Enemy everywhere in war game
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
The combat units have moved inland from the Indian Ocean to help the local government secure a border, and Col. Ray Mason's job is to make sure they have the fuel, food and firepower to do the job.
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser
Mason's two forward support battalions and a main support battalion had been in place for 30 days when all hell broke loose yesterday morning.
Col. Ray Mason gave a briefing during the war games at Schofield Barracks yesterday.
Welcome to the post-9/11 world of war, where the threat is "asymmetrical," the enemy is everywhere, and soldiers like Mason and his men and women are using every trick in the technological trade to fight back.
The scene is a war game near a firing range in the shadow of the Wai'anae Mountains on Schofield Barracks, and the battle Mason's unit is fighting isn't combat, but supply.
On this day, Mason learns that two CH-53 helicopters have crashed at 7:10 that morning, with 20 aboard and no survivors. At 9 a.m., two water purifying units are taken out at a forward landing field. At 10:40 a.m., a Marine Corps military police platoon reports Highway 88 is washed out.
At 11:45 there is a mysterious fire at Banigan University, with up to 100 casualties. The U.S. Embassy wants Mason's people to provide ground medevac support.
No sooner is that started when another CH-53 drops a sling load of cargo, and less than an hour later a convoy is ambushed.
Mason's people, cocooned in a camouflage tent surrounded by razor wire, now have no choice. They hunker down and fire up their ... laptop computers.
Mason, in charge of logistics with the Support Command of the 25th Infantry Division (Light) from Schofield Barracks, says he's sort of like a city manager of a community the size of, say, Richmond, Va., where he hails from.
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser
"The first difference is I have to pick up my city and move it every few hours," says Mason, a 22-year Army veteran. "The second difference is somebody is shooting at my city."
Col. Ray Mason gave a briefing during the war games at Schofield Barracks yesterday.
Staff Sgt. Michael Westerfield of the 25th says, "you can't fight without beans and bullets."
Or, today, beans, bullets and bytes, as computers help the military respond with more speed and precision than ever before.
Maj. Herman Ancheta, a self-styled "Kalihi boy" in the Hawai'i Army National Guard, mobilized to active duty after Sept. 11 to beef up the division at Schofield, lights up a projected map. He lays over it with successive key strokes the forward units, the rear units, the routes between them — all conveyed to him by indicators on vehicles and equipment sending signals to a global positioning system satellite.
It's like FedEx under fire, Mason says. The guy who delivers your package and has you sign off on his little hand-held computer is one of Mason's soldiers delivering diesel fuel or mortar shells.
Behind the map board sits a line of liaison officers linked to the engineers, the air units, even the judge advocate general.
Asymmetrical threat isn't new, the colonel said. Americans used it against the British in 1776, and the Viet Cong used it against the United States almost 200 years later. That threat was also faced in Mogadishu during "Black Hawk Down," and Bosnia with the enemy tying women to tanks so we wouldn't fire on them, Mason said.
Enemies have learned from the Gulf War that there is no point in fighting the United States head on, force massed against force, the colonel said. "Iraq, with the fourth largest army in the world, tried it, and ended up with the 20th largest army in the world," he said.
So now an enemy will circle behind your lines and poison a water supply, assassinate a political leader, fly a jet plane into a skyscraper, he said.
Where real battlefields exist today, it's less likely to be one battalion sent up against another, and more often a special operations team dropped in somewhere in Afghanistan to pinpoint a target and then pull out and wait while the Air Force pulverizes it with bombs, the colonel said.
Some of the officers and enlisted men stumbled over some of the problems hurled at them yesterday in the first of two days of war gaming at Schofield, Mason said.
"It was mostly because the people hadn't worked with one another before, didn't know their strengths and limitations," he said.
"When you come right down to it, all these gadgets are just tools," he said. "It's the human factor that really counts."
Reach Walter Wright at wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8054.
