CAMP SHELBY, Miss., - About 60 Idaho National Guard members from the 116th Cavalry Brigade Combat Team's Company Intelligence Support Teams are taking part in an intensive eight-day Military Intelligence training cycle in preparation for their deployment to Iraq.
Among these Soldiers, about two-thirds are not your typical MI Soldiers. They are ground troops training to support the Military Intelligence effort, which drives future operations. These Company Intelligence Support Teams or CoIST provide collection and ground level analysis at the tactical level, but can have strategic level effects.
A key part to this is the Tactical Site Exploitation training exercise.
This training will allow the Soldiers to both conduct and train others to conduct basic intelligence gathering operations enabling them to gain useful information about oppositional forces.
"TSE involves conducting a systematic search of a secure location to ensure that documents, materials and personnel are identified, collected, protected and evaluated in order to facilitate the prosecution and conviction of detainees, as well as the development of tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence information," said 1st Lt. Joe Dahl, a 188th Infantry Brigade intelligence officer.
"The Soldiers from the Company Intelligence Support Teams do the first line analysis," said Troy Gordon, a document and media exploitation instructor with the National Ground Intelligence Center, headquartered in Charlottesville, Va. "We train them on evidence collection and give them an appreciation for the intel cycle because if they don't get it right from step one, the rest of the process becomes painful."
Typically CoIST will collect relevant materials during TSE, those materials will be tagged, labeled and sent back to DOMEX teams, composed of personnel from Joint U.S. Forces and other NATO countries. These DOMEX teams do the actual analysis of the collected materials to generate actionable intelligence. The products developed from the intelligence gathered contribute to theater and national intelligence efforts. The 116th CBCT will fall-in on DOMEX teams upon arrival in Iraq.
Sgt. 1st Class Larry Dunlap, who deployed with the 116th CBCT in 2004, now deploying again as a CoIST member, received training and participated in a TSE field exercise. After the exercise, he noted that he gained a lot from the experience and was looking forward to passing on his knowledge to others in his company.
"It is nice to get real world experience at the TSE facility, not a glass house," said Sgt. Jack Morehead of the search experience. Soldiers search a fully furnished brick and mortar building instead of the outline of a building in a field, sometimes referred to as a glass house.
The 188th Infantry Brigade is committed to executing a combat training environment that closely simulates the operational environment to prepare the 116th CBCT to successfully execute the first 30 days of combat tasks and to be in position to adapt to likely changes in mission requirements.
The 188th Infantry Brigade, along with the other training support brigades in First Army Division East, provides and facilitates theater-focused training for deploying National Guard and Reserve formations.
Based out of Fort Stewart, the 188th has been training deploying National Guard and Reserve units for Iraq deployments continuously since 2003.