Sydney Freedberg opens Infantry transformed by new tools, training with a scenario from the 14-week course at Fort Benning’s Infantry Training Brigade:
The Army drill sergeant rebuked a group of recruits who had fired their rifles too hastily in a mock ambush. “You know we’ve got civilians on the battlefield,” said 1st Sgt. Dennis Williams. “Just because your buddy fires, doesn’t mean you fire.”You’ve got to be aware of exactly what you’re shooting at, Williams told the soldiers. Be aware of what you’re not shooting at, too; don’t focus on the first target that pops up and forget your flank. “Everybody wants to kill that same guy, but those guys over there,” he said gesturing to the side, “would’ve wiped us all out!”
It’s not all that different from youth soccer practice.
The infantry’s changing:
Today, however, the soldiers at Fort Benning are visibly different from their predecessors of just three years ago. They wear Kevlar jackets reinforced with rigid breast and back plates, 16 pounds per man, the first mass-produced bulletproof armor in history and all but unknown in the U.S. military before the invasion of Iraq. The soldiers carry rifles with sophisticated optical sights, tools that, before the insurgency, were reserved for snipers and commandos. They practice treating casualties with a new first-aid kit — tourniquet, gloves, and an Israeli-developed pressure dressing — that was derived from last year’s battlefield lessons.And these are just the tools, the visible surfaces of far more fundamental changes in how human beings are being taught to fight.
[...]
“I didn’t do half of this,” said Lt. Col. Ricardo Mitchell after he and the recruits finished the exercise. Mitchell did his basic training in the peacetime Army of the 1980s. Today, as commander of one of Benning’s training battalions, he said, “We are teaching things to privates comparable to what, five or six years ago, we were asking lieutenants to do.”
I recommend reading the whole article.