Army Emphasizes Urban Warfare Training in Wake of Panama Invasion : Military: Protection of noncombatants is being stressed. The engagement rules could be used on narcotics missions also.

At first light, a volley of machine-gun fire erupts from the third-floor window of a burned-out cinder-block building, shattering the silence of Combat Town.

Its target--a company of paratroopers--is breaking out of the nearby woods and creeping toward the city, aiming to secure a toehold from which their battalion can, house by house, wrest control of the settlement from a smaller force of rebel “Cortinians.”

The recent scene at Ft. Bragg’s mock Combat Town reflects the new emphasis that the Army is placing on urban warfare training in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Panama. In the December operation, U.S. forces met some of their most daunting opposition from urban guerrillas holed up in the buildings and shantytowns of Panama City.

During a recent briefing for the Army’s senior leadership, Army investigators identified the need for more and different kinds of urban warfare training as one of the principal lessons learned in Panama.

What makes urban warfare particularly dicey is the presence of civilian noncombatants. In the training exercises at Combat Town, situated in the pine-dotted hills of North Carolina, all of the “Cortinian” civilians had fled and the invading soldiers did not have to worry about the possibility of killing noncombatants.

But real life, as Panama demonstrated, is more complicated. So, later this month, when the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Battalion storms Combat Town again in another round of dawn training maneuvers, it will face not just a band of rebels but a city full of sleeping citizens as well, perhaps played by Army dependents and out-of-uniform soldiers.

“The Panama situation has emphasized the need to work the civilian side of things,” including the handling of prisoners of war and bystanders, Col. Glynn Hale, commander of the 1st Battalion, said.

At Ft. Bragg, where some of the nation’s “first-to-fight” units are based, that means increased training for “military operations in urban terrain,” in Army parlance. Although many Army units get to practice urban combat only once or twice a year, the 1st Battalion has fought its way into Ft. Bragg’s Combat Town six times in recent months.

With the addition of noncombatants to the training exercises, units like the 82nd Airborne hope to learn how to use their firepower more discriminately, adding risk and complexity to an already dangerous and painstaking task.

And there is no question that battles fought in the smoke, rubble and close quarters of a city are deadly to soldiers and civilians alike. In last week’s training session, for example, the 700 soldiers of the 1st Battalion secured Combat Town after nearly four hours of fighting, but at a “loss” of 22 U.S. dead and 46 wounded.

The Pentagon estimated that 220 civilians were killed during the U.S. invasion of Panama, most of them in the cities and shantytowns that provided shelter and anonymity to Gen. Manuel A. Noriega’s loyalists. The casualties were high even though the operation’s commanders placed tight limits on how, when and what kinds of force U.S. troops might use.

“Operation Just Cause, like many of the counter-narcotics missions the Army may be asked to perform in the future, involved restrictive rules of engagement,” Maj. Blair Ross said, referring to the guidelines that dictate whether, how and when soldiers may use deadly force.

“So we now have this new focus, this new need to make sure that we’re familiar with operations under those circumstances,” said Ross, a brigade operations officer in the 82nd Airborne Division who designed and oversaw last week’s Combat Town maneuvers. “It’s something that we’re certainly going to have to adjust ourselves to. We haven’t practiced much with restrictive rules of engagement.”

In fact, most of the Army’s urban warfare training assumes scenarios far different from those confronted in Panama.

The Army’s largest mock urban combat site is a 189-acre facility in West Berlin called Doughboy City, where Army forces practice operations against organized tank armies that resemble Warsaw Pact forces, not Third World rebel troops.

According to Maj. Pete Pierce, a spokesman for the U.S. Command in Berlin, the Doughboy City facility does not use “extras” to simulate the presence of civilian populations.

“Panama brought a lot of things back into focus,” said Col. Bob Harkins, director of training and doctrine at the Army Infantry School at Ft. Benning, Ga. “In Vietnam, we didn’t really fight much in the city, and everybody after that tended to put urban warfare training in the European context.”

That assumption was initially questioned by the Army’s top brass after the Israelis discovered the costs associated with going into Beirut during their invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Pentagon planners began to recognize that Third World cities, from Tehran to Seoul to Managua, had become crucibles of unrest.

“Given the population trends throughout the Third World, the prospect for urban warfare has actually increased markedly over the past several decades,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

“It’s easy to say we’d better be preparing for these Third World conflicts,” he said. “But it’s hard to design training to prepare soldiers for this, because it’s a gut-wrenchingly hard kind of warfare to prepare for. It’s not like training to fight large tanks, where, if you have enough room and gas, you can prepare for anything.”

In 1986, the Army Infantry School was directed to review its urban warfare training, which had assumed new significance with the creation in 1983 of special light infantry divisions designed for rapid deployment to operations like Panama.

By last November, amid intensive preparations for the Panama invasion, the reassessment had borne fruit at the Army Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Chaffee, Ark., where the Army pioneers new training techniques for the nation’s rapid-deployment forces.

For the first time, soldiers in two-week urban warfare exercises at Ft. Chaffee began to face civilian role-players extensively and to receive daily changes in the rules of engagement under which troops operate.

The new techniques--bolstered by the U.S. experience in Panama--already are finding their way into the normal training routines of other Army units, such as the 1st Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 505th Brigade at Ft. Bragg.

The Panama invasion has also taught the Army other lessons that will affect the equipment it uses for training and for battle in urban areas.

Congressional and Pentagon sources said that the 82nd Airborne’s 1960s-vintage Sheridan tanks, which are lighter than more modern tanks, negotiated Panama City’s rubble-strewn streets better than the lightly armored wheeled vehicles used by the Marines in Panama.

The Sheridan’s performance is likely to affect a heated debate on Capitol Hill over the size, shape and armor of the Army’s and Marines’ next fighting vehicle.

“I think someone here will probably insist we have a tracked vehicle to (succeed) the Sheridan,” one Ft. Bragg officer said.

In addition, training experts said that, if soldiers are to practice not killing bystanders, they must be equipped with simulated hand grenades and mock tank and artillery rounds that will accurately show how many people--civilians and otherwise--are killed in a unit’s efforts to secure a building.

Currently, only the M-16 rifle and some Army machine guns are equipped with laser devices that allow soldiers to “shoot” without live ammunition and know whether they have hit or missed.

Because hand grenades and small building-shattering rockets are among the most commonly used urban weapons, the Army Infantry School’s Harkins said, they, too, should be equipped with devices to enable soldiers in training to show how many people they kill when they lob such explosives into a room.

“We’re more aware of the construction of a building,” and the nature of its occupants, since Panama, said Capt. David Woolf, commander of the 1st Battalion’s Charlie Company, during the recent exercise.

“It’s very much easier to stand off and just plaster something,” he said. “But, in places like Panama, that just isn’t an option.”

Melissa Healy was on assignment recently at Ft. Bragg.