Exercise brings civil affairs troops back to groove

USASOC PAO

January 26, 2012

	Photo by Leslie Ozawa/95th CA Bde PAO Sgt. 1st Class Joshua Marquis coaches 95th Civil Affairs Brigade Soldiers on weapons-firing positions used when clearing buildings in hostile environments.

FORT POLK, La. — Fort Bragg Before Fort Bragg transitioned to holiday season mode in mid-December, about three dozen Soldiers from 95th Civil Affairs Brigade shut down their computers for the brigade’s first field training exercise, Dec. 5 to 7, at training site Forward Operating Base Patriot.

“All of our non-civil affairs Soldiers in this unit are very, very good at their MOS (military occupational specialty) jobs,” said Capt. Ryan Schloesser, commander of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 95th CA Brigade. “Our illustrators are very good illustrators, our resource management Soldiers are very good on DTS (Defense Travel System) and budget. But since we conduct operations 24-7 at the brigade HHC, they don’t have time to go out in the field environment and be reminded why they came into the military — to be a Soldier.”

Also moving out to the FTX were several key members of the brigade headquarters staff. Their mission was to not only train the civil affairs support personnel in basic combat skills, but to also help the brigade determine how to set up a brigade headquarters away from Fort Bragg.

“The other thing we tested was the logistics and communications piece,” Schlosser said. “We tested our communications systems, whether they could handle our civil information management program, uploading and downloading data. We identified that we would need a lot more support, if we were to actually deploy a portion of the brigade headquarters.

“We don’t have fuelers, so we had to convoy back to Fort Bragg proper to refuel our vehicles. We don’t have a feeding section. We had to move chow back and forth,” Schloesser said.

He added that the FTX also helped test the brigade as an operations center.

“My normal resources clerk had to kind of shift gears and her main priority was the radio. This involved tracking where the squads were and ensuring they were receiving the situation reports and getting updates from those squads,” Schloesser said.

But for most of the brigade’s “low density” Soldiers assigned to the FTX, the four days in December meant re-learning the Army’s Skill Level 1 tasks, which is what every Soldier in the Army learns in basic training.

“They may be a personnel clerk downrange, but Forward Operating Base Bagram might be attacked by mortars and they may end up having to move to a different location,” said Schloesser. “They might be on a convoy that might be attacked. There are multiple vignettes where support Soldiers have been attacked in convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they didn’t have the training they needed.

“The other thing that I really pushed was troop leading procedures.” Schloesser said. 

He explained that troop leading procedures are a list of steps that a company goes through, from receiving a mission to executing that mission — what every infantry platoon and squad does.

“But it also can be applied to their jobs,” Schloesser noted. “You receive a mission. What is that budget analyst’s mission is for the day? You make a tentative plan. How am I going to process 40 travel vouchers today? Give a warning order. Tell my buddy, my one Soldier that’s under me, that we got to do 40 vouchers today. You take 20, I take 20. Conduct the reconnaissance. Does my computer work today? In just doing simple tasks, conduct rehearsals if you need to,” he said.

“I asked them after the mission, ‘How you can apply the troop leading procedures that you learned today, into making your job better?’ I think that was good. I think they took away the troop leading procedures.”

“And we also pushed them as well. They were out every night. They got a lot less sleep than they were used to,” said Schlosser.

Pushing the Soldiers were several of the more senior brigade noncommissioned officers who have trained and deployed as combat arms Soldiers to Iraq or Afghanistan.  

Schloesser selected as platoon leader a civil affairs sergeant who had served as an infantryman attached to the 18th Field Artillery Brigade, in Iraq for 16 months as a convoy security squad leader, and who had deployed to Afghanistan as a CA noncommissioned officer.

“Even with my experience, seven and a half years as an infantryman, I had to crack open that field manual. It’s a perishable skill, just like anything else,” said Sgt. 1st Class Joshua Marquis.
Marquis said the FTX was a training event for the NCO’s as well.

“If you’ve been up here at the brigade for awhile, it was really beneficial, not only for the Soldiers but for the squad leaders. You have to make sure you’re teaching it right to the Soldiers, to operate as an infantry squad,” said Marquis.

“If you slack on that, they’re not going to get training value out of that. There was a lot of pressure put on me and the other squad leaders, to know what we are talking about,” Marquis added.

Marquis said that one of the focus areas for the training was land navigation.  “We did something that was more realistic. We realized if you’re moving to an objective, moving to a village, moving to a land feature, you’re not looking for a 10x10 placard,” he said.

“Tuesday night, we went outside the training area of FOB Patriot and identified major training features that we could send the squads to practice their land navigation. That first night was on the squad leaders to cover everything from dead reckoning with a compass, to using the terrain association method with a map — there’s a hill on the left, this is where we are,” Marquis said.

For the following nights, Marquis and Schloesser devised a new land-nav course, incorporating scenarios that would force the Soldiers to act and react as a squad. The squads would set out on the land-nav course at staggered intervals so that they wouldn’t cross paths, as they moved from one objective to the next, along the 20 to 25-kilometer course.

The first was a military checkpoint with the “Pineland” security force. Marquis explained, “At the first point, they would radio the headquarters, and the operations center would read their FRAGO (fragmentary order): ‘Now we want you to move to this point.’

“The idea was they would never know how far they were walking and when they were going to be done. We wanted to make sure they wouldn’t quit.

“After the first point, they were told to conduct a recon on a village, the suspected origin of a mortar strike on the FOB. They first moved on the road, in a permissive environment, and once the FOB got attacked by the mortar, it became a hostile environment.  They had to move tactically. They don’t find anything, and do a recon on the village. They are then given an order to resupply from a friendly unit.

“Then at the third point, they get intel that our forces had located an enemy cache that was resupplying the mortars. Then they were told to move to that point and once there, to assume the role of a quick reaction force mission to support the original checkpoint. There was this big circle we had developed, so they never ran into each other,” said Marquis.

“We used to go to the field all the time,” said Spc. Isaiah Baxter, a budget analyst assigned to the Brigade HHC. “In Korea, I was in the field six months out of the year. There’s no resource management office in Korea. Just regular finance. It doesn’t matter who you are. You just go out,” he said.

“How we executed it was amazing,” Baxter commented. “There was no problem with the vehicles. Everyone just moved out.  We had a few hiccups, but nothing that made everyone go, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’” Baxter said.

“The first thing that I noticed about that it was the training. The NCO’s that were out there did a pretty good job of letting the Soldiers more or less do most of the work… They let us go mess up and then tell us what was the right thing to do. It was a great experience I had a lot of fun. No one was really complaining, although it was really cold. We stayed out for countless hours,” Baxter said.

Pfc. David Miller, a human resources specialist, agreed about the cold. “The last mission, it was really cold,” Miller said. “Everyone was suffering, but nobody complained about it. Marching through the swamp, walking all over the place. We did a lot of walking that night.”

Miller, who was assigned to the brigade last June, after completing Advanced Individual Training at Fort Jackson, S.C. and Airborne School, said the training was well organized.

“Seeing how things were planned out, using troop leading procedures and going out and doing it,” Miller commented. “I would love to do more of this stuff.  I never had training like this that was so structured, so put together.  The relationships you build within the team. . . you see them differently, not just working in the office. We were working to achieve a common goal.”

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