After more than a decade of wars in which U.S. special-operations forces have played a lead role, military planners are seeking to retrain those forces in skills they haven’t used in the decade’s overseas missions. This summer, Hudspeth County will be the site of part of that training effort.
At a meeting of Hudspeth County commissioners Tuesday (Feb. 24), Francisco Oquendo, a contractor working with U.S. Army Special Operations Command, described plans for a Green Beret training exercise planned for August. Commissioners voted to grant their support for the operation, which will be conducted in cooperation with private landowners in the county and in adjacent areas of New Mexico.
Oquendo said the exercise will not involve live fire, and that most county residents will be unaware of the troops’ presence. Participants in the exercise will be veteran soldiers. The purpose the exercise is to retrain participants in unconventional warfare, an effort Oquendo compared to rebluing, or renewing the protective finish, on a gun.
“For the last 12 to 15 years, we’ve been heavily involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other places not in the media,” Oquendo said, “in direct action missions – not conducting unconventional warfare. These are perishable skills, and commanders have asked us to come up with ways to reblue them.”
The training exercise in Hudspeth County will be limited in scale – lasting four to seven days and involving fewer than 20 soldiers on the ground. But the local exercise is part of a much larger operation, unfolding across seven states in the Southwest and in 10 other Texas counties, called “Jade Helm.”
Over an eight-week period, 1,500 to 1,800 people will participate in the Jade Helm training, Oquendo said. The training will run from July 15 through Sept. 15, and the Hudspeth County portion is planned for August. Jade Helm is planned as an annual occurrence, and future exercises in Hudspeth County could involve a larger number of military personnel, Oquendo said.
In Jade Helm, special operations are simulating entering a foreign country to assist an insurgency. Oquendo said the exercise is focused as much on the skills of decision makers in various agencies as it is on soldiers on the ground. In Hudspeth County, participating soldiers will by Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, but special-operations soldiers from the other branches of the military will participate in other locations.
In the Hudspeth County exercise, a group of Green Berets will parachute into the airfield near Ranch Road 1111, north of Sierra Blanca. The soldiers will be moved to a location north of the drop site – and will then move on foot into New Mexico.
“There will be an airborne infiltration, and they’re going to hide,” Oquendo said. “You’re not going to see them. At 1 a.m., there will be an airplane that flies at about 1,000 feet for about 15 seconds, and that’s the last you’ll hear or see of them.”
The Hudspeth County training will recreate a situation in which soldiers have to get out of hostile terrain. Oquendo said the military will recruit several local residents to serve as role players – to assist in transporting soldiers, in the guise of locals sympathetic to the insurgency.
Though the military has vast installation across the Southwest, Oquendo said that conducting training outside of an installation is designed to create a more “realistic” training experience. He said that for participants, encountering unfamiliar terrain outside of an installation, and interacting with residents who have real knowledge and experience of that terrain, is a central point of the training.
Oquendo is a retired sergeant major from the Green Berets, with 23 year of active duty experience. He works know with Intelligence, Communications, and Engineering, Inc., or ICE Inc., a Sierra Vista, Ariz.-based company that contracts with the military to facilitate training exercises. On his visit to Hudspeth County, Oquendo was joined by Paul Crownover, a retired master sergeant from the Green Berets, with 27 years of active duty, who now works for contractor Visual Awareness Technologies and Consulting, Inc., or VATC.
Special operations trainings were conducted in Hudspeth County in 2011 and 2012, and those trainings included exercises in rural locations and “urban resourcefulness” operations in Dell City, Sierra Blanca and Fort Hancock.
Before the court voted to endorse the plan, Hudspeth County Judge Mike Doyal noted that, in those earlier exercises, some local residents had been caught off guard by the use of live ammunition and explosives in rural areas. Oquendo said that, in the Jade Helm training, “[the soldiers’] job is to maneuver through the terrain without being compromised – so there will be no live ammunition, unless they’re authorized for force protection ammo” against snakes or other wildlife.
In other business at Tuesday’s meeting, commissioners authorized Doyal to finalize contracts for the sheriff’s department to house inmates from Reeves and Ector counties at the county jail in Sierra Blanca, at a per diem rate of $46 per inmate. The sheriff’s department began to house inmates from Otero and Eddy counties in New Mexico, at $44 per inmate per day, more than a year ago, and the arrangement has helped to improve the finances of the county jail.
Though inmates from the two New Mexico counties kept the jail population near capacity for some time, the numbers of inmates have dropped off in recent months, and the jail housed fewer than 30 prisoners from the two counties during the last month. The arrangements with the two Texas counties could raise the inmate population again.
Also on Tuesday, commissioners voted to purchase a building on the east side of Knox Avenue in Fort Hancock, which formerly served as an office for the Border Patrol. Doyal said he had negotiated a price of $20,000 for the building, which the county plans to use as an office space for county officials and as a yard for county equipment.
The Border Patrol has also indicated it might donate another building – just opposite Knox Avenue – to the county. The building could be used by law enforcement.
