<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> WorldTribune.com: Mobile — U.S. military asks game industry to help train troops for IEDs

U.S. military asks game industry to help train troops for IEDs

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 Free Headline Alerts

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military has turned to the video game industry to help train troops to detect and foil improvised explosive devices in Iraq.

Officials said the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have been adapting games from the computer entertainment industry for simulation in counter-IED training. They said the games enable a range of scenarios for patrols in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We want to train soldiers in search techniques — not just walk in and look — [but in] the high-level search techniques that a very skilled investigator would do if they walked into an apartment in Pentagon City," Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, director of the Defense Department's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, said.

In a Feb. 13 briefing, Metz outlined U.S. plans to enhance training and equipping of forces to battle IEDs and the new Explosively-Formed Projectiles, designed and manufactured by Iran. The army general said his agency intended to combine training and technology to counter roadside and car bombs.

"The strength of my background is training soldiers, and I think we can make great headway here," Metz said.

The Pentagon organization, with a budget of $3.45 billion, has turned to the amusement industry to help replicate an IED attack. Officials said a cellular phone system was installed at the Joint Center of Excellence, with headquarters at the National Training Center, at Fort Irwin, Calif., so troops could learn how communications trigger IEDs. In addition, the center was provided with a replica of an Iraqi home.

"If someone has been making a homemade explosive, they have been working with acid, and most likely their hands are going to be stained," Metz said. "And nitric acid comes in black two-liter bottles. So if you're searching, and you find the owner of the home has got stained hands and in the backyard garbage can are black bottles of nitric acid, you probably have a bomb-maker."

The Defense Department has proposed a $591.3 million budget for fiscal 2009 to train soldiers against IEDs, the source of 60 percent of U.S. casualties in Iraq. Officials said the funding would cover the training of new arrivals in Iraq in skills required to identify IED networks.

Officials said a key element in IED training was to provide real-life simulation in an effort for patrols to detect bombmakers and their tools. In Kuwait, U.S. troops and their commanders were being instructed at the Udairi Range.

"It's one thing to train individual soldiers to use a device, and we are certainly getting about doing that, but it is the collective training of the leader pulling together so that the total is greater than the sum of the parts," Metz said. "At the staff level, it goes back to this understanding, using the tools and capturing the data that help you put together that network and understand the parts and know when to attack."

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