|
|
|
Seasoned Vet
Group: Community Supporter
Last Login: Today @ 5:49 PM
Posts: 5,155,
Visits: 3,588
|
|
LRSD soldiers: not quite Special Forces
SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq — They are the division’s top dogs, and they know it.
Team leaders with the Long Range Surveillance Detachment of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) must be Ranger and Airborne qualified, and most attend Ranger school while in the detachment.
They all attend Reconnaissance Surveillance Leaders Course, a four-week course at Fort Benning, Ga. And most usually have some additional training such as medical, diving or high-altitude, low-opening jumps.
But in 1996, the Army stopped allowing noncombat military occupational specialties to attend Ranger School.
So the communications soldiers, because they are not in a combat MOS, are not eligible to attend Ranger School, and that’s a bone of contention.
“It is the most important part of our mission,” said LRSD commander Capt. James McGahey, 30, who supports an exception to policy.
Staff Sgt. Kurt Merrill, 32, from Little Rock, Ark., is a base radio-station team leader. He’s been trying for nine years to get a slot at the Ranger School.
“A lot of people deem this to be a Ranger unit,” Merrill said. “All the key leadership in the detachment has to be Ranger qualified. It would give us some credibility and some insider knowledge about what they’re doing and what they’re going through when they’re out there.”
The LRSD soldiers have been called “wannabes” by some Special Forces soldiers. Still, belonging to an LRSD unit is viewed by some soldiers as a springboard to getting into Special Forces. For others, it’s the next best thing to being there without going into the world of special operations.
“LRSD guys get to do things regular units don’t,” said Sgt. 1st Class Adam Dobson, 32, operations NCO.
“We have E-6s acting like company commanders. We formulate our own plans, do our own coordinating, pull our own security and do our own quick reaction force,” he said.
In fact, LRSD soldiers might be mistaken for Special Forces soldiers in their appearance. When at the Iranian border, many choose to strip off their rank insignia and nametags. Many wear sideburns and longer-than-usual hair, and there’s lots of nonregulation headgear.
“LRSD is the SF of the conventional Army,” said Dobson. ”SF supports the entire armed forces. LRSD is the closest thing to SF the division has
------------------------------------------------------------ Out of every 100 men, ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are just targets, Nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back." - Hericletus, circa 500 BC ----------------------------------------------------------- 
|
|
|
|
|
Seasoned Vet
Group: Community Supporter
Last Login: Today @ 5:49 PM
Posts: 5,155,
Visits: 3,588
|
|
Issue Date: November 10, 2003
On the edge of Iran
Long Range Surveillance Detachment tasked with training Kurds to guard the porous border
By Gina Cavallaro
Times staff writer
SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq — Staff Sgt. Troy Brin is frustrated with the commander he just trained. Despite months of orientation, Brin says Osman Abdulah Kider Hassandoesn’t get it.
“Tactically, we’re not seeing eye to eye,” Brin said of the former regional commander for Kurdistan’s army, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Hassan is one of more than 800 Kurds trained by U.S. soldiers to patrol and police a 700-kilometer stretch of Kurdish Iraq’s border — from Qaladize in the north to Darbondi Khan in the south.
This rugged, mountainous region of northeastern Iraq has been a stronghold for the Peshmerga, who for more than 80 years have battled soldiers from Turkey, Iranand Saddam Hussein’s army.
Old fighting positions dot the landscape and signs warning of live land mines line the roadways.
Brin and Hassan are standing on a rocky ridge about 9,000 feet above sea level, a few meters from Iran near the bustling commercial village of Zale, Iraq.
Vehicles are not allowed to cross, so as they’ve done for decades, men on donkeys ferry goods back and forth on well-worn trails a thousand feet below, crossing a river to bypass the official border entrance.
When they emerge at the trailheads in Iraq, they are searched, mostly by Hassan’s patrolmen.
“We should have included donkeys in the vehicle search training,” promotable Sgt. Luke Soria, 23, of Madisonville, Ky., says cynically, watching the Kurds wave the men through without checking their animals.
Hassan still is looking the other way on some illegal cargo, and he’s not following guidance on the best way to position his men at the border, Brin says.
Brin, Soria and their fellow soldiers have put blood, sweat and tears into this project, and they’re finding that, while success looks good, it’s not that easy to change old habits.
On the other hand, Brin said, the Kurds have come a long way since he first arrived. “Two months ago, they were running around in PUK uniforms. They didn’t have a list [of banned export items]. They didn’t have a law.
“They would just tax things and let them go,” Brin said. “Now we’re catching people; we’re catching things.”
The “things” he refers to are more than terrorists and weapons coming into Iraq. The soldiers, and the Kurds they are training, also are stopping a flow of goods out of Iraq — goods deemed by the U.S. Army as essential to rebuilding Iraq’s economy.
The next night, at Hassan’s district headquarters building down the mountain in Qaladizah, he and Brin hash it out over a lamb dinner. For Hassan, having the U.S. military at the border is worth the head-banging sessions.
“Whatever [the U.S. soldiers] tell us to do, we accept it and we do it because we believe in it; it’s something we needed,” Hassan told the Army Times.
As a former official with the Patriotic Union, he earned about $400 a month.
He now makes little more than $200, and his men, who initially were paid $190 a month make $120. Payroll was met on time with confiscated Iraqi government money. Now, there is less of that money, and it’s slower in coming because the Interior Ministry in Baghdad has taken over.
Still, Hassan said, they are empowered.
“Before, Iran … didn’t pay attention to the Peshmerga, but now it comes from the coalition. Now we have a hammer,” said Hassan, one of five district commanders who, by November, will take complete control of 10 border control points.
A different task
Brin is a team leader and Soria his assistant team leader with the Long Range Surveillance Detachment of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault). They command one of a half-dozen, six-man teams, all led by staff sergeants.
The mission to train foreign nationals, one usually reserved for Special Forces, was a curve ball for this conventional Army unit, specially trained infantrymen and communications technicians who usually insert deep inside enemy lines to hide, observe and gather intelligence — quietly, covertly, slowly.
For this mission, they were asked to come out of hiding and do something very public — and without a plan.
A Special Forces group had been working in the region for months, but by the time the 101st assumed responsibility for northern Iraq in May, the Green Berets were up against a wall on their operational tempo and getting ready to leave.
Division commander Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus needed to establish control of the borderand decided the Long Range Surveillance Detachment had the capacity to fit the bill.
The task was to train hundreds of Kurds to guard, police and patrol this remote stretch of border long-known as impossibly permeable and rife with a long-standing tradition of smuggling, bribery and violence.
Petraeus “has got a lot of trust in us,” said LRSD commander Capt. James McGahey, 30.
“He knew we were going to be out there by ourselves, that we were going to have to make decisions on the ground,” said McGahey of Brighton, Mich., who took over the detachment June 5.
But LRSD soldiers, who spearheaded the division’s penetration into Iraq and were the first to do reconnaissance missions to Iraq’s borders with Syria, Turkey and Iran, resented the nature and scope of this task. That’s because they were being asked to do a Special Forces mission with half the resources of a Special Forces team.
“At first, I was pretty pissed we had to come out here and do this. We thought we had screwed ourselves into it because we told them how bad the borders were,” said Staff Sgt. Lucas Hamrick, 26, of Dallas, a team leader who has been with LRSD for almost six years.
“We were just feeling our way through it. No one [in LRSD] had ever done this before. I’m glad we did it, though. You get a pretty good motivational charge. I’m proud of the progress we’ve made with these guys.”
There are only six LRSD units in the Army — one each with the 82nd Airborne Division, the 10th Mountain Division, the 25th Infantry Division, the 2nd Infantry Division, the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 101st.
Two larger corps-level long-range surveillance units support V Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps. The XVIII Airborne Corps’ unit trained Iraqi border guards north of the LRSD here and with the division’s 3rd Brigade on the Syrian and Turkish borders.
The LRSD here, the only one operating in theater, falls under the division’s 311th Military Intelligence Battalion and is broken into six surveillance teams and two base radio-station teams. On the border project, they worked with Special Forces, the CIA, FBI and other intelligence and counterterrorism agencies.
After a couple of recon trips to the border in May, these soldiers moved lock, stock and barrel June 10 to a house once occupied by Special Forces, inside a PUK military compound west of town.
Armed with six U.S.-contracted interpreters, many of whom are former Peshmerga who now live in the United States, the LRSD teams made contact with local commanders, identified existing border crossings and formulated a training curriculum.
The first Iraqi Border Patrol members graduated in August, at the Peshmerga Military College, Kurdistan’s West Point. By the time the LRSD is finished, the plan is to have 800 patrol soldiers.
Uniforms, pickup trucks and new AK-47 assault rifles were issued to the new patrolmen and work began. Seventeen percent of the force is made up of women, who perform the same tasks as men, plus one — search female border-crossers.
By early October, the LRSD soldiers had turned operations over to the Kurds and become overseers. The soldiers taught them to follow guidelines established by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and trained them to train one another.
Everything about this mission was different.
An LRSD, by nature, doesn’t interact with people, and they live for days at a time in “hide sites.” To make contact, to attract attention by returning fire is to give away the fact that they are there. So the soldiers endure a lifestyle different than their brothers in other division units, spending days in one place, unable to move, even using plastic bags as latrines.
“It’s different, it’s way different. I mean, this isn’t even our job. We came up here and pretty much banged our heads together to get it done,” said team leader Staff Sgt. William Fleck, 33, of Alpena, Mich., a former Marine who’s been a member of LRSD for almost four years.
“We never make contact with the populace on any other mission. With the interpreters, you’re pretty much immersed.”
At the PUK compound, the soldiers moved into a house once occupied by the Special Forces guys and began their strange and wonderful new odyssey: air-conditioned rooms with beds and blankets, banks of shower stalls with hot water, a gym, washing machines, regular access to the Internet and telephones and a service kitchen with local Kurd and U.S. Army cooks.
They watch TV together, eat together and roughhouse like brothers in a college fraternity house.
All the LRSD soldiers have learned a variety of Kurdish phrases, and some even expressed regret that they would be leaving their border patrol behind when they abandon the Iraq mission in the next two or three months.
“It’s going to be hard for these guys to leave this place. A lot of them got close to the families,” Fleck said.
------------------------------------------------------------ Out of every 100 men, ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are just targets, Nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back." - Hericletus, circa 500 BC -----------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|
|
|
Seasoned Vet
Group: Past PNET Supporter
Last Login: 8/17/2008 12:01 PM
Posts: 3,376,
Visits: 1,296
|
|
One more reason why the LRS teams should come under Special Forces doctrine as we had the Strategic surveillance/reconnisance mission that eventually evolved into the LRS mission. The Rangers are not really comfortable with the "lay low" nature of LRS missions and are more aggressive by nature and design.
I constantly had to fight with Ranger regiment soldiers about being stealthy and NOT ENGAGING the enemy while doing surveillance missions. They also did not like the Isolation phase and extremely detailed planning for a LRS mission, instead prefering to Frag it or go with a simple OPORD. I think the LRS teams could be an asset to training in the FID (Foreign Internal Defence) spectrum of warfare due to their competency and highly trained personnel...many of whom are well trained Rangers.
I believe that any soldier who is SF or Ranger can do the LRS mission, I'm not so sure I wouldn't set-up a Recondo type school to teach LRS doctrine and take the Ranger School out of the LRS business all together since it is almost teaching conflicting doctrine.
While it is desireable to have Ranger trained soldiers I'm not so sure that all the team members should have to be Rangers to do the job based on my experiences in a LRS unit. It is desirable but not neccessary as most Airborne infantry, commo and medics have the stuff to be good LRS soldiers. Just my .02
[82nd][E7][E6][uswingm]
Stand in the door!
|
|
|
|
|
BS6's Dude
Group: Community Supporter
Last Login: 7/27/2008 6:18 PM
Posts: 3,039,
Visits: 4,275
|
|
Here's my .02, as a SOF troop and Arabic linguist:
1. There were TONS of examples in those articles as to why it's inappropriate use of troops in this instance. Some of the stuff the troops were saying proves that. LRS troops are more akin to Rangers in many ways, and are not schooled in cross-cultural communications and nuances. They CAN be trained, but are more like the Rangers who say "I speak 5.56 and 7.62 - I don't need another language."
2. Regardless of their unsuitability for the mission and lack of desire for the task at hand, these LRS troops are excelling, which isn't surprising. Without proper training in instructional techniques and cross-cultural communications, these LRS guys shouldn't be given this mission. The main problem is that the successes of current conflicts eventually become the templates for future conflicts, and we don't really want that.
3. In my opinion, ALL personnel assigned to LRS units should be authorized to attend Ranger school, the same as all personnel assigned to the Regiment are authorized. We all know it's not necessary to attend to school to be a superior performer, but we also know it's a huge credibility factor in the Army. Seems to me like it should be OK for LRS commo guys to go if it's OK for USAF cops to go... More so, actually.
Just my opinion.
|
|
|
|
|
Trooper
 
Group: Registered User
Last Login: Today @ 7:09 AM
Posts: 621,
Visits: 129
|
|
agreed. and if a support guy in a LRS unit is to go to ranger school. he should have more retainablitiy in the LRS unit as to not attend a school and the run away.
where the army usually goes with one year retain after a school. LRS units should have a 3 year retain for it's support MOS ranger graduates.
AIRBORNE GODS WALKING THE EARTH....
|
|
|
|
|
Regular Joe
Group: Registered User
Last Login: 2/12/2008 10:25 AM
Posts: 271,
Visits: 2
|
|
I principally agree with you on this JR, although I do have a couple things to say on this. For one RS is a great gut check and it shows you very clearly and unmistakable who the men are and who the boys are. But I strongly disagree with the whole "a tabbed guy is like a battboy", because (everyone who was in reg knows this)one is a school and one is a way of life.
Rangerschool doctrine and Regimental training are two totally different animals.
I think LRS guys should all be sent to RS since it is a small unit leadership course. It teaches valuable fieldskills and it toughens you up in more than one aspect. But the emphasis should be on mission orientated type schools and internally ran courses. I believe that group needs to take some of these guys under their wing and train them properly. They are not going to get the kind of training that they need from the regular army. It's just not going to happen. I know that in 5/20, the scout and sniper section sometimes got to go out with one of the 1st group teams and learn some stuff. But that's as far as it went.
RLTW
|
|
|
|
|
BS6's Dude
Group: Community Supporter
Last Login: 7/27/2008 6:18 PM
Posts: 3,039,
Visits: 4,275
|
|
Oh - I definitely DO NOT think "a tabbed guy is like a battboy" - Not at all.
Ranger School is a school - The Regiment is a lifestyle.
You also said:
"I think LRS guys should all be sent to RS since it is a small unit leadership course."
I concur completely.
| | | |