Surviving and Winning a Doomsday War: The Army’s Strategy to Fight ‘Dirty’

operational environment,” the manual reads. The Navy and Air Force also have their own guidelines for how commanders will fight in a nuclear environment or respond to nuclear attacks by potential adversaries.Along with new policies, training for leaders and soldiers will have to adjust.“That gets you to step one when you know where you need to go,” Peters said. “But when you understand that these are the critical nodes that I need to protect if I have to move through this area or attack this particular area, now we start thinking about mission assurance for ensuring these assets are protected.”And soldiers need to understand not only how to fight through a contaminated area, but also how to train, equip and maintain their gear for such a fight, RamageGarcia said.“You’re going to have to train on it frequently,” she said. “It really is a crawl, walk, run. We have to start somewhere and I’m a firm believer that we need to start where it’s important and I am responsible to my unit to continue that moral obligation. accountable and maintain that standard.”The Army has rebuilt its low- to mid-level training courses across the force. RamageGarcia said starting at the basic level of personal protective equipment identification, to more complex integration with medical, maintenance and logistics.But that training can’t be done in small vacuums, RamageGarcia and Meany both noted. It must be integrated into exercises and training that commanders need to prepare for large-scale conflict, such as the result of a nuclear attack.“To be able to fight effectively in a CBRN-contaminated environment is going to require practice and repetition, and reinforcement on a frequent basis,” Meany said.That instruction can take root at installations such as the U.S. Army Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear School in Alabama, which offers advanced decanting courses that go beyond basic, individual-level gear training.In the end, the concerns over future conflicts are not only about how to use new tools, but also keenly understanding how an enemy might use weapons and how to defend against them.“In the digital age, that’s where a lot of our adversaries are going to come to us. And to us as a nation, if we want to even go so far as to say … that digital tools and information are our weapons of mass disruption,” Peters said.