Iron Strike 16 exercise prepares Fort Carson soldiers

We’re getting an inside look at how Fort Carson soldiers train to confront an enemy. It’s all part of a month-long live-fire training that winds up Friday.

It’s real-life scenarios that are preparing Fort Carson soldiers to deploy to any contingency operation worldwide.

“We go through pre-fire checks. We go through different ways to occupy a firing position (and) different types of fire missions and more,” said Nathan Driscol, with the 3rd Brigade’s 4th Infantry Division.

The training mission consists of using Bradley fighting vehicles, Abrams, Stryker armored vehicles and other weapons.

Driscol serves as a platoon leader. His role focuses on verifying the position of guns.

“Making sure that our fire direction center, which is responsible for the ballistic solutions, making sure they have everything together and ultimately making sure we’re firing safely,” Driscol said.

It is the largest field training exercise put on at Fort Carson. It’s conducted by the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team.

“This is excellent training opportunity because you don’t want to get caught down range and not have training. We get the opportunity to be able to utilize the land, all the battalions within the brigade,” said John Burke, with the 3rd Brigade’s 4th Infantry Division.

Soldiers are conducting attacks through a synchronized fire coordination exercise.
Burke says one of the hardest parts is preparing mentally.

“You can’t come out here without mentally being prepared because even just doing a dry fire or live fire training and nobody is shooting back at you there’s a lot that can go wrong. You need to always be in the game,” Burke said.

Three-thousand soldiers from 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team’s seven battalions deployed to the Fort Carson training area for the exercise.

“This has been a really great training opportunity for the brigade as a whole,” Driscol said.

Next up is the final home-station test at the National Training Center in California in August.

We’ll have the full story on KRDO Newschanenl 13 at noon.