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David Burge  |
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FORT BLISS >> When Lt. Col. Rob Goodroe first joined the Army more than 20 years ago as a young lieutenant, he said he could have been mistaken for a soldier who fought in Vietnam when you looked at the equipment he was given.
The past decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan has pushed the Army to modernize and upgrade the equipment it is now issuing soldiers, said Goodroe, who is participating as an observer/controller this month with the semi-annual Network Integration Evaluation at Fort Bliss.
About 4,700 soldiers and Marines are participating in the latest version of this exercise which is going on in the vast training area north of the Fort Bliss garrison. The NIE, as it is commonly called, started in late April and is expected to wrap up in about a week.
This exercise is crucial for pushing Army modernization efforts forward, Goodroe said. Without this type of exercise, you might look at soldiers 20 years from now and think they belonged in 2014, he said.
The Brigade Modernization Command, in which Goodroe serves, puts on the NIE with help of several partner agencies.
The Fort Bliss training area and the NIE are the "only place where you can play and experiment in the field with a full brigade," Goodroe said.
The 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division is attached to the Brigade Modernization Command and has been assigned by the Army to test new equipment, mostly communication and computer network items, under realistic combat conditions. Joining the 2nd Brigade this time around are about 900 Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment from Camp Lejune, N.C. This is the largest contingent of Marines to participate in the NIE since it started in 2011.
New this spring, a joint and international exercise known as Bold Quest is taking place simultaneously but independently at White Sands Missile Range with live aircraft and a handful of NATO partners. When the NIE and Bold Quest end, troops from both will join together, either live or on computer simulation, to fight in a large-scale joint training exercise.
The 1st Armored Division is serving as the higher headquarters for both the NIE and the culminating exercise. About 40 to 50 British soldiers from a brigade headquarters were expected to arrive in the past few days, and they are going to participate as part of the headquarters for the large joint exercise at the end.
"We have brought together all three of these large exercises in one area," said Col. Paul Cravey, operations officer for the Brigade Modernization Command. "The important thing is the lessons learned in interoperability in our joint forces and coalition forces — how we fight together, how we communicate and how our systems operate together."
In the NIE, 2nd Brigade tests new equipment against a live opposing force to see how it works and then gives feedback from its soldiers to the Army, said Lt. Col. Ernest Tornabell IV, the brigade's deputy commanding officer. They look for things like reliability, agility, flexibility and the ability to move around the battlefield, he said.
The idea is to make sure the equipment works well together before it is issued to troops who deploy to hot spots around the world, Tornabell said.
A key area the 2nd Brigade looks at is to make sure the equipment is user-friendly and not so complicated that it can't be easily used by regular soldiers, said Maj. Chris Lane, 2nd Brigade's executive officer.
Equipment tested in past NIEs has already been issued to the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y. and the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) from Fort Campbell, Ky., who have both used it in Afghanistan, NIE officials said. Other units have been issued some of this equipment and are using it in places like Europe, the Pacific and Africa, they added.
Spc. Reece Whitsett is an artilleryman with Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team.
Whitsett, a Blacksburg, Va., native, said the NIE is good training and can serve as a refresher course in how to operate in the field.
He was given a new piece of equipment that looked like a cell phone and could be used to direct an artillery strike. He said it crashed during one of his training missions.
That is exactly the type of feedback that the Army is seeking from doing this exercise, Goodroe and other officials with the NIE said.
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