NTC Exercise

This article caught my attention (updated the link): https://uk.news.yahoo.com/us-military-might-not-best-164000460.html

I remember observing a National Training Center (NTC) rotation around 2000 (the map shown above is not from this exercise). It was an armor or mechanized brigade and an air mobile brigade against the usual reinforced company of very experienced defending opposing forces.

One of the first disasters occurred when the air mobile brigade decided to conduct an insertion against an opposing force (OPFOR) that was completely ready for this. They ended up loosing a number of helicopters and were halted. So much for their “verticle envelopment” effort. Interesting enough, in 2003, outside of Baghdad, I gather we attempted the same thing, with similar results. An army fights as it trains.

The other early disaster was an early morning (still dark) attack that failed to take a large hill in the south of the battlefield that was enemy occupied. This hill gave the defenders complete oversight of the entire U.S. armored brigades’ attack in the morning.

Still, with the vertical envelopment having failed, and with their flank not covered, they then attacked forward with rather predictable results, especially when they hit the minefield that extended across the open area of the battlefield. It turned out that the brigades’ engineering assets were still in the rear. It took some time (read: hours) to bring them up. In the meantime the brigade was stranded in the middle of a wide-open desert area that was over-watched by the enemy. This experience may have been a career killer for the brigade commander.

Their only success came from an attached “Ukrainian armored company” that was not Ukrainian, but was actually people from the opposing forces playing an attached foreign contingent. They managed to maneuver through some rocky area on the north side of the battlefield, because they knew it intimately, bypassed the minefield that was holding up the rest of the brigade, and flanked the defenders. I gather this won the battle for the attackers.

Anyhow, I have no knowledge that allows me to comment on Captain Metz’s article, other than to note what I saw in my observation of a NTC exercise.

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.

Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.

His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)

Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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2 Comments

  1. Interesting war-game. I tried the link but unfortunately could not find the article. Don’t know what I did wrong. So I have some dumb questions:
    1. Was this a tabletop or computer based exercise or live field mock battle?
    2. I see the enemy knew the terrain well, but did the attacker also know the terrain?
    If not, I am surprised that the commander attacked frontally against an enemy who could oversee the attack terrain well. I wonder why a more oblique approach was not tried (e.g. utilising the local troops to outflank while the main force demonstrated and only attached when the outflanking move succeeded or covered the retreat if it failed.)?

    Interesting though. It sounds like some of the British disasters in the colonial era when the British commanders drastically their opponents and paid the cost. Maybe some military history lessons would be useful – seriously.

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