FORT JOHNSON, La. – Spc. Christopher Strawn sweated heavily under a glaring sun as he knelt beside an improvised checkpoint on a dusty gravel road. The checkpoint wasn’t much — concertina wire strung between spindly tripods of tree branches set up on either side of the road. But it would have to do for now.
Strawn’s unit, G Company, 250th Brigade Support Battalion, New Jersey Army National Guard, was arrayed in a rough semicircle nearby in the woods the road ran through.
His eyes darted left and right from under his helmet, scanning the area for anything out of place after a probing attack on the unit’s flank. As a mechanic, he was usually more likely to be found under the hood of a Humvee than pulling security on a seemingly deserted road in the middle of nowhere.
But much of the past few days had been new experiences as the brigade his unit supports advanced into enemy territory. Most days, the company usually moved to a new location — breaking down equipment, loading trucks and then setting it back up again with each move, all made more difficult by sporadic attacks.
The enemy seemed to know every inch of the undulating wooded landscape. And they should. While much of the past few days may have been new experiences for Strawn and others in his unit, for the opposing forces at the Joint Readiness Training Center, this is what they do day in and day out.
Located on Louisiana’s Fort Johnson, recently renamed from Fort Polk, JRTC provides highly realistic, challenging and stressful joint and combined arms training geared toward brigades and their subordinate elements.
“JRTC is really the U.S. Army’s premier rotational exercise to allow Soldiers to test their skills,” said Maj. Vincent Solomeno, the assistant brigade engineer and chief of protection with the New Jersey Army Guard’s 44th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, which recently wrapped up a rotation at JRTC.
More than 5,000 Soldiers in Army National Guard units from 12 states participated in the rotation, taking on the full spectrum of large-scale combat operations.
“This is not an MRE, a mission rehearsal exercise for deployment,” said Brig. Gen. Nate Lord, the rotation’s senior mentor and assistant division commander for support with the 42nd Infantry Division, New York Army National Guard, parent division of the 44th IBCT. “It’s an exercise to build a level of readiness to fight large-scale combat operations.”
That’s increasingly important as the Army shifts from counterinsurgency operations to focus on near-peer threats and the possibility of more traditional force-on-force engagements.
“Now we have to prepare for forces that have similar technology, similar capabilities, similar size forces and assets to ours, with similar ability to deliver fires precisely and very rapidly,” said Spc. Aaron Smith, an air defense battle management systems operator with Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 44th IBCT.
JRTC rotations help build the skills for that shift.
“This transition from counterinsurgency operations is not something we’re going to be able to move to just by reading a couple of manuals, or a couple of command post exercises,” said Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, director of the Army Guard. “We have to go out, get in the field and go do hard things that the Army does in support of our national defense strategy.”
Each year, four Army Guard brigade combat teams typically undergo rotations to either JRTC or the similarly missioned National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. Those combat training center rotations are the culminating event of a multiyear training cycle that builds readiness from the ground up, creating “foundational readiness today to build generational readiness tomorrow,” said Jensen.
Soldiers who go through the demands of a JRTC or NTC rotation carry those lessons with them throughout their career as they move to other units and assignments, he added.
Lord agreed.
“I was fortunate to have done that as a company commander and that really prepared me to be a brigade commander,” he said. “It is really critical that we give each brigade an ability to go to a combat training center and develop that bench of junior leaders so they’re ready for the next fight, particularly for large-scale combat.”
That also ties into the Army Guard’s role as an “integrated reserve” component, said Jensen.
“What we’re trying to do is get out of the binary choice between a strategic reserve and operational reserve because, quite frankly, the Army Guard is both,” he said. “Integrated reserve is exactly what we are today — integrated at every echelon of the United States Army, integrated inside of every operation of the United States Army.”
The full operational integration hits close to home for many in the 44th IBCT — a good number have previous deployments under their belt, and the brigade is to deploy next year. Undergoing a JRTC rotation helps prepare for the deployment, even if the rotation isn’t deployment specific.
“We are not only improving upon our basic Soldier skills, but we’re working together to bring our organization, our infantry brigade combat team, to the next level,” said Solomeno, adding that JRTC rotations help build skill sets needed to “react to multidomain threats, whether those are threats from an enemy infantry unit or threats from an enemy’s electromagnetic warfare unit.”
For Smith, whose job is to detect, track and provide situational awareness of any aerial threats or potential aerial threats in the brigade’s area of operations, JRTC also helped him prepare for other, more mundane threats.
“I deal a lot with computers and sometimes they don’t behave as expected,” he said. “So being able to troubleshoot is a huge aspect of the job. Being here, it’s been able to teach me how to do that effectively, and how to actually integrate those systems, how to implement those changes and to work with those challenges and not get frazzled when the heat is on.”
It’s also one of his favorite parts about the rotation.
“You know, it’s a stressful environment,” said Smith. “So, being able to keep calm, prioritize challenges and execute, that’s been the best part for me.”
And that’s the important part about the rotation.
“It’s the little things that are hardest,” said Lord. “Your fuel trucks, do they have the right filters? And do you have the right communications? The glamorous stuff is the infantry folks and the infantry battalions seizing our objectives. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is getting them to that objective, sustaining them after they take that objective.”
And bringing all those elements together in an austere environment like JRTC can be a grind, just like actual combat.
“It’s not an easy experience,” said Smith. “It’s a challenging one. But being able to face those challenges, you come out on the other side better than you were when you went in.”