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Air Guard on a dangerous roadWeb Posted: 01/26/2005 12:00 AM CST
Most Air National Guard truck drivers probably haven't fired a rifle in two years, but their duties are shifting like the sands of Iraq.
Starting Monday, 10 truckers will begin the first class of a new six-week convoy training course at Camp Bullis as the Air Guard steps up efforts to bolster the Army's most dangerous mission in Iraq. Five more airmen will arrive Feb. 6.
They'll become as familiar with the M-16 and Squad Automatic Weapon as they are the stick shifts of their trucks. But it will be a jarring transformation for some if the experiences of 153 civilians called to convoy duty last year are any guide.
"People see tapes and run through training, but you can never replicate somebody wanting to kill you, and that's the kind of stuff that we've heard back from people who say these guys are serious, real people are getting hurt," the air guard's deployment chief, Lt. Col. Chris Swadener, said Tuesday.
"Up-armored airmen," as air guard spokesman Lt. Col. Mike Milord calls them, are a new development in Iraq. The Army, shorthanded and spread thin, turned to the Air Force and Navy last year to augment its convoys.
That was long after Gen. Erik K. Shinseki, then the Army's chief of staff, told a Senate committee weeks before the U.S.-led invasion that "several hundred thousand soldiers" likely would be needed in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rebuked him, as did Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who called the estimate "wildly off the mark."
"We just didn't anticipate," retired Army Lt. Gen. Ted Stroup said this week.
"It goes back to probably the folks planning the operation who just didn't accurately forecast Phase 4, post-combat operations."
Getting food, fuel, ammunition, construction material and other goods around in the desert nation is critical, but convoys are a fat target for insurgents. More than 2,660 convoys were attacked and 102 coalition forces killed in those incidents from June 2003 to August 2004. Another 190 troops were injured.
Figures for the remainder of 2004 weren't available, but no air guardsman has been killed on convoy duty.
Airmen get 10 hours of training on the M-16 rifle during basic training at Lackland AFB. Drivers, like other airmen, then have to qualify on their weapons every two years.
The new Basic Combat Convoy Course, dubbed BC-3, is the product of lessons learned on the battlefield, where firefights along Iraq's main highways have tended to be short and violent.
The up-armored airmen will get a heavy dose of classroom instruction and physical fitness training, plus an introduction to Army vehicles.
They'll also learn the ins and outs of running a convoy and then meet a tough physical fitness test that includes a 3.5-mile run and sit-ups, push-ups and pull-ups.
The Air Guard tends to have older airmen than active-duty forces and last year had a 45-year-old airman among the convoy operators. So it hopes six weeks is enough to get into shape.
Once the airmen wrap up at Camp Bullis, they will head to Fort Hood for an intensive 10-day weapons training course, then fly to Kuwait. They'll serve six months and come home, almost certainly followed by a new crop of Texas-trained airmen.
The Air Guard touts the effort as a new milestone in joint, or "purple," operations that mix soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.
Swadener said in Tuesday's edition of the Army and Air National Guard's newspaper, "The On Guard," that while his organization had supported the Army "in traditional roles like tactical air control and weather operations in and around air bases, these new deployments of guard personnel will break the paradigm."
Stroup praised the initiative, calling it a "good indication the services are become more joint, not only in senior leadership but also on the battlefield."
But Stroup, deputy chief of staff for the Army from 1994-96, said it evolved out of necessity. Rumsfeld asked the Air Force and Navy in November 2003 to augment Army convoys, engineering, communications and security escorts.
The Air Force fielded the first of three Air Expeditionary Force truck companies in Iraq on March 15 after training ended at Udairi Range in Kuwait's northern desert.
sigc@express-news.net
Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/specials/battlefield/stories/MYSA012605.1A.iraq_guard.446542d2.html
