2 brigades to skip desert training in rush to Iraq

Some confident they are ‘ready to go’
On a visit to the brigade’s home station at Fort Lewis last week, Murray asked the top commander there, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, whether the soldiers’ preparation for Iraq was adequate without going to the National Training Center, according to a Fort Lewis spokesman, Lt. Col. Dan Williams, who said he attended Dubik’s meeting with Murray.

Dubik assured her it was, Williams said. The general told her he was confident “that they were ready to go” to Iraq even if they had not had 1,300 soldiers imported from the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk to play the role of Iraqi insurgents and civilians and to observe and control the mission rehearsal exercise.

“They went through all the things they know they’re going to do in Iraq,” Williams said.

Some outside observers say it was inevitable that, in a pinch, the Army would tinker with training.

“It tracks with what we should expect when we hurry the units up in their last three months” before a deployment, said Kevin Ryan, a retired brigadier general and former Army planner who is now at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Army commanders are compelled to make “economies,” he added, when an accelerated deployment plan forces them to compress some aspects of training.

Ryan said he doubts this approach will significantly detract from the soldiers’ degree of preparation for Iraq.

Analyst cites ‘modicum of risk’
“‘Adequate’ is probably a good description of what that training is,” he said. “It’s not the premier kind of situation that commanders would prefer, but it is adequate.” Daniel Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a think tank, said, “This shouldn’t have a decisive impact, although it carries a modicum of risk.”

The two units that are skipping their National Training Center sessions are among five Army brigades that are being dispatched to Baghdad on an sped-up schedule as the centerpiece of Bush’s new approach to stabilizing Iraq.

The first to go, in January, was an 82nd Airborne brigade specially designated for short-notice deployments; it did no full-scale final exercise before deploying to Kuwait and then into Iraq.

The next two, from Fort Benning, Ga., and Fort Riley, Kan., did their final training sessions at the National Training Center. The unit from Fort Riley is entering Iraq now and the other is due to arrive in March.

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