Green Troops

ast November, Marines from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit flew 350 miles into southern Afghanistan from Navy ships to set up the first permanent U.S. base in the country at an abandoned airstrip. With Taliban and al Qaeda forces still lurking in the countryside, the Marines immediately were ordered to start digging defensive foxholes at the base, known as Camp Rhino. But despite six months of training before their deployment, most of the Marines had little experience putting shovels to soil. Some were digging their first foxholes since basic training.

"When we got to Afghanistan, people were surprised just how much work there was for preparing a defense," says Lt. Col. Gregg Olson, director of operations and training for the unit, which is based at the Marine Corps' Camp Pendleton in southern California.

Eventually, the Marines were called to help pick off Taliban and al Qaeda forces traveling along one of the region's main thoroughfares, known as Highway 1. They traveled about 60 miles from Camp Rhino across desert terrain in light armored vehicles to the outskirts of Kandahar. Once there, the Marines conducted raids and called in close air support to halt the flow of traffic on Highway 1 and kill scores of Taliban and al Qaeda soldiers.

Olson is quick to praise the operation, but says the troops involved needed some on-the-job training when they set out for Kandahar. Initially, the Marines drove their vehicles north in long convoys as they had done in training, but commanders quickly realized those long lines were easy targets, and ordered the vehicles to disperse and take more rugged off-road routes. "Our drivers had to learn to be much more circumspect in their driving. They had not had much exposure to it. We had not had a good workout on the vehicles [before deploying]," says Olson.

The Marines did get six months of training before being sent off to Operation Enduring Freedom. But their efforts were hampered by environmental, noise and air restrictions that limited their training and left them with new skills to master once they started fighting. For example, their training in the off-road maneuvering of vehicles had been limited because of concerns about damaging the habitats of endangered species. Such restrictions have raised the ire of military leaders and ignited a debate over whether U.S. forces are getting all the training they need before heading off to war.

Camp Pendleton, where the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit trained, is the Corps' largest West Coast training facility. The installation offers some of the best training terrain in the nation, with 125,000 acres that stretch from Pacific Ocean beaches through wide open coastal plains into the 4,000-foot Santa Ana Mountains. The area also is the only large stretch of undeveloped land between Los Angeles and San Diego. The major highway connecting the two cities, Interstate 5, runs through the heart of Camp Pendleton, which includes part of the region's only habitat for 18 endangered species. The area's residents and commercial developers complain about the noise from live-fire exercises. All of these factors have led to sharp limits on how Marines train.

Nowhere are those restrictions more visible than at the camp's Red Beach, where Marines once trained before landing on Iwo Jima in 1945. The mile-long stretch of beach on the Pacific coast has gone from being a premier site for learning the ins and outs of amphibious assaults to serving as an environmental obstacle course.

Marines hitting the shore at Red Beach cannot spread out as they normally would during a landing, but rather can only move in designated areas. They can't dig in because they might disturb several of the beach's endangered species. Vehicle movements are isolated to a few man-made trails. As Marines move up the beach, they must pass under Interstate 5 in narrow tunnels that are big enough for only one vehicle at a time. After midnight, helicopters cannot fly and live-fire exercises are halted because of concerns about noise. As a result of these restrictions, training commanders have created a new battle cry-"administrative pause," a call for a stop in live action to navigate the various workarounds.

Col. Thomas Waldhauser, commander of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, told the House Government Reform Committee in May that his Marines were not fully trained for combat in Afghanistan because of the restrictions at Pendleton.

The troops rarely practiced digging in, he said, due to environmental restrictions and the base's limits on off-road maneuvering left Marine drivers unprepared for Afghanistan's rugged terrain. "Over time, as we build bad habits into our training, or substitute the classroom and simulators for field training, our combat edge will become dulled," Waldhauser said. "Limited training opportunities translate into increased risk where the price of success in combat will be unnecessarily high."

ENCROACHMENT CONCERNS

The Marine Corps is not the only military service in which commanders complain about restrictions on training ranges. All of the services are cutting back or eliminating training exercises due to an increasingly common phenomenon plaguing military bases-encroachment.

The Defense Department defines encroachment as "the cumulative result of any and all outside influences that inhibit live-fire training and testing." More specifically, encroachment refers to the effects of increased development around bases and the enforcement of environmental regulations on military training. All of the services have reported that encroachment is hurting their training:

• Three Navy ships in the Carl Vinson Battle Group were deployed to the Indian Ocean to support aircraft dropping bombs in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom without having participated in a key missile-firing exercise during their training. Naval officials canceled the exercise, scheduled to take place just off the California coast, because they believed several marine mammals, including seals, were too close to the exercise site and could be adversely affected. Recent interpretations of the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act by regulatory agencies found that any activity that disturbs a mammal, such as the wake from a passing ship, could violate federal law. "Rigid application of some environmental requirements threatens our ability to train for combat when the president calls," says Rear Adm. Robert Riley, the Navy's chief of environmental readiness.
• Soldiers training at Fort Hood, Texas, have unrestricted access to only about 17 percent of the base's nearly 200,000 acres. From March to October, Army vehicles and soldiers cannot leave trails on 44,000 acres because they contain the habitat for endangered birds. To preserve and promote air quality, Fort Hood limits the use of smoke, flares and pyrotechnics on nearly 50,000 acres. Noise restrictions prevent firing of the Multiple Launch Rocket System and other kinds of artillery on more than 1,000 acres. In some areas, even camouflage netting cannot be used because it could interfere with the natural habitat of threatened and endangered species.
• The Air Force spends $300,000 annually to monitor the movements of the endangered Sonoran Pronghorn antelope at the Barry Goldwater Range in southern Arizona. If any antelope are within five kilometers of a target area within two hours of a bombing run, the training exercise must be moved or canceled. In 2000, about 30 percent of all bomb exercises had to be moved to other areas because of antelope sightings, while 3 percent were scrapped altogether.

Many of those laws have been on the books for decades, but they have increasingly come into play as areas surrounding military bases have been developed, forcing out wildlife and making training ranges into attractive habitats for endangered species. For example, since the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, the number of threatened and endangered species making their homes at Camp Pendleton has grown from four to 18.

The Defense Department spends a total of $4 billion each year on efforts to comply with laws and work with civilian agencies, such as the Fish and Wildlife Service, that determine how to protect endangered species.

Defense officials say they are not trying to shirk their environmental responsibilities, but they would like some relief from rules that have not changed as encroachment has worsened.

"Our ultimate goal is to address ambiguous requirements and provide more flexibility to train our forces while protecting our environment," Paul Mayberry, deputy undersecretary of Defense for readiness, told the House Armed Services military readiness subcommittee on March 14. Congress was still debating the merits of the proposal in early September.

But Sherri Goodman, who oversaw environmental issues as a deputy undersecretary of Defense in the Clinton administration, says Defense is overstating its case. "Just as we know we can grow the economy while protecting the environment, we also know that we can conduct most training and readiness activities while advancing environmental stewardship," Goodman argued in a July 20 opinion piece in The Washington Post.

Beth Lowell, a policy analyst for the Endangered Species Coalition, says most environmental laws contain provisions that allow the Defense Department exemptions in the interest of national security.

Defense should use those exemptions rather than pressing for changes in the law, she says.

"We don't see a reason why the laws need to be changed," Lowell says. "They all have the provisions already. If we change for DoD, what's next? Is the Forest Service going to ask for changes?"

FOR THE BIRDS

Navy officials say they've come a long way from the days when ships indiscriminately dumped trash at sea. Now, they say, they go to great lengths to protect the habitat of wildlife, especially on Navy bases. But they argue that efforts to protect two threatened and endangered migratory birds raise serious questions about whether environmental restrictions have impaired the Navy's ability to train effectively.

Chain-link fences surround 51 acres of pristine beach at Naval Base Coronado, Calif., near San Diego. A huge padlock swings from one of the few gates to the shoreline, where a sign warns "U.S. Government Property. No Trespassing." The Navy however, is not seeking to keep sunbathers off what was once a key training location on the West Coast. Rather, the service is trying to keep two species of birds, the California least tern and the western snowy plover, from becoming extinct. "Endangered Species. Keep Out By Order of the Commanding Officer," says another sign just a few feet from the gate leading to the shoreline of San Diego Harbor.

The Fish and Wildlife Service put the least tern on the endangered species list in 1970 and added the snowy plover to the threatened species list in 1993. Both decisions have led to numerous restrictions at Coronado's beach training areas. The rules are strictest during the migratory birds' breeding season, from March 15 to Oct.15. During this period, all military traffic on the beach must use specific crossing areas, nesting areas must be marked with blue traffic cones and small yellow signs, and officials must monitor where lights are shone at night so they don't disturb terns and plovers nesting on the beaches.

Those restrictions, and efforts to keep away potential pests at tern and plover nesting areas, have been "extremely successful" in boosting the birds' population, says Capt. David Landon, the base's commanding officer. In 1993, there were just 189 tern nests at Coronado; now there are 763. Nearly 80 percent of the area's terns now live on the base. "No one would have believed that number back in 1993," says Landon. Similarly, the plover population has risen from a dozen birds in 1992 to 97 in 2002.

However, Navy officials say the birds' comeback has had a dramatic impact on the Navy's ability to train. Nearly half of the base's beaches are now off-limits for training. Like Marines at Pendleton, Navy SEALs training at Coronado cannot maneuver freely during simulated beach assaults and are restricted to moving up the beach in narrow, preset 50- to 100-yard crossing lanes.

"The quality and realism of training has really gone down. One moment I am a warrior, the next moment I am an environmentalist," says Cmdr. Hans Walsh, director of training at the Naval Special Warfare Center at Coronado, headquarters for several of the Navy's elite amphibious assault teams. SEALs are not being trained to make decisions, Continued on page 48 such as picking out the best route for moving up a beach, that they will face in combat, Walsh says.

Most SEAL training exercises no longer carried out at Coronado are still performed at other Navy or Marine Corps sites in southern California. Those sites, however, do not offer immediate access to emergency medical facilities, such as decompression chambers built decades ago near Coronado's beaches to respond promptly to diving accidents. Some of those alternative sites, such as Camp Pendleton, have restrictions of their own and are already used much of the year for other training exercises.

Besides, ferrying SEALs and their equipment to other training sites can add hours and, in some cases, days, to training rotations, and add tens of thousands of dollars in logistics costs.

Landon, who estimates about one-third of his time is spent addressing environmental concerns, says the Navy has been a victim of it own success in helping bring back the terns. Only a decade ago, there were no terns on the oceanside beaches, but now more than 300 of the base's hundreds of terns live there. In fact, the Navy recently had to launch an elaborate effort to prevent terns from building additional nests. The service has hired contract biologists to comb the beach daily for nests (palm-sized indentations in the sand), remove any eggs, and then rake them over to discourage further nesting. Thus far, 51 eggs have been collected and turned over to a breeder. "We really don't want to turn this into a tern captive breeding program. We just don't have the money for it," Landon says.

Landon says the Navy has no choice but to limit further tern nesting because the Fish and Wildlife Service has offered little flexibility in regulating the species as its population has risen. The agency allows the Navy to accidentally kill only 10 terns and one plover on the Coronado beaches each year. If that threshold is reached, the Fish and Wildlife Service could order all beach exercises to be halted.

GROWING PAINS

East of Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert sprawls as vacant and barren as the lunar landscape. About two decades ago, the Army decided to make use of this vast area by turning an old National Guard training base into the service's premier training facility, the National Training Center at Fort Irwin. Because the base is surrounded by mountain ranges and has mainly government neighbors, the Army believed the training center's 1,000 square miles would be an ideal spot for live-fire training exercises and would provide plenty of space for growth.

The Army turned out to be only half right. Commanders repeatedly have praised the training center for providing soldiers with the most realistic training site anywhere in the world. Indeed, the training provided at the 642,000-acre base is credited with preparing troops for their quick rout of Iraqi forces in Operation Desert Storm.

However, the Army is quickly running out of room for future training. New, more powerful weapon systems and changes in warfighting that call for projecting forces over larger areas require more training space then ever before. In 1988, the Army was designed to fight in battalions that would have included 4,000 soldiers and 350 combat vehicles, whereas today's premier fighting units are combat brigade strike teams with 5,000 soldiers and 418 vehicles. At the same time the units have grown, so has the power and the range of the Army's weapons. Ground vehicle speeds have doubled over the past two decades and ammunition fire rates have increased twentyfold since 1981. "We have new weapons, new tactics and new doctrine that require more land," says Jim Gunlicks, the Army's deputy director of training.

Mickey Quillman, an Army biologist who heads Fort Irwin's environmental division, probably knows the boundaries of the training center even better than training range commanders. Several times over the past decade and a half, he's drawn and redrawn the boundaries to find ways to add space for training without angering environmentalists, who want more land set aside as a natural preserve, and off-road vehicle enthusiasts who want more space for recreation. "We are right on the border of 30 million people who want to come out and play in the desert," Quillman says.

But the Army's greatest obstacle to expanding may come from two species already on the land-the threatened desert tortoise and a recently discovered and endangered plant, the Lane Mountain milkvetch. The Fish and Wildlife Service must sign off on Army plans for protecting the plant before the expansion can win final approval from the Interior Department, which controls most of the 111,000 acres the Army wants to add. A final decision could come as early as next June.

In making the case for the expansion, Quillman says, the Army will argue it has established a strong record on environmental stewardship at the training center and would protect threatened and endangered species on any new land. For example, the Army already has restricted training on about 25,000 acres to protect the tortoises. The service has fenced in two, one-acre strips of land as nursery and study areas where 200 tortoises have been hatched over the past decade and then released back into the wild. As for the endangered plants, the Army has already fenced off almost 2,500 acres to protect the milkvetch and is surveying its proposed land acquisition to see if other areas would need to be preserved. Still, Quillman says, getting the new land is far from a done deal. "We've been trying to expand for 15 years," he says.

In the meantime, Army brigades will continue to rotate through the desert training facility. Before any shots are fired, all soldiers will be briefed on what to do if they see a tortoise (stop everything and call an Army biologist). Before leaving, the soldiers will participate in one final exercise, known as "hands across the desert," where they will walk, drive and fly over the training center to spot and pick up any stray trash. "We really want to protect our environment just like anyone would, but there's a balance that we have to achieve," says Gunlicks.