FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. — Fort Leonard Wood’s Counter Explosive Hazards Center hosted a tabletop exercise from Sept. 12 to 14 in St. Louis and Rolla, bringing together about 50 Soldiers from across the country to discuss breaching operations in complex terrain.
According to Staff Sgt. Michael Brokaw, a CEHC instructor and one of the primary facilitators of the exercise, this was the second year in a row they held the event.
“Initially, the focus was to bring experienced breachers from across the Army Engineer Regiment to come and share experience, knowledge, as well as take in some of the new knowledge that we have been working on,” Brokaw said.
The CEHC team then decided to branch out and invite explosive ordnance disposal specialists and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear specialists this year.
“Our goal this iteration is to try to form some of those partnerships with people that have vested interests within this sort of same mission set that we do,” Brokaw said.
In St. Louis, the group visited an 80-plus acre beer-manufacturing facility, where the Soldiers could use the industrial nature of the facility to discuss breaching considerations in urban centers.
“That brewery has been there since the 1800s, and it’s been built on layers and layers of subsurface tunnels and caverns,” Brokaw said. “They used to store their beer down there before artificial refrigeration, and then they would move it down to the river, and up and down the river. So, you have that aspect of it. But then also, there are tons and tons of toxic, industrial chemicals, materials, stuff like that.”
In Rolla, the group spent the final day of the exercise at the Missouri University of Science and Technology’s experimental mine to discuss subterranean breaching, or as Brokaw called the mine discussion, “your considerations in those environments.”
“We try to keep it all tied together, because in every urban environment, there’s the subterranean element,” Brokaw said. “A lot of people don’t think about that, but even if you’re operating on the street level — in, let’s say, New York City — underneath you, you have over 7,000 miles of man-navigable sewers, subway systems, utility corridors. Anything you do on the street level can affect what’s above you, below you and all around you.”
Brokaw said breachers became used to “very simple structures” while operations were ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the Army’s switch in focus to what is called large-scale combat operations, he added the mindset needs to shift.
“The biggest thing that we want them to take away right now is that the (U.S. Army Engineer School) is here to help; the Counter Explosive Hazards Center is here to support them and their units,” Brokaw said. “We might not have all the answers, but being a proponent of doctrine within the Engineer School, we know somebody who does have an answer, or at least has an idea.”
One of the attendees this year was Master Sgt. Kevin Guy, USAES’s NCO in charge of combat engineer and bridge crewmember professional military education, who said he wanted to participate in the exercise “because our operational environment’s changing.”
“What we considered urban environments (in Iraq and Afghanistan) are minute in scale, compared to what a near-peer adversary in the current operational environment may evolve into,” Guy said. “The operational environment now dictates we have the surface; we have subsurface, facilities and super facilities, where we’re talking skyscrapers. That presents a very unique challenge for combat engineers, who have never focused on that large-scale combat operation in an urban environment at this size.”
The exercise helped everyone focus their thinking “about the next fight,” Guy said.
“What are our shortcomings? Planning considerations? How are we going to fight and move?” Guy said. “We’ve talked urban breaching for a long time with just the munitions that we have at hand. In tomorrow’s fight, that’s not all we’ll need, because we have oxygen-depleted environments; we have chemicals we have to take into consideration — we can’t go in and just blow everything up.”
Brokaw said the exercise filled its intended purpose — generating discussion.
“And that’s the key point,” he said. “We might not have all the answers, but I bet there’s somebody out there in the force who has that experience and has been in that particular situation and can address the group. We’re just trying to bring experienced breachers to the table and learn from each other.”
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