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Range offers training in combating IED threat

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. — A new $13 million training range opened here March 25 that will give Marines much-needed experience in countering improvised explosive devices, which remain the most significant threat to troops in the war zones.

With a low-key ceremony, top officials marked the opening of Camp Pendleton’s newest training range they say will help prevent deaths from roadside bombs.

The facility features three specific “training lanes” along a three-mile stretch of road so units can learn to locate, identify and react to improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that are the top killer of service members in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Marines preparing for a combat deployment to Afghanistan, including combat support units, will rotate through the IED and vehicle-borne IED training lanes as part of their predeployment training that now will be offered earlier in workup schedule, officials said. The $13 million facility is the latest “home station” training range to open at Camp Pendleton.

Col. Nick Marano, [cqgf], Camp Pendleton’s base commander, said the facility will help close “a serious gap” in home-station training, particularly for non-infantry units as well as elements of deploying Marine expeditionary units. Many only get counter-IED experience during training at their final major training during the monthlong Enhanced Mojave Viper exercise at the Marine Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif. A similar high-tech counter-IED training facility opened there earlier this year.

“This capability really has the ability to change all of that,” said Marano, a former infantry battalion commander. “What we have lacked is a facility like this, so we can completely integrate it all.”

While smaller training lanes provide similar counter-IED instruction and training, the new facility is the first at Camp Pendleton to incorporate some of the latest “IED Defeat” technologies, such as IED jammers and sensors. It will let Marines use and become familiar with high-tech systems that combat engineers and explosive ordnance disposal experts usually use. Trainers will tweak their instruction and adjust the course to the ever-changing face of the complex IED threat that U.S. forces face overseas, training officials said.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” said Navy Capt. Joe Campbell, Marine Corps Installations-West’s officer in charge of construction. “If we can keep Marines from getting hurt to begin with … then we’re ahead of the game.”

The training lanes sits near the helicopter outlying landing field and the longer Combat Convoy Course, which incorporates live-fire training through a route that winds through San Mateo Canyon, in Camp Pendleton’s northern hills.

The facility “is not a big, sexy weapons system,” said Brig. Gen. Rex McMillian, I Marine Expeditionary Force’s deputy commander. “But the site here is extremely valuable and necessary, and an extremely critical tool.”

McMillian reminded a small crowd at the facility’s opening how the IED is the easy weapon of choice for insurgents “who can’t win a fight with Marines.”

Yet the IED remains a killer. Just a day earlier on March 24, he said, an IED blast in Afghanistan killed two Marine reservists, including Sgt. Maj. Robert J. Cottle, 45, as they rode in an armored vehicle.

A visibly upset McMillian spoke about Cottle, a rifleman who became a parachute rigger serving with Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company ANGLICO and 4th Reconnaissance Battalion, and eventually serving as the top enlisted Marine with 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion in what would be his final tour. Cottle was an experienced member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT unit.

“If we can prevent this from occurring in the future, that’s what we need to do,” McMillian said.

“We’ll put it to good use,” he said, motioning to Marano. “This is personal for us.”