The Army is standardizing how armor crews train and fire | Halek Hossain

 

The Army is standardizing how Abrams tank and Bradley fighting vehicle crews keep up with their combat skills.

Brigades from the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia, took last month to train under a new set of qualification standards, or gunnery tables, for their M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles against long-range targets.

"What we're trying to do is train our crews to be more adaptable and to be more lethal as our adversaries change," said 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team Command Sgt. Major Ryan Rausch. “All will go through the same validation process. Once these tables are implemented across the Army, we can get a new soldier from any unit in the Army and know that the standard of training that soldier has used, is exactly the same across our Army and then our performance and base. Expectations from it.”

Tank crews are required to have their skills checked twice a year at a unit's gunnery table. Under the current Combined Arms Strategy there are six gunnery tables in which crews must be certified: Table I Gunnery Proficiency Test; Table II simulations; Table III Training skills with live rounds; Table IV Basic Competencies of the Platform; Table V practice and Table VI qualifications for crews participating in live-fire exercises.

Master gunners previously used their own discretion to create tables with time and distance categories for targets. But with this initiative, a standard will be set that Soldiers and crews must meet, said Sgt. Daniel Blandon, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team Abrams master gunner.

Large-scale combat operations

For the past two decades, training in Iraq and Afghanistan has focused on counterinsurgency operations "for a soldier's entire career," said Steve Krivitsky, chief of the weapons and gunnery branch of the Maneuver Center's Training, Tactics and Doctrine Directorate. Excellence "Here was a group of soldiers who had not experienced long-range and then large-scale, combat-operations-type training."

Tank crews are often only tested on skills and targets that their commanders deem necessary for Iraq and Afghanistan deployments, or that can be fired within the confines of their own base.

"When you look at Fort Stewart and the range at Fort Stewart, they created a scenario that was based on their past performance for their facility and their unit's training requirements," Krivitsky said. "What they choose to shoot at is not going to be exactly the same as shooting something at Fort Carson."

Soldiers at Fort Stewart, Krivitsky said, are "pushing the limits of training munitions and systems to hit targets at 2,200 to 2,400 meters."

The current qualification for farthest main gun engagement is a single target at 1,800 meters. The requirement under the new table would increase the engagement of the main gun to seven targets between 1,800 and 2,400 meters.

The new table focuses on multiple fixed and moving main gun engagements. Now, Tables V and VI will involve an offense and a four-target defense.

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Kravitsky said, with current gun capabilities — for a variety of engagements — the average is 31 seconds to engage a single target. But the new standard will include four targets in a shorter time frame.

“In a four target engagement, they don't have two minutes, they have 75 seconds. And so that 31 seconds can overlap with another target's 31 seconds as it's exposed," he said. "The speed in combat, the speed at which you deliver accurate fire first, your reward is that you win. So our goal is to strike first, quickly. Hitting and moving on.”

Officials are finding new ways to use the latest sensors and optics from Bradleys and Abrams. The M1, for example, has a common remotely operated weapon station at the vehicle commander, or the CROWS system for on-the-move target acquisition and first-burst target engagement.

The new standards for Table IV force the tank gunner to run through five defensive machine gun skills instead of using the main gun, while the vehicle commander has five tests in the CROWS system.

"While the gunner is performing machine gun operations, the vehicle commander is using the commander's independent thermal viewer to locate complementary targets," Krivistki said. "This speeds up the target acquisition process and target hand-off to quickly engage multiple targets in sequence."

The Maneuver Center of Excellence looked at the different possible target engagements a tank crew might see and found 3,264 different variables. With the gunnery table, officers must decide which type of engagement is the best use of time and shows a crew's gunnery skills.

"We only have 30 engagements for live fire so we really have to choose which engagements make the most of the crew's experience because of the remaining 3,234 simulations," Krivistki said.

Once they collect all the data from 3ID's training, they will hand it over to the Maneuver Center of Excellence for analysis. Center officials will take their findings to the commandant of the Armor School and if he approves the manual, they will go through the publication process which can take three to six months.

When a new book comes out and "significantly changes how we do things," there will be an Army-wide implementation period that takes about a year, Krivitsky said. The 3ID initiative "accelerates completion of this training strategy and publication in at least nine months, which in the Army system, is faster."

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