Iraq War forces U.S. Army to adapt while fighting.

www.usatoday.com...

BAGHDAD — Racing through crowded streets to the site of a car bomb, gunners atop the Humvees pivot side to side, scanning for threats. The drivers zigzag through underpasses, to make it hard for someone who might drop a grenade on the far side. Radios hiss as troops pass the word about suspicious items on the roadsides that could contain bombs.
2nd Lt. Leslie Waddle's platoon is escorting bomb-disposal experts into some of Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods. It's not what they trained for. Yet they handle their mission with the attention to detail of combat veterans, which they now are. They've had the windows blasted out of their vehicles and driven into scenes of carnage draped with body parts.

"We see it all," says Waddle, 23, quiet and petite with a soft rural Kentucky accent.

Waddle's platoon is trained to drive convoys of trucks, ferry ammo, and run fuel stops behind the lines on a more conventional battlefield. It's attached to the 1st Battalion, 9th Field Artillery, part of the 3rd Infantry Division.

But there is little demand for cannons in the fight against the shadowy insurgency in Iraq. And so they have been deployed on what amounts to the front lines of an insurgency. Iraq has forced the Army to reorganize on the go, changing a force designed for large tank and mechanized battles in Europe into one more suited for hunting a dispersed and hard-to-see foe. The military is taking soldiers ranging from cooks to tank gunners, and putting them into the fight.

"The U.S. Army is finally moving in the direction that the British Army moved years ago," says retired Army colonel Doug Macgregor, author of two books on modernizing the Army's organization. British soldiers are trained to be more generalist. The U.S. Army is more specialized.

this shows that the military which is burdened by the bureacracy and still is to me, and that this war helps speed things up for the needs of the grunts to fight a war successfully.

Well it's nothing new that the army has to change it's tactics I believe that happens in most conflicts at one point or another, but this is something we should have done years ago. My heart bleeds at the lost time and the lost lives in Iraq that we didn't have to lose. This thing would have been so much better had we actually prepared for this kind of war instead of crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.

I agree that our troops in Iraq are getting a hand on hand training on one area that it was lacking, and that is urban warfare.

Even went our soldiers are very well trained on technology and the art of war, they needed to experiences what is to be on enemy land with an enemy that is hard to identify from the rest of the population.

The also had to improvised with what they have available.

I think our troops are going to be better trained than ever before after Iraq.

At least that's what my husband thinks.

Hopefully we will learn from this experience and apply are new found knowledge to future conflicts or even rehabilitate our image by leading a few UN approved peacekeeping missions.