Special Forces Prepare For Afghanistan In Utah Desert

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From the Early Bird News (AKO) 15JUL09

CBS
July 14, 2009

Special Forces Prepare For Afghanistan In Utah Desert
CBS Evening News, 6:30 PM

KATIE COURIC: Tonight, our chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan has an exclusive report on one of America's most potent weapons.

LARA LOGAN: These Green Berets are on a night mission to take out several high-value Taliban leaders. Every minute bringing them closer to their target.
The shooting starts before they even land. The soldiers touching down in hostile territory. Gunfire lights up the night sky.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shift fire. Shift fire. Shift fire.

LOGAN: But the operation is swift and decisive. The Special Forces soldiers secure the area and eliminate their targets. This operation has the feel of Afghanistan and the terrain is strikingly similar, but we're not on Afghan soil, we're thousands of miles away from the middle of the Utah desert on a Special Forces training mission. The enemy here is a paper target. But these soldiers know from experience that the targets and the dangers they'll face in Afghanistan are very real. That's why they've chosen the remote mountains at the Dugway Proving Grounds for their training. This military facility is the size of Rhode Island and the closes you can get inside the U.S. to the conditions these soldiers face in Afghanistan. We can't identify any of them for security reasons. Difficult terrain to operate in?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, they don't send us to places that are easy.

LOGAN: They execute mock assaults on enemy compounds and work through an interpreter to treat Afghan civilians, practicing the strategy to win over the people. We spoke to a team member who served in Afghanistan before.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's pretty much a good mock-up of what we actually expect in Afghanistan.

LOGAN: It's pretty realistic to you?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Definitely.

LOGAN: It needs to be. The soldiers told us the enemy they now face eight years into this war is one who knows their tactics and has adapted to stay two steps ahead. When these soldiers are not training, they're deployed. The operational tempo for Special Forces is relentless. And the demand for these elite soldiers is growing. Their skills are rare. Here we watched as they practice parachuting for more than 10,000 feet in the dead of night. A high-altitude jump designed to bring them unseen and unheard on to a target.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Excellent job.

LOGAN: They can be dropped miles away then drift silently through the black sky reaching their targets undetected. Elite soldiers at the tip of the spear in President Obama's new strategy for the Afghanistan war.

Lara Logan, CBS News, Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah.