Nearly 15,000 deployed without IED training

Nearly 15,000 deployed without IED training
By Peter Eisler, Tom Vanden Brook and Blake Morrison - USA Today
Posted : Wednesday Oct 17, 2007 20:27:59 EDT

FORT IRWIN, Calif. — The troops arrive to pure chaos. The wrecked Humvee lies smoking on the road, blown apart by a roadside bomb. One soldier moans on the ground, a leg torn off at the knee. Another slumps unconscious nearby. Iraqis crowd in, pointing and yelling. Snipers lurk on every roof.

Some soldiers secure the area; others provide first aid. They call for support. As they load the injured for evacuation, sniper fire rains down.

Fortunately, the wounded soldiers are only lifelike mannequins. And the entire episode is a training exercise aimed at preparing soldiers for the chief threat they’ll face in combat: improvised explosive devices. A half-hour later, the soldiers listen as an instructor ticks off their mistakes: They failed to stop traffic. They were distracted by the crowd. They didn’t clear the scene before snipers got in place.

The anti-IED instruction at Fort Irwin’s National Training Center is the best the Army has — a true-to-life piece of the battlefield, mocked up in the Mojave Desert. But tens of thousands of troops have gone to war without this sort of training, a USA Today investigation shows.

In the war’s early years, troops were deployed with little or no knowledge of IEDs, even as the devices came to account for 60 percent of combat deaths.

Even today, many troops head to Iraq without the best available training. Three of the 22 Army combat brigades now in Iraq — nearly 15,000 troops — didn’t have time to visit Fort Irwin or one of the three other combat training centers where brigades are supposed to do final pre-deployment exercises. Regardless of where they train, most soldiers and Marines still practice without the armored vehicles, electronic equipment and other tools they will rely on to avoid and survive IEDs in combat.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/10/gns_iedtraining_071017/