FOLA, W.Va. — While West Virginians were going about their regular business this week more than 300 of the top-trained soldiers in the U.S. Army were being put to the test on a mountaintop in Clay County.
These soldiers, including the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, were here testing several new pieces of technology that could help save their lives and make them more effective fighters.
They call this training DIRT Days (Driving Innovation in Realistic Training). It’s a joint effort between Morgantown-based Civil-Military Innovation Institute (CMI2), the Department of Defense, research universities and what are referred to as non-traditional technology firms.
The training ground is Fola, a reclaimed surface mine site not far from Clay that includes 13,000 acres of mainly challenging topography, the soldiers used 5,000 of those acres in their training exercises.
Why Fola?
The West Virginia National Guard was the first to begin using the site, officially called the Adaptive Experimental Facility, a few years ago under then-state Adjutant General Jim Hoyer. He said he always envisioned the site could be used to make a difference in the nation’s defense efforts but maybe not as quickly as it’s happened.
“It has made a lot of movement in a short period of time,” Hoyer told MetroNews at Fola last week. “This terrain is going to be able to mimic what our service members are going to see in Eastern Europe, the European Theatre. It doesn’t mimic exactly the terrain in the Pacific Theatre but it mimics the same kind of problems. They can then translate those problems in that different terrain.”
CMI2 Vice President Mitch Kusmier said his company, which operates the site in cooperation with the Guard, uses the property for two types of events including Dirt Days.
“It’s more of an experimentation and military training operations combined. It’s an opportunity for soldier units to come out here, improve combat readiness, with the overlay of doing experimentation and test prototypes for the military,” Kusmier said. “The soldiers focus on soldier readiness and we do the experimentation.”
Kusmier said Fola is a perfect setting for “soldier-driven innovation.”
“It’s 100 percent about soldier feedback,” he said. “It is mission essential.”
Saab, a military supplier of military technology, was one of the companies on site at Fola with its technology that’s helping soldiers in the field.
David Rees, Saab’s director of training and simulation in the U.S., said his company has been testing its products at Fola for the last 18 months and they’ve been pleased with the challenges the site presents.
“Traditionally DOD (Department of Defense) training takes place in the desert because there’s lots of land there but in the future we’re going to go potentially into terrain like this,” Rees said. “These mountains, these hills, these wooded areas, are very dense and challenging areas to maneuver, that piece of it is really unique to Fola. It really lends itself to what we’re trying to do here.”
The soldiers who trained
101st Airborne Battalion Commander Lt. Col. Dale Marrou directed his 220 soldiers to traverse the Clay County site with the new technology.
“It’s challenged my leaders and I think they are some pretty fit and very intelligent individuals and they’ve been very challenged,” Marrou said.
Marrou mostly brought a leadership group to Fola and separated them into three separate groups. They jumped out of helicopters to three different landing zones and each company had it’s own maneuverable corridor with the goal of destroying air defense systems and securing key terrain. They used the prototype technology during those drills.
Marrou said he came away impressed with what’s called the Unmanned Automated Resupply , which involves a drone that can carry up to 150 pounds of equipment and supplies to soldiers in areas where it may be dangerous for a helicopter to travel. He said the technology will help in future fighting.
“If I can get those UAS systems fielded into the battalion, the expansion of what we can do as far as reconnaissance, targeting, 3D modeling, identification of enemy forces, tie that to our electronic warfare capabilities, our ability to find, fix and destroy, as a battalion, now grows to some of the capabilities a brigade or division only had 10 years ago,” Marrou said.
He added the feedback soldiers will provide after a week in Clay County will be key.
“If we can turn this into something that will actually get fielded to the Army, I think we’ve really built something that gets the right answer in soldiers’ hands faster than we’ve had in the past. It’s a great opportunity,” Marrou said.
A help for the future
What chance do the technologies tested during Dirt Days have of making into regular military use? Some of the technologies have already been approved while others stand a good chance, according to retired Major General Buford Blount, who is now the chairman of CMI2.
“A lot of good ideas never get implemented and so that’s one of the reasons we want to push it into the hands of soldiers early on to get their ground up approval,” Blount said.
He said time will tell how the feedback will help the products but those who make them want to get it right.
“You’ve got corporate people here, technologists, they want to sell stuff to the government so they want it to be successful,” Blount said. “They’ll modify, adjust, adapt, to meet the soldiers’ needs.”
Blount, who led the Third Infantry Division in March of 2003 as it stormed into Iraq and took Baghdad in three weeks, said the U.S. is way ahead of other nations when it comes to research and development and the Fola site lends to that.
“Nobody is being killed here, nobody is shooting at you, so it’s an ideal situation where you can experiment, develop and prove products and you’ve got that improved product to take to combat with you,” Blount said.
He came away impressed with the drones, officially called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and the robotic dog that can work with it.
“They can pick a robotic dog up with a UAV and take it and insert it into a contested area and the dog can go film what’s happening and whose there and go into a tunnel. Instead of sending a soldier into that tunnel, send the robotic dog in and find out if it’s booby trapped or if the enemy is in there, that’s going to save soldiers’ lives,” Blount said.
The prototypes tested included:
–Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
–AG Bag, Assistant Gunner Bag, a soldier-inspired concept that creates a new ammunition bag system that will help machine gun crews.
–Arctic Sled, which will help Airborne soldiers pull heavy loads in arctic environments instead of trying to carry those loads.
Helping the local economy
There was a banner hanging over the main drag in Clay welcoming the soldiers who had come there for Dirt Days.
Hoyer, who now in his civilian life works for Gov. Jim Justice and WVU on a variety of projects, said Dirt Days representing a “great opportunity for us with rural economic development.”
“You can get all of these folks who come in for this training and we start to tell them about all of the other great things about West Virginia. ‘So bring your family back and do the Elk River Trail. Come to the New River Gorge,’ “I think it’s a great opportunity for us,” Hoyer said.