FORT BENNING, Ga., -- The 25th Infantry Division at
Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, is building adaptive Soldiers through the Jungle
Operations Training Course.
The unit had a display set up at the Maneuver
Warfighter Conference to inform Soldiers of the relevance of jungle training to
build smart, fast, lethal and precise Soldiers.
The Jungle Operations
Training Center prepares Soldiers for operations in jungle environments.
"The jungle encompasses every type of terrain," said 1st Lt. Peter Dierkes,
officer-in-charge JOTC, 25th Inf. Div. "If you can survive in the jungle, it is
the harshest terrain in the world - if you can survive there, you can survive
anywhere.
The course is 15 training days and progresses from individual
skills to platoon tasks.
Dierkes said Soldiers learn survival,
communication, navigation, waterborne operations, traversing, knots, evasion,
marksmanship and patrol base operations.
"The land navigation and
marksmanship are what you would learn in a standard Army course, but with
jungle-specific knowledge," Dierkes said.
Land navigation in JOTC has
shorter movements in thicker terrain, Dierkes said.
The unit observed
jungle training courses such as in Australia, Bernai and the 3rd Marine Division
Unit's Jungle Warfare Training Center in Okinawa, Japan, to have derived the
most recent version of the JOTC.
"The first iteration looked much
different than what the course is now - it has grown ... and now, we're working
with the Infantry School to make the points of instruction concrete," Dierkes
said.
The course is meant to train the trainer. Soldiers who go through
the course return to their battalion as jungle experts, Dierkes
said.
"The overarching 'building the adaptive Soldier' is important
anywhere they are for the rest of their career," Dierkes said.
The U.S.
Army and the military are focusing more on the Pacific as a hotspot, Dierkes
said, therefore jungle training is becoming more important.
"It's not a
matter of if we fight in the jungle, it is a matter of when we go back to fight
in the jungle," Dierkes said. "The 25th had great success in the Vietnam War,
fighting in the jungle - we've always had the skills, we've always had the
doctrine, it is just a matter of bringing it back to the forefront of the 25th's
training."
JOTC has had 51 distinguished visitors since 2014, Dierkes
said, to include the chief of staff of the Singapore Army, representatives from
New Zealand, China and the sergeant major of the Australian Army. The course has
also hosted subject-matter experts from Cambodia, New Zealand, Great Britain and
Malaysia for instructor exchanges.
"Everyone in the Pacific speaks a
common language, and it seems language is jungle," Dierkes said. "It builds
combat power for the 25th, it teaches skills that maybe have been lost over the
last 15 years of a different focus, but it also builds Pacific partnerships."