General: Fort Bliss at forefront of training

Fort Bliss' training ranges could see large-scale maneuvers similar to those at the Army's National Training Center, the four-star general in charge of the Army's training and education programs said.
Gen. William S. Wallace, head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va., also said Fort Bliss soldiers are finding new ways to use cutting-edge technology in combat. Wallace made the comments in an interview with the El Paso Times after his speech to graduates of the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy last week.

As V Corps commander, Wallace led the U.S. attack on Iraq. He commanded the National Training Center, or NTC, in California, which is where deploying units typically conduct their final, large-scale training exercises. He also commanded the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

"As we grow the size of the Army we haven't grown the size, of any of our combat training centers, and we recognize there's a requirement to expand their capacity," Wallace said.

The Army has plans to create mobile training teams that can go to posts where soldiers are preparing for combat duty, Wallace said, adding, "perhaps save some money because of transportation costs and that sort of thing."

"If we can actualize our vision of having exportable training capability, there's no reason why you wouldn't see large-scale maneuvers in some of the training lanes here at White Sands (Missile Range) and Fort Bliss."

However, he said the timing is "hard to determine."

"Part of the challenge we have today is the operational tempo allows us to essentially train for one mission, and that mission is the mission that we're given in Iraq and Afghanistan," Wallace said. "As the Army gets larger, we'll have more flexibility, have more dwell time in between the deployments and ... then we can develop other ways of training and training in the full spectrum of potential combat operations, rather than exclusively focusing on counter-insurgency ops."

A Fort Bliss tragedy has transformed Army training, Wallace said.

After 11 of the post's soldiers died in the ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company during the 2003 Iraq invasion, every soldier is drilled in combat skills, Wallace said.

"Every soldier regardless of (military occupational specialty), regardless of gender, is trained on what we refer to as warrior tasks and battle drills," he said. "We train them to be an infantryman first. We train them to make sure they know how to use their weapon and are comfortable with their weapon in many, many circumstances ... which is orders of magnitude more weapons handling that soldiers get in basic training than they did several years ago."

Fort Bliss soldiers also are transforming how soldiers fight, Wallace said. Members of the Army Evaluation Task Force are testing and evaluating Future Combat Systems equipment. The FCS program is at the heart of the Army's modernization and is changing tactics, techniques and procedures, which means the Army, in some cases, must rewrite manuals or create new sections.

FCS includes unmanned ground and aerial vehicles and a communications system that hooks soldiers into a broadband network to a new series of vehicles based on the same chassis.

"We find, over the course of experimentation of any ilk, that when you take a piece of equipment and put it in the hands of a soldier, the soldier either finds out how to use it in ways that you never expected previously or, in some cases, tells us that the piece of equipment we're putting in their hands doesn't measure up to their expectations and we've got to go back to the drawing board," Wallace said.

But he thinks young, technology-savvy soldiers won't have much problem adapting.

"It won't be nearly as radical to the young soldier who uses it as it will be to the old soldier who tries to tell them how to use it," Wallace said. "I heard the story the other day that a kid didn't like the control mechanism that had been provided to him by the contractor, and so he went out and bought himself an Xbox controller and hooked it up and it worked just fine. And it was more intuitive from his perspective on how to control it. They're totally unafraid of it."

http://www.elpasotimes.com/military/ci_9440214