It’s not all about fighting in a mostly rural theatre where the natives are stuggling just to survive off of what they can grow. The Army has come to recognize that success can only be attained if soldiers are also helping citizen farmers support themselves.
In an article in Army Times that describes other changes in training for the First, we find the following:
One unique mission that recently was added to First Army’s training repertoire is preparing agribusiness development teams for deployments to Afghanistan.
The training program for the ADTs so far has been ad hoc because the mission is relatively new, said Maj. Gen. Mick Bednarek, commanding general of First Army’s Division East. But the training continues to evolve and become more refined as more teams are formed, and trainers are pulling together experts from the deploying team and its home state to help them address issues such as economics, agriculture, farming, soil and energy generation, he said.
When Col. John Smith, commander of Division East’s 158th Infantry Brigade, got the mission to train the Indiana Guard’s ADT, he raised his eyebrows, scratched his head and went to work developing a plan to combine war fighting with farming’s many complexities.
“I’m a boy from the city. I just thought it was a bunch of guys that were going to go out there and teach the Afghan farmers how to grow crops,” said Smith, who also trained ADTs from Texas and Tennessee.
Smith and his staff pulled together all the information they could about the first agribusiness teams to deploy to Afghanistan, enlisted the expertise of agricultural scientists at Indiana’s Purdue University and began to replicate Afghan farm land at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center near Camp Atterbury, Ind.
“There isn’t any manual, there isn’t any guidance of how to train agribusiness development teams,” Bednarek said. “What we did … is figure it out, put the concepts on paper, form them and then physically make it happen and execute it well above the standard that anybody ever expected.”
