Denver Post July 6, 2006
Foes imaginary, real at Piñon site
The Army wants to expand its training grounds south of Fort Carson, but some neighbors say it hasn't been forthright.
By Erin Emery
Piñon Canyon - Army Maj. Milford Beagle stood in a mock forward operating base and looked over a map that pinpointed the locations of three enemy forces operating in the vast war zone: Muhammed's Army, QJBR and Muqfada's Militia.
Outside his camp, troops wearing 40 pounds of gear in near 100-degree heat searched for insurgents on 236,300 acres of the austere, arid landscape of the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, 150 miles southeast of Fort Carson.
In Beagle's eyes, the desert training ground - roughly the same size as Rocky Mountain National Park - was the perfect place to get 3,500 troops from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team ready last month for a fall deployment to Iraq.
"It's wide open; you don't see all the buildings and towers, and it gives you a real good representation of what you'll see," he said.
With an additional 10,000 troops moving to Fort Carson in the next two years, officials want to expand Piñon Canyon by more than 400,000 acres - making it the Army's largest training site.
That plan has run into a buzz saw of opposition from a group of about 500 farmers and ranchers. The Piñon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition says the Army has not articulated the need for so much property and has not been forthright about its plans.
"If I wanted to deal with you on some land that you had, we would enter into an open and honest discussion. ... But there's none of that open discussion, it's just not there," said coalition leader Lon Robertson.
Two weeks ago, the Senate approved a measure offered by Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo. - and cosponsored by Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo. - intended to address those concerns. Before expansion proceeds, it requires the Pentagon to address Fort Carson's current and future training requirements, the expansion cost, the economic impact to the area and options for compensating communities for lost revenue.
Fort Carson officials say the expansion is needed to provide quality training opportunities.
Piñon Canyon offers soldiers a sneak preview of the kind of space and environment they'll encounter in Iraq and Afghanistan, they say.
More soldiers to train
The Piñon Canon Maneuver Site, opened in 1985 to provide room for large operations, is second in size only to the 358,700- acre Joint National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif.
The plan that could turn it into the Army's largest was hatched last summer, when experts on Fort Carson began analyzing what their training needs would be after learning that thousands more troops were headed their way.
That analysis - sent to the Pentagon as a "predecisional document" - has not been released to the public.
The Army will not comment on the expansion until it decides whether to approve it. If that happens, the plan will be reviewed by the Department of Defense.
Fort Carson officials could not provide statistics on how often troops have used Piñon Canyon in the past few years and how often they plan to use it in the future.
Karen Edge, outreach coordinator for Piñon Canyon, said the training site has been underused since Sept. 11, 2001, mostly because soldiers at Fort Carson have been in Iraq.
But that will soon change.
"More soldiers means more training, which directly translates into needing more land to train those soldiers on," she said.
Land needs rest
And the entire expanses of Fort Carson and Piñon Canyon are never fully available. Troops are rotated to different sections at the two sites so as not to destroy the environment, a process known as resting the ground.
While some expansion opponents believe Fort Carson troops can practice at the National Training Center, there are only 11 rotations offered annually for the Army's 33 brigade combat teams, which are expected to increase to 42.
Fort Carson hopes it will be able to train two brigades simultaneously at an expanded Piñon Canyon; currently, it can train one brigade.
Maj. John Gossart, deputy operations officer at Fort Carson, said Piñon Canyon offers four distinct benefits: distance - it's 150 miles from Fort Carson; command and control challenges for leaders; dusty, desert terrain; and immersion - the ability to take soldiers out of their comfort zone and put them in an environment that is unfamiliar.
John Pike, a leading defense expert and director of GlobalSecurity.org, said the nature of the battlefield has changed. Units can cover larger sections, he said, and larger training sites are an expected evolution.
"You think about what they're going to get with future combat systems and all those (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and all the robots and so forth," he said, "even if you were not increasing the fixed number of troops, you're going to start bumping into the edge of the training area."
© Copyright 2006, The Denver Post
