USJFCOMLive

In the week our team has been reporting from Bold Quest 09, we’ve constantly come back to the key theme and focus of the assessment: improving air-to-ground communication to mitigate friendly fire incidents on the battlefield.  Different systems have been assessed multiple times during the exercise, carried by both the aircraft flying unseen overhead and forces on the ground.  The “Wild Boars” of the Army’s 2nd Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, part of Fort Polk, La.’s 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, have been a vital part of the testing.  They play the ground forces the fast-movers are trying not to hit.

Last night, Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dave Wyscaver and I had the opportunity to sit with the two men who lead the 2/30th: Lt. Col. Chris Ramsey and Command Sgt. Maj. Doug Maddi, the battalion’s commander and command sergeant major.

Like many Army units, the Wild Boars are preparing to deploy to Afghanistan in the near future.  Maddi told me that the battalion has been able to accomplish its own training goals in support of that deployment’s training cycle in addition to supporting USJFCOM’s mission here.

Our primary mission is here is to support the JFCOM exercise and provide vehicle support as well as soldiers to validate the air-ground integration piece of it, but the commander’s guidance was to take full advantage of that.  What we’ve been able to do is - as well as supporting the JFCOM aspect of it - we’ve been able to do a lot of shooting, getting after some squad level training as far as live fires … Subsequently, as part of the JFCOM piece in support of Bold Quest, we were able to develop our own intel scenario and that kind of drives some platoon collective-level training.

Ramsey and Maddi both said that conducting training away from the unit’s home station has had added benefits.  It immerses the soldiers in their training and allows them to focus primarily on it.  Ramsey added that training in a new environment has its own benefits.

It helps build adaptive and agile leaders that are able to think through problem sets.  Developing a scenario, for example … back at home station, somebody’s done it before, so you can ask them ‘Hey, how did you do this last time?’ and they can provide you all the concepts and scenarios that they did.  From that aspect, we didn’t have the ability to tap into anybody here, so our commanders, platoon leaders and platoon sergeants have to sit down and develop concepts based off the training objectives that they wanted to meet.  The MOUT sites that they have here and some of the great training areas that they have allowed us to do things that we wouldn’t normally do based on not seeing them before.  I think that’s been a great thing for us.

The Wild Boars are training with a variety of joint and coalition forces during BQ 09, including U.S. Navy joint terminal attack controllers, French pilots and Australian artillery officers.  Both men said that has been a unique and valuable aspect of the training for their soldiers.  Maddi said that training with the other services and countries they will encounter downrange will pay dividends once they’re there.

Joint Forces Command is obviously just that.  They are the feeder and the requirements setter for all forces.  We’re doing that at various different levels, from the staff planning level to the midlevel leader level … It really allows our guys to get to know these other services [and militaries] and see how they operate, some of their TTPs [tactics, techniques and procedures].  It just socializes us to the operating environment.

As he prepares to lead soldiers into a combat zone, Ramsey told me the focus of this year’s Bold Quest is vitally important to the modern warfighter.

We don’t want to kill our own.  That’s the most important thing.  If there’s a capability that can be brought to our forces that reduces the shooter-to-sensor time and allows that shooter to know with confidence that he’s not going to kill friendlies, I think that’s huge.

For photos of the Wild Boars in action against Marines providing their opposing force, click here.