Grafenwohr: Ultra-real Training for the Urban Battlespace
 U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan daily confront the changing nature of combat. What was once a clash on a known battleground between uniformed opponents has become a penetration into an amorphous urban maze where warfighters search out and defend against adversaries hidden within the population.
To support warfighters with training that prepares them for everything they will face, the services are providing maximum-reality exercises that simulate urban engagements. Grafenwohr, home of the Joint Multinational Training Center, set deep in the heart of Bavaria, sits on more than 140 square miles of green forests, traversed by the Frankenhohe River. The land is spotted with bogs, lakes, and streams, and since its creation as a training ground in 1906, the area and its wildlife have been tended by forest meisters, who manage the numerous rare species that thrive there. It sounds like an improbable place for U.S. warfighters to get a taste of Iraq, where they will be greeted by 120-degree desert heat, blinding sands, and 12-inch long camel spiders. Yet few places on earth offer a more realistic wake-up call than Grafenwohr.
A mock Iraqi village built on the live-fire range smolders with burning animal entrails to simulate the smell of a Baghdad slum. Islamic prayers blast from a loud speaker as if from a mosque, and units trained to attack and respond like adaptive, determined insurgents prowl the town’s center. As young privates move into the labyrinth, live tank and cannon fire blasts through the streets, and demolition charges blow out windows and doors. Heavy machine-gun fire rattles across the road. Troops “fall” to sniper fire, and no medic can be found. Thick smoke obscures trainees’ vision, disorienting them, and another blast from a live mortar splinters the air, forcing them to make the right decision right now.
The goal of this high-risk training is to teach young soldiers to work effectively within the confines of overwhelming chaos and under conditions of authentic fear, to understand exactly what Iraq will feel like before they get there, so they won’t have to handle a task for the first time when they are in actual combat. If these warfighters are to be adequately prepared, their training must be more than a drill; it must be a dress rehearsal for war.
There was a time when troops trained for one skill at a time, but commanders have found that the lessons are more effective when everything is thrown at the trainees at once. The U.S. military has been forced to adapt to compressed training cycles, and it also faces a shortage of mid-career sergeants. These two facts together mean that brigades made up of younger soldiers with shorter training times are led by fewer seasoned fighters. Commanders at Grafenwohr stage an experience as close as possible to reality so that when their young warfighters step out of their humvees into the reality of Ramadi, their experience of urban battle, rehearsed in simulated streets, will make them ready, decisive, and lethal and will increase their survivability.
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