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(27 Nov 2002) 1. Wide shot presser 2. Television screen showing training video (shot at Urban Warfare Training Site in Fort Polk, Louisiana) 3. Press conference 4. SOUNDBITE: (English) Major Terry Beissel, officer in charge of urban warfare training at Fort Polk, Louisiana “We want to humble them. We want them to realise that as much as they know about urban warfare, as much as they know they need to do theoretically, there's a lot of stuff, for whatever reasons - through sleep deprivation, lack of preparation time - things that can naturally be forgotten or lowered in the priority scale. And those are some of the things that we use the cameras, the playback features for after action reviews. We will question their approach. Our goal is to allow the unit itself to realise what it did right, what it did wrong, and also how that unit's going to fix itself in that particular aspect and then go back to wherever they came from.“ 5. Various of training video 6. SOUNDBITE: (English) Major Terry Beissel, officer in charge of urban warfare training at Fort Polk, Louisiana “Our goal, by not only introducing civilians to the battlefield, has multiple purposes. Number one, is to introduce another level of sophistication and thought processes that we want our army leaders and units to have to think about. We do not ever say, you know, under no circumstances whatsoever are any civilians to be harmed. We know that in the course of a battle, especially in the Joint Readiness Training Centre, there will be some type of unavoidable casualties. However, if we have army units thinking about possible ramifications, in other words, we don't want the army units to go in and say we'll just level the town. That's the easiest way to take the town. Think about it, you know, to just go ahead and level it. But what we want them to do is realise that not only do they have the mission to sieze the town, but we also incorporate into their mission statement that they have the task to transition the control of that town back to the local national government.“ 7. Training video 8. SOUNDBITE: (English) Colonel Paul Mellody, director of combined arms and tactics directorate, Fort Benning, Georgia “The experiences of units in urban combat is a series of small platoon company squad fights coordinated and supporting one another. So the training facilities maximises that reality. Because that's the reality of the soldiers on the ground. You don't see a brigade, you don't see a batallion. What you tend to see are squads, platoons, and parts of companies, and that's what those training centres replicate.“ 9. Training video STORYLINE: The Pentagon on Tuesday released video of U-S soldiers training for urban warfare at the world's most high-tech urban warfare training centre at Fort Polk in the southern state of Louisiana. The 200-thousand acre Urban Warfare Training Site is part of the Joint Training and Readiness Centre (JRTC). Soldiers are put through various situations of urban combat, facing the perils of car bombs, snipers and minefields to name but a few. Unlike combat in the open countryside, a full air assault on a city is not an option. All the action is recorded on a thousand cameras and monitored by instructors watching the action on screens in a control room. The battles are then watched and analysed in a classroom setting, and instructors point out mistakes and explain different military tactics. Civilians, played by members of the local population, are added to the mix. Find out more about AP Archive: Twitter: Facebook: Instagram: You can license this story through AP Archive:
