Corps mulls training for Afghanistan fight - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Corps mulls training for Afghanistan fight

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. — The planned shift of combat forces from dusty Iraq to mountainous Afghanistan will reshape predeployment training for many Marine battalions, according to the Corps’ top officer.

Soon, units will spend more time training in expeditionary and mountainous environments, Commandant Gen. James Conway said Nov. 20 during an interview at Camp Pendleton, Calif. Commanders and training officials want to concentrate the new training at one of two places: the Corps’ desert training base in the Mojave Desert or its mountain training camp in California’s High Sierras. They’re assessing the pros and cons of using each facility, Conway said, and a decision was expected “in the next few days.”

“You can’t match the Afghan environment in many places [domestically], except for the Mountain Warfare Training Center or maybe at … Horno Peak here,” the commandant said, referring to Pendleton’s coastal range. “It gets close to it, but it’s still not 7 or 8,000 feet.”

The Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, Calif., hosts monthly “Mojave Viper” training exercises, considered the capstone for battalions heading to Iraq. The Mountain Warfare Training Center near Bridgeport, Calif., offers high-altitude terrain, live-fire areas and mock villages for unit and individual combat training and mountaineering.

Conway has asked commanders at both sites to provide him with the number of battalions that can train at one time, range requirements and daily garrison needs.

“We want to go to one place for maybe three or four weeks and get it all done there,” he said.

Conway has been vocal about the need for more Marines in Afghanistan, where a resurgent Taliban has stepped up attacks on coalition forces. Moreover, that country’s rugged terrain, Marine officials say, is more suited to Marines’ expeditionary prowess.

A new special purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force, composed of units from North Carolina, California and Hawaii, has arrived in Afghanistan to replace the Marines who have spent most of the past year there, but there is no clear indication yet how large the Corps’ footprint there will be in the coming year. The sizable Marine presence still in Iraq, where violence has diminished considerably during the past several months, limits the service’s options when it comes to Afghanistan.

“There is no residual force at Camp Pendleton or Camp Lejeune or anyplace else that we can simply call forward and say, ‘Go get ’em, boys.’ So the answer is, it depends on the risk that you’re willing to accept in Iraq,” Conway said. “What we’re doing [in Iraq] is five percent kinetic. There’s a lot of people who can do what we’re doing in Iraq. … We could put a significant force structure in Afghanistan.”

If and when that day arrives, “it is going to result in additional casualties,” he said. During his previous visit to Afghanistan, Conway learned the “golden” hour in trauma care there — the time it takes a wounded Marine or soldier to receive the first echelon of medical treatment — is actually two hours. That must change, he said.

“We don’t accept that,” he said. “It was one hour in Iraq that a Marine must be to … level II operative care after he was hit. That was the operating standard. Medicine hasn’t changed the analysis of that.” “… If we are sending more Marines in there, we’re going to insist that we have that one-hour rule in effect, wherever we are,” he added.