FORT IRUIN, Calif. (AP) – In the dusty California desert, U.S. military trainers are already using the lessons learned from Russia’s war against Ukraine as they prepare soldiers for future battles against a major adversary such as Russia or China.
The role players in this month’s exercise at the National Training Center speak Russian. The enemy force, which controls the fictional city of Ugen, is using a steady stream of social media posts to make false accusations against the US brigade preparing for an attack.
In the coming weeks, the planned training scenario for the next brigade will focus on how to fight an enemy who wants to destroy a city with rocket fire to conquer it.
If the images look familiar, they are, appearing on television and websites around the world right now as Russian forces launch air strikes on Ukrainian cities, killing dozens of civilians. The information war on social media showed passionate nightly speeches by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, as well as Russian efforts to accuse Ukrainian forces of falsifying mass killings in cities such as Bucha, massacres blamed by the West on Moscow’s troops.
“I think the whole army is really watching what’s going on in Ukraine right now and trying to learn from it,” said Secretary of War Christine Warmouth. These lessons, she said, range from Russian equipment and logistics problems to communications and Internet use.
“The Russia-Ukraine experience is a very powerful illustration for our military of how important the information domain will be,” said Warmouth, who spent two days at a training center in the Mojave Desert, watching an army brigade wage war against imaginary Denov forces.
“We have been talking about this for about five years. But to really see him and see the way Zelenski was incredibly powerful. … This is a world war that the real world can see and observe in real time. ”
In the center the commander no. Gen. Kurt Taylor and his staff are extracting pages from a Russian book to ensure that American soldiers are ready to fight and win against a sophisticated enemy who is close to them.
This is a common tool. For example, its base and the Joint Louisiana Preparedness Training Center have switched to fighting insurgents during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And the military has focused other training on how to fight in cold weather – mimicking conditions in Russia or North Korea. But these latest changes came quickly in the first months after Russia invaded Ukraine.
About 4,500 soldiers from the 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, based in Fort Hood, Texas, are out in the vast desert training area of Fort Irwin, where they will spend two weeks battling the NTC’s 11th Armored Resident Armored Regiment. who acts as a military enemy. Regiment soldiers – known as Blackhorse – are stationed in and around Ujen, which includes role-playing players acting as locals.
As the sun rose earlier last week, Army Colonel Ian Palmer, the brigade’s commander, stood on Crash Hill on the outskirts of the city, preparing his troops to launch an attack. Rows of tanks stretched out in the distance. The strong wind the night before hindered his progress, so the attack was a little behind.
He said the exercise used more drones than friendly and enemy forces, both for surveillance and attack. So his forces are trying to use camouflage and return to the field to stay out of sight. “You know that if you can be seen, you can be shot wherever you are,” he said.
Down in the makeshift city, opposition forces are confident they can hold Palmer’s brigade despite the difference in size. The Denovites have only about 1,350 forces, but they throw everything they have at the brigade, from silence and other electronic warfare to rebel attacks and propaganda.
Role-playing players have their phones ready to shoot and quickly post on social media.
The Denov forces want to portray the unit in the worst possible light, Taylor said, and are constantly distorting the story on social media so that Palmer’s troops realize they are fighting for the truth.
This is a challenge, he said, because “when I have a bunch of casualties and I’m taken from my left flank and my supply trains aren’t where they should be and I can’t find the bulldozers, it’s hard for me to think of something someone said about me on twitter.
The purpose of the training, Taylor said, was to teach the coming brigades how to merge all elements of their combat power into a coordinated attack.
“Everyone can play an instrument, but it’s about making music – combining everything together in a synchronized way. And what you saw today was that artillery did artillery, aviation did something with aviation, and maneuver boys did something with maneuver. But part of the delay in their attack on the city was that they could not synchronize the three, “he said.
Again, they can look to Ukraine to see how Russia failed to do so in the first weeks of the war. U.S. leaders have repeatedly noted that in Russia’s initial multilateral attack on Ukraine, commanders have consistently failed to provide air strikes and support their ground forces needed to move to key cities such as Kyiv.
The failure led Russian troops to bomb suburban cities, strike hospitals, housing and other structures, and kill civilians.
So when the next brigade arrived as a training center, Taylor said he would face an enemy on board by doing just that.
“We will be very focused on how to fight an adversary who is ready to destroy the infrastructure, because that is how we think our adversaries will fight,” Taylor said. “We must be prepared for a city battle, where we have an enemy who fires artillery indiscriminately.
Warm, the army minister, said the vision of the training underscores other lessons the United States is learning from the war in Ukraine.
“As we watch what is happening to the Russians now, it is informative for us to think about what is right in terms of modernization,” she said, noting that some American tanks are very heavy and the terrain in Europe is more murky rather than the hard sand of the desert.
The army, she said, needs to determine the right balance between tank mobility, tank survival and tank lethality. If you want to make it more mobile, you make it lighter, but that makes it less survivable. That’s why you have to decide where to take risks. “
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