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thedrifter
02-14-06, 11:46 AM
February 20, 2006
Stateside drill helps cannon-cockers fire on all cylinders
By Gayle S. Putrich
Times staff writer

It’s not that it isn’t an important job, but Col. Glenn Starnes gets a little edgy when some of his Marines are on military police duty in Iraq for too long.

That’s because Starnes, 10th Marines’ commanding officer, is in the artillery business.

“Artillery is our main trade,” he said.

But when the regiment hasn’t been to the field in about 18 months, it’s time for some training: Exercise Firestorm.

For four days in late January, Starnes’ two artillery battalions that aren’t deployed — the 1st and 2nd Battalions — had the chance to get reacquainted with their 155mm howitzers.

Once most of the shooting in the 2003 Iraq invasion was done, deployed artillery batteries ended up working as military police and doing convoy or border security. Some are even working as prison guards. But the skills needed to be a highly successful artillery unit can fade if they’re not used, Starnes said, and teamwork is important to making a fire mission happen.

When he came to his post at Camp Lejeune, N.C., last October, Starnes made it a primary focus to keep those skills from drifting to the back of his Marines’ brains.

Exercise Firestorm was four days of regimental and battalion missions, with a scripted fire mission series on a simulated town. They had to do it all with intelligence coming in, orders changing and command centers on the move.

Most of the teams just seemed out of practice, Starnes said, since some skills, such as digital communication, get lost if they are not used daily.

Based on recent decisions on the future of artillery units, training like this will become more important than ever. In December, officials announced that almost the entire artillery force will be assigned the secondary mission of civil-military operations, normally performed by civil affairs groups.

In short, when the shooting ends, the diplomacy begins. And as with other provisional duties, the bread-and-butter artillery skills will slip away while cannon-cockers perform these other jobs.

Starnes said that from his perspective, another good reason for the training is the addition of new personnel. The business of artillery, which some of these Marines have only read about, became reality for the first time.

Starnes said he can tell, even from the way they carry their gear, the difference between Marines who have been deployed and those who practiced carrying gear at boot camp.

“The guys who haven’t been deployed learn from the ones who have, especially in a training like this,” he said. “Learning is going on at all levels.”

Two of the units that participated in Exercise Firestorm will head back to Iraq in September. One leaves for Okinawa, Japan, in March. A fourth will soon lock on with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. It’s not likely that any of those Marines will see artillery action until they return to the States; mostly, they will work in a security capacity.

But another exercise for those who are still in the States or have returned from Iraq is planned for April at Fort Bragg, Starnes said.

By April, “hopefully those units that were walking this time will be running by then, and those units that were crawling will be walking,” he said.

Ellie