Fort Campbell, KY – Soldiers with 21st Brigade Engineer Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), conducted squad lanes on Fort Campbell, KY, August 2nd, 2023.
The lanes tested squads on procedures and fundamentals regarding a number of different scenarios.
“The first few days of Operation Lethal Eagle are dedicated to our solid stakes, which is our sapper squads going out and getting tests and validations done on patrolling, CBRN, medical lanes and various other engineer lanes,” said 1st Lt. Samuel Hester, a sapper platoon leader assigned to Bravo Company, 21st BEB. “Those are just to help prepare them for their integration with our maneuver battalions and prepare them for our platoon live fire later on during OLE.”
One lane was focused on the squad’s ability to secure a weapons cache and respond to close enemy contact. Soldiers began the lane as though on patrol, moving forward as a unit. They would discover the cache and need to secure it, pull security and report it over radio. During this process, a Soldier acting as an enemy combatant would ambush them from approximately 30 meters away and the squads would have to respond to enemy contact. Hester noted that the evaluation for the lane was on the fundamentals of patrolling.
“The main thing we’re looking for is their action upon enemy contact, how they react to contact in a squad-sized element facing one or two enemy opposing forces”, Hester said.
After a squad completed their lane, the instructors reviewed their performance, highlighting what the squad could improve upon for future training events and deliver guidance on how the squad went about securing the weapons cache, their method for responding to the enemy ambush, and what they did after neutralizing the enemy, with regards to ensuring the enemy was no longer a threat, rendering aid if necessary, and maintaining a secure perimeter throughout the exercise.
Operation Lethal Eagle III is a large-scale training operation aimed to improve cohesion and teamwork at all levels of a division. Everyone from brigade level to individual squads plays an integral role in the success of the operation.
“I feel pretty good about the training we’re doing out here,” Spc. Aiden Dyke, a combat engineer with Alpha Company, 21st BEB, said. “It helps us see how you can work as a squad and company, how to move as a battalion, and it gets everybody the idea of how to move and how to get everything out there if we actually do deploy.”
When talking about his experience so far with Operation Lethal Eagle, Hester talked about the pride and dedication he’s seen in his company and platoon.
“The people I work with are all amazing go-getters,” said Hester. “They love to be coached. A big part of my job is talent management, and it makes my job really easy when I have a bunch of noncommissioned officers and Soldiers wanting to learn. We’ve been working hard for the past couple of months preparing for this, so I’m really looking forward to the platoon live fire coming up in a couple of weeks.”
Throughout Operation Lethal Eagle III squads will be retrained and reevaluated on the skills they began to develop during the lanes.
