Dagger Brigade is a weapon and not a potential pile of scrap metal and dead bodies scattered across the landscape because this is what they do before deploying:
Some 4,000 Soldiers of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, out of Fort Riley, Kan., are training for realignment to U.S. Africa Command, expected later this year.
The 2nd BCT, or "Dagger" Brigade as it is known, will be the first brigade to be regionally aligned to U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. ...
Following weeks of small-unit preparatory training at Fort Riley, the 2nd BCT, 1ID, arrived here at the National Training Center, or NTC, for decisive action training, which lasts from Feb. 16 to March 1. That training consists of two main parts: combined arms maneuver and wide-area security. ...
In wide-area security, the other main focus of decisive action training, Soldiers are trained to deal with counterinsurgency missions, humanitarian crises, floods of refugees, criminal and insurgent elements and even negotiations with host-nation governments, tribal leaders and local and national militias.
While the two parts of decisive action training can be thought of separately, in reality they overlap, said Lt. Col. David Oesgher, the NTC senior operations officer or G3. He explained that a humanitarian crisis or rear-action guerrilla warfare could occur at the same time conventional fighting is taking place at the forward edge of the battle area.
The brigade leadership, which met with planners at NTC months earlier to discuss their customized training objectives, wanted NTC trainers to stress the humanitarian aspect, since that is considered one of the more likely scenarios Soldiers will face in Africa, according to Lt. Col. Jack Murphy, who heads up the NTC Operations Group. However, he said, the rest of the decisive action training is also something all Soldiers need to be really good at no matter what region they're aligned with.
Murphy said the training is intense, with troops spread thin across "the box," as the vast training area is called, which is about the size of Rhode Island.
That intensity, or "fog and friction" as Murphy terms it, comes from one crisis after another, lack of sleep or down time, and realistic scenarios where Soldiers at all levels must think quickly and make crucial life-or-death judgment calls, while simulated and real ordnance is being dropped and where injured and wounded role players must be tended to.
This isn't cheap. But we pay a price either before or after the battle starts. I choose paying the price before the battle. Will our government? Will our Pentagon make that choice?
