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Army trains for combat in a new kind of battlefield: Afghan caves

By David Fisher

Four soldiers line a wall, their M-4 rifles pointed outward, while their lead man pours into an open doorway.

All's clear. Soon, all are inside and the point man creeps toward a stairwell.

"Wait!" Sgt. John Blackstock barks. "No, no, no, no."

He patiently walks them back through the intricate choreography of storming a building, placing each of them where they need to be to take the next room without getting raked by a hidden sniper or blasted by a fragmentation grenade.

Their mistake? All four gawked at their lead man's gun barrel while the door, a window and a side room went unguarded.

"This is pretty much where people are gonna die," Blackstock grumbled as his teenage troops lined up to rush the Fort Lewis training building one more time. "This is it. And it always happens when they are just standing around."

To a greater degree than at any time in its history, the Army is training its troops for the deadly world of close-in, bloody, room-to-room urban combat. Whether they will have to use their skills in Afghanistan is still a matter of debate.

The leaders of two Northern Alliance factions told reporters this week that they are "70 percent sure" Osama bin Laden is holed up in his Tora Bora tunnel complex -- a sophisticated series of mountain bunkers near Jalalabad more like an underground city than a natural cave system.

Some military analysts doubt that, suspecting that bin Laden is more likely to attempt to rebuild his terror network from another country than he is to set himself up for a suicidal cave battle with U.S. and Afghan troops. Most of Afghanistan's ancient caves are too small to hide a significant force for long, and the rock that was excavated to create bigger bunker complexes, such as Tora Bora in the 1980s, is easily spotted by satellites and flying drones.

"If every major news organization in the world is focusing on Tora Bora as bin Laden's hideout, then it's not a hideout at all," said John Pike, chief of the defense policy group GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va.

Whatever the case, if bin Laden or some of his followers are holed up in a deep rock bunker, experts say aerial bombing is unlikely to flush them out or kill them underground. Ground troops would have to do the job.

The Pentagon has made it clear that it would prefer to induce Afghan troops to root out Taliban and al-Qaida factions from the country's vast system of caves and tunnels, possibly lured by a $25 million bounty on bin Laden. Meanwhile, U.S. bombers are trying to seal cave entrances, and Marines, Special Forces troops and Army soldiers are securing bases and waiting for the situation to clarify.

"We've only got, depending on who you believe, 1,000 to 1,200 combat guys on the ground, so you don't want to wear them out chasing shadows and phantom reports," said Army Col. Daniel Smith, retired, chief of research for the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank.

Whether the fight comes in Afghanistan or elsewhere, military strategists are convinced that small-scale, room-to-room warfare is an ugly reality that American troops are increasingly likely to face, whether it happens above ground or under.

The reason is straightforward, Smith said. Increasingly, U.S. troops are being called upon to land in Third World cities to keep the peace, deliver humanitarian aid and survive quick firefights, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes without success. In October 1993, 18 Army Rangers died in a vicious firefight with al-Qaida-backed gunmen in Mogadishu, Somalia. The drive quickened to broaden urban warfare training beyond the Marine Corps and Special Forces, where it has long been a mainstay, to the basic Army.

The Army currently has 12 urban training centers, including complexes at Fort Lewis. It plans to build seven more.

They're training for an ugly business.

Reports from Afghanistan say al-Qaida's Tora Bora fortress is cut as deep as 350 yards into solid rock high in the White Mountains south of Jalalabad. Its main entrances are hidden by trees and angled to deflect the force of a bomb exploding outside. As many as 2,000 soldiers may guard the rugged approaches.

A battle for Tora Bora or any other cave complex would start with an attempt to surround the exterior, to plug escape routes and to keep enemy reinforcements away, said 1st Sgt. Alexander Somoba, a Ranger-qualified urban combat trainer with Fort Lewis' 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division.

Cover fire, designed to knock enemy gunmen back on their feet, would come from machine guns and possibly anti-tank missiles, Somoba said. As soon as the dust cleared enough to see, the first infantry squads would move in.

Then, Somoba said, it becomes a battle against darkness, enemy guns, booby traps and fear of the unknown.

Army troops would carry M-4 rifles and 9mm pistols. Marines and Special Forces might carry shotguns as well. All would have infrared vision devices to see through the dark, but their usefulness could quickly be complicated by thick dust.

Grenades have to be used with care -- too likely to cause cave-ins and collapses, with concussion waves that can just as easily kill attacking troops as their enemies.

Nine-man squads would move in, one after the other, clearing rooms and calling commands and information back to the rear, trying to give follow-up troops a chance to map the route and get to trouble points.

The goal, Somoba said, is to build a speedy rhythm, with intense bursts of activity broken by brief pauses.

"You just keep punching in there. Once you hit them, you've got to keep them back on their feet and on their heels," Somoba said. "You keep that process going so they never have a chance to reinforce on you and mass their forces."

The need for speed is tempered by fear and caution.

Booby traps are likely at key points -- if something draws your attention up, trainers tell their troops, look down or the last thing you hear could be the sound of a wire zinging with a grenade tied to the end of it. Side rooms and hallways, sometimes of unknown depth with unknown hazards, have to be spotted and checked.

Broken buildings and cave walls can collapse. Subterranean worlds can be crawling with snakes, scorpions and spiders. The expected casualty rate in close-quarter fighting, whether it's in a city or underground, is about 25 percent, Somoba said.

The hours of training at Fort Lewis and at other Army camps is an attempt to displace fear with organization and reaction, so that "little things like noise and such won't slow you down, because you know what you're supposed to do," Somoba, 35, said. "You instill in your soldiers, hey, this is your job. You've got to get it done."

If bin Laden escapes Afghanistan, he could conceivably take up residence again in Somalia, where national government has effectively ceased to exist, GlobalSecurity's Pike noted. Yemen or the remote islands of Indonesia or the Philippines are also possibilities.

Wherever he goes, or whoever takes his place in the ranks of American enemies, underground fighting may be an unwelcome wave of the future, the Center for Defense Information's Smith said. As American satellites, spy planes, guided missiles and bombers grow ever better at blasting above-ground sites, it's reasonable to believe that future chemical weapons factories, nuclear warheads and terrorist training camps will move to subterranean bunkers.

"It's a classic race between offense and defense," Smith said. "If you've got the money, you go underground. And the deeper you put them, the harder it is go get to them."

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