Combat engineers fire up Volcano

By Crystal Ross (Fort Carson)August 28, 2014

Combat engineers fire up Volcano
1 / 3 Show Caption + Hide Caption – FORT CARSON, Colo. -- Pfc. Christopher Suarez, 3rd Obstacle Platoon, 569th Mobility Augmentation Company, 4th Engineer Battalion, loads live-fire canisters into the Volcano mine dispersal system atop a heavy expanded mobility tactical truck in prepar... (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL
Combat engineers fire up Volcano
2 / 3 Show Caption + Hide Caption – FORT CARSON, Colo. -- Spc. Masayuki Alpen, 3rd Obstacle Platoon, 569th Mobility Augmentation Company, 4th Engineer Battalion, stacks Volcano training canisters. During training Aug. 21, combat engineers loaded and unloaded the 62-pound canisters and ... (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL
Combat engineers fire up Volcano
3 / 3 Show Caption + Hide Caption – FORT CARSON, Colo. -- Pfc. Christopher Suarez, 3rd Obstacle Platoon, 569th Mobility Augmentation Company, 4th Engineer Battalion, loads 40 live-fire canisters into the Volcano mine dispersal system, Aug. 21. The upper canisters without a band around ... (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

FORT CARSON, Colo. -- A platoon of Fort Carson engineers saw eight months of work come to fruition Aug. 21 when they deployed the Volcano Mine System in live-fire training for the first time in more than a decade.

Capt. Alex Zerio, commander, 569th Mobility Augmentation Company, 4th Engineer Battalion, said for the past several years, combat engineers have been focused on route clearance in Iraq and Afghanistan, but bringing the Volcano system out for training gets the combat engineers more in line with their traditional role.

"With the wars winding down, we come back to our conventional engineering tasks, including countermobility," Zerio said. "We're shaping the battlefield to put the enemy where we want him.

"The younger Soldiers are not used to this. It's a real treat for these guys," he said.

1st Lt. Erin Jankowski, platoon leader, 3rd Obstacle Platoon, 569th MAC, 4th Eng. Bn., said her Soldiers were excited to report to work early on the day of the live-fire training, because they understood the magnitude of what they were doing.

"We were in early to make sure the training would go as smoothly as possible," she said. "Instead of (complaining), the guys said, 'We're making history.'"

Use of the Volcano had become so rare in today's Army that with their recent live-fire exercise, Soldiers in her platoon now have pride in their ability to meet their countermobility core competency.

The Volcano is a system that delivers mines after being mounted on a helicopter or ground vehicle. It can be loaded with up to 160 canisters that each hold six mines, both antitank and antipersonnel, for a total of 960 mines. The Volcano alternately deploys the canisters from the right and the left sides of the unit, scattering mines across a vast area.

Jankowski said the platoon's 25 members have been working since January to get the Volcano up and running. Countermobility is one of an obstacle platoon's core competencies. Funneling the enemy and impeding his movements are part of that objective. At the beginning of the year, the 36th Engineer Brigade at Fort Hood, Texas -- the 569th MAC's headquarters organization -- sent down word that it wanted its units trained again on the Volcano system.

Jankowski said the task began with opening the boxes in which the system had been stored and figuring out "what was what." Soldiers had to read instruction manuals and documents to learn how to assemble the system, wire it and make it operational.

"We trained for about a month just to put it together and take it down," she said.

Zerio said the engineers had been working since May to work up to a live-fire run. Until last week, they'd been loading and unloading inert canisters and had Soldiers toss blue wooden blocks from the back of a truck to simulate the system's mine dispersal.

To prepare for the live-fire training, Soldiers first had to delineate the boundaries of the minefield with pickets and barbed wire, which is also an early step in real-world minefield creation. Then Soldiers removed inert canisters from the Volcano mounted on a HEMTT -- a heavy expanded mobility tactical truck. They reloaded the Volcano with live canisters --

each weighing 62 pounds -- filled with inert mines. The canisters were then locked into place and armed. The canisters can be offloaded and replaced with new ones in about 30 minutes.

The control unit for the Volcano is housed in the bed of the HEMTT, and the vehicle passenger handles the launch controls from inside the cab.

Until recently, Fort Carson had no live canisters. Zerio said that local battalion staff worked over the past three months with the brigade at Fort Hood to procure live canisters for training for the 3rd Platoon.

The platoon quickly learned the difference between working with inert and live canisters. Jankowski said that even with all the simulations her group had run with inert canisters, they found that it took much more effort to arm the live units than it did the inert ones.

"We did it as realistically as we could, but this added the next level to our training," she said.