like to see eliminated.
In addition to air surveillance, Geronimo will put trackers similar to Apple AirTags into the vehicles, so they can attack them later, explained 1st Lt. Ryan Fitzmaurice, a cyber and special effects officer. An Apple AirTag will emit a Bluetooth signal to allow Apple users to track keys or other items from their phone or other device.
So finding the right phone application for soldiers to search for the trackers is useful, he explained. They’ve found a few options they hoped would keep whole companies from getting wiped out during the exercise.
Fort Carson is slated to get a battery to counter small unmanned drones in 2028, as part of the Army’s restructuring plan.
‘Knife of the fight’
About 45 miles from the explosions close to an airfield, the brigade intelligence support elements set up under camouflage tents, surrounded by concertina wire, to protect the soldiers processing information from human sources, imagery, electromagnetic signals and online networks made to simulate social media networks. Their work helps determine high priority targets and the likely action the enemy is going to take, explained Chief Warrant Officer Cory Saddler, an all-source analyst technician.
Compared to others in intelligence, the group is focused on immediate action.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
Soldiers with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Carson clear the way for soldiers to take a trench during live fire training at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., Monday, Nov. 4.
“We’re kind of the knife of the fight. We’re focused on what’s 50 feet in front of us,” he said, distributing information out to decision makers at the division and brigade levels. The group can also push information out to anyone on the battlefield, he said.
It’s a capability that will be going away from the brigade level as the Army restructures, Saddler explained. The change makes sense since brigades will be on the front lines, constantly moving and it’s tough for intelligence elements to keep up with their specialized equipment, such as satellite dishes. When intelligence forces have tried to keep up as mobile units in the field, it’s been difficult, he said.
In a real large-scale war, the group would likely be in a different country from the fight for its own protection, Saddler said.
Keep the wheels turning
When the brigade travels, they bring a mobile warehouse with equipment to help ensure parts are available to keep vehicles and weapons running. While most of the equipment traveled by rail to Louisiana, the critical supply containers travel by truck, explained Chief Warrant Officer Nicholas Otting, supply system technician.
When Otting opened one of the drawers inside the huge metal shipping containers it looked like a Home Depot shelf, full of small parts, including washers and screws. The sustainment team also brings out large items like replacement engines.
The huge containers and their keepers, responsible for about $9 million in inventory, also make the trek out to the training area, where Otting hoped he would find the necessary flat ground for his containers.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
Chief Warrant Officer Nicholas Otting, supply system technician with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, explains sustainment operations, with Sgt. Seon Kim, at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. When the brigade travels, they bring a mobile warehouse with them with equipment to help ensure parts are available to keep vehicles and weapons running.
Once in place, Otting and his staff must defend themselves from Geronimo. He’s been through similar training before, and recalled the sustainment soldiers and their weapons popping out of sleeping bags during the night to defend themselves and their containers.
The weapons are outfitted with laser modules, so no one is actually getting shot at. But it’s good practice for young soldiers to put their own defense before other inclinations, like putting on a pair of pants, Otting said.
While the fighting is not real, the supply and repair needs are — and Otting expected when the Strykers got stuck in the mud, transmissions, transfer cases and differentials could break.
He sent out all the differentials to all the battalions ahead of time —his way of distributing the love —but was waiting for more to arrive because they had all been used, just a few days into the field exercise, he said.
Honing a craft
After making their way through tall evergreen trees, some scarred from fire, 1st Stryker Brigade soldiers set an explosive under several strands of concertina wire secured with poles.
When the charge went off, soldiers were prone on the ground with their mouths open to prevent concussions from the blast.
The combat engineers who set the charge made way for infantrymen to invade a small village, where green manikins popped up representing the enemy.
To open the road for Strykers, soldiers used a dark green smoke bomb to obscure themselves as they cut through the thick strands of wire by hand.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
To open the road for Strykers, combat engineers use a green smoke bomb to obscure themselves as they cut through the thick strands of wire by hand during a live fire exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., Monday, Nov. 4, 2024. (Parker Seibold, The Gazette)
The obstacles and explosives are both the responsibility of combat engineers, who are tasked with clearing a path for soldiers, through wires and mine fields. They also set up obstacles to slow down the enemy, explained Staff. Sgt. Andrew Davis, a combat engineer with Fort Johnson, tasked with coaching and maintaining safety while using explosives.
In this case the strands of concertina wire, staked and anchored to the ground, merited the blast that sent razor wiring flying.
“The only way to get through it is by blowing it up,” he said.
As the Army prepares for larger ground wars, the combat engineers, like the intelligence specialists, will be moving from the battalion level, a group of several hundred, to the division level, where they can help plan missions over a much larger area, Davis said. While there will be fewer combat engineers, the companies are expected to get bigger, he said.
During the training, combat engineers planned across three large objectives, two small “towns” and the trench, supporting the companies as they attacked each one, leapfrogging over one another.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
A car bomb explodes as soldiers with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Carson take an “enemy village” during training at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., Sunday, Nov. 3.
They ran the exercise twice, spending one full day attacking with blanks to prepare for the live rounds.
It was deafening and chaotic, to an outsider, even when the soldiers fired blanks. But for the coaches, who stood often strangely still, even as the soldiers ran around them from one building to the next and car bombs went off, it is a craft. They are looking for good decision-making, moving with purpose on foot and ensuring soldiers are putting Strykers, originally built for an urban environment, are put to their best use, among many other aspects of fighting.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
Above: Empty rounds on the ground after Fort Carson soldiers completed weapons validation in preparation for a live fire exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., Satruday, Nov. 2, 2024.
The Strykers can get stuck at choke points and can be tricky to drive in the confined spaces of a town. When they come out to an open field facing the enemy, Strykers need to be spread out and camouflaged under the trees to get the maximum effective firepower, Davis said.
On the second day when troops fired live ammunition, 1st Sgt. Wyatt, who observed every stage, saw an 80% improvement, he said.
While it was a war game at nearly every level, Keller noted winning is not really the goal — it’s the learning and experimentation across the whole organization.
“It’s better to do this now, than if we ever do go to combat for real,” he said.
As brigades cycle through the training center, the Army also learns from the overall trends to help transform its forces as the military prepares for more complex modern conflicts with well-armed and creative opponents — like those demonstrated in Ukraine.
Fort Carson Soldiers Participate in training at the Joint Readiness Training Center
Soldiers with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team move into a town during live fire training exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, La., Nov. 4.
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