Lessons From Somalia Applied to Teach U.S. Troops How to Wage Peace : Training: Mock villages at Ft. Polk lend reality to simulated confrontations military may encounter as peacekeepers.

“CARNIS VILLAGE, Republic of Cortina”--For Army Maj. Stuart Patton, this has been the military equivalent of a bad hair day.

First his heavily armed security force failed to link up with a humanitarian relief convoy near this mud-bedecked “Third World” village. Then a land mine killed six villagers, including the wife of a local chieftain the major had hoped to win over.

And now Darren McConnell, a youthful, cocksure field agent for a private aid organization, is ignoring Patton’s suggestion that the relief convoy stay out of a guerrilla-held area until the Americans can provide adequate protection.

Patton finds none of this pleasant. A member of a special forces unit, he has been trained to brook no nonsense in a combat situation. But now he is on a peacekeeping mission. He quietly explains the situation. Eventually, McConnell goes along.

The incident is fabricated. Only Patton and his soldiers are real. The villagers, the township of Carnis and the entire Republic of Cortina are all props in a peacekeeping exercise conducted by the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk, La.

This is the new look in military training in the post-Cold War era. The services, convinced that peacekeeping is going to become a major part of their mission in coming years, are preparing troops to make not only war but peace.

Strategists are starting to use many of the lessons learned in places such as Somalia to get U.S. forces ready for potential peacekeeping operations in other areas--possibly even Bosnia or Haiti if the Clinton Administration succeeds in paving the way diplomatically.

Much of Ft. Polk’s sprawling woodland has been turned into mock villages where troops can be trained in various operations, from fending off surprise attacks to taking care not to run over villagers’ geese with Humvees.

The U.S.-run Combat Training Maneuver Center in Germany is adopting similar techniques to conduct training exercises for heavy-armor divisions in case the Administration sends peace enforcement troops to Bosnia.

The Pentagon’s joint staff published the first all-service peacekeeping doctrine last fall. The joint U.S. Atlantic Command is developing new training programs, and the Army is completing a new field manual. And all the individual war colleges offer courses on peace operations.

Moreover, the services are beginning to modify some equipment for peace operations. The Air Force, for example, is revamping its parachute pallets for delivering humanitarian relief supplies.

By analyzing lessons learned from the U.S.-led operation in Somalia, strategists “are gaining a better understanding of how to tailor their forces . . . to respond more effectively to the challenges presented by peace operations,” said Assistant Defense Secretary Edward L. Warner III.

Finally--and perhaps most important--the Administration itself is beginning to formulate a clearer policy about how it intends to use U.S. troops in peace operations around the globe--a far cry from earlier months, when it seemed to waver on the issue.

In early May, the White House unveiled a presidential decision directive, dubbed PDD-25, that sets stringent conditions on the use of U.S. forces in peace operations, again mostly as a result of lessons learned from the situations in Somalia and Bosnia.

The lessons being incorporated in the new doctrine and training policies include:

* The United States should insist on a clear chain of command under which military commanders are given a firm say in the operations they are asked to mount. Although U.S. troops might be temporarily under U.N. command, American officers must retain final control.

* U.S. forces must never again appear to be taking sides in a civil dispute, as they did when they began hunting Somali leader Mohammed Farah Aidid after his militia ambushed Pakistani U.N. troops last summer. The policy led to increased U.S. casualties.

* U.S. forces should not be sent into peace operations without adequate firepower and troops. The fact that Army Rangers were asked to hunt Aidid without the armor they requested was blamed by some analysts for the heavy casualty toll in an ill-fated Oct. 3 raid.

* Peacekeeping forces must be given clear rules of engagement that spell out when they may fire on belligerents and civilians. They need sufficient flexibility to enable them to defend themselves while showing restraint when possible.

* Policy-makers and military commanders must be alert to changes in the original mission of a peace operation, as when U.N. forces began hunting Aidid in Somalia. They must make sure the troops--and the general public--understand changes thoroughly when they occur.

U.S. strategists say peacekeeping units also need to learn narrower skills more effectively, such as operating checkpoints along a road, dealing with private relief organizations, negotiating with villagers and handling refugees.

Students at Ft. Polk’s Joint Readiness Training Center, which trains Air Force and Navy commandos as well as Army troops, are put through a 12-day curriculum that combines practice at light-infantry combat operations with realistic experience in peace operations.

Besides Carnis, the center has set up two other “villages” in “Cortina” and the neighboring country of “Atlantica”--complete with actors playing villagers, tribal leaders, snipers and Cortina “national police,” and a collection of geese, pigs, mules and goats.

Although the broad situations are scripted in advance, the bulk of the interplay between the soldiers and the villagers is free-form. As a result, no one knows when a “terrorist” is going to throw a grenade. An ill-timed remark by an infantryman could start a revolt.

The exercises, carefully monitored by on-the-scene observers and enhanced by electronic devices that beep when a participant has been “killed” by a land mine or rifle fire, are followed by after-action critiques in which a unit’s mistakes are reviewed.

“Most of it is just plain common sense,” said James B. Williams, technical leader for BDM Management Services Co., a consulting firm that puts together the role-playing operation for the Army.

Inevitably, the mistakes--by far the school’s best teaching tool--are legion. A few days ago, soldiers driving through a “contaminated” area donned protective masks but did not provide them for their civilian passengers, who “died” on the way to their destination.

In another incident, a failure to listen to warnings from local villagers led two U.S. convoys into an “ambush” by opposing forces, who are played--with a vengeance--by Army troops stationed permanently at Ft. Polk.

“This is probably the most realistic wartime scenario we will ever play,” Patton said as his unit helped make sure that the “bodies” of villagers “killed” by that day’s mine blasts are respectfully loaded onto trucks for transportation.

“The quickest way to get thrown out of a country is to anger the people who live in it,” he said. “This teaches us to react to various situations. You can learn those lessons here without paying the price.”

Canadian army Capt. John Errington, who recently returned from deployment with U.N. forces in Bosnia, agrees. “The potential is all here,” he said of the course at Ft. Polk. If the United States does send troops to Bosnia, “every unit ought to go through here.”

Army Lt. Col. Jack Clarke, a military analyst at the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command in Norfolk, Va., and one of the authors of a new field manual on peace operations, warns that the curriculum must be kept general in order to keep troops prepared for all situations.

“There are valuable lessons to be learned from Somalia, but we also want to be careful not to look at all peacekeeping operations through that same lens,” he said.

The difficulty is that, despite the new presidential directive, the Administration still has not spelled out precisely when and how it plans to use U.S. forces for peacekeeping operations in other areas of the world.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, President Clinton unveiled an ambitious proposal to establish an international army, including some U.S. troops, that would be ready to stand “at the borders of countries threatened by aggression,” preventing mass violence.

But the Administration’s inability to work out a firm policy in Bosnia, combined with the Oct. 3 raid in Somalia, in which 18 Rangers were killed, clipped the Administration’s enthusiasm for peace operations and forced it to scale back its plans.

The new White House directive rejects suggestions that the United States support a standing U.N. army, or even that it earmark specific U.S. military units for participation in U.N. operations. It also concludes that Washington is spending too much on peacekeeping worldwide.

White House caution in approving U.N. military operations in Rwanda prompted the U.N. Security Council to put off a proposal for dispatching 5,500 more troops to that country earlier this month, the first such impact from PDD-25 since the new policy was announced.

And while the White House has pledged that it will send U.S. troops to Bosnia to help enforce any new peace accord there, it has laid down so many strict conditions that some analysts say it makes the prospect of using U.S. forces there anything but a certainty.

Many U.S. officials say they now believe that, given the adverse reaction to the Oct. 3 firefight in Somalia, the United States would be better off providing logistic support and intelligence for peace operations, leaving ground fighting to other countries.

Indeed, Col. Sam Thompson, operations commander at the Ft. Polk training center, argues that even with all their training, U.S. forces may be better geared to securing an area initially--as they did in Somalia--than to enforcing the peace, which takes more patience.

“We’re just not by nature very well-suited for these other things,” he said.

Even so, most analysts agree that preparation for peace operations will continue to be a mainstay of the post-Cold War military, along with maintaining conventional combat readiness and improving U.S. capability to counterattacks by weapons of mass destruction.