Infantry DASH into new urban training
Australian infantry soldiers will be better prepared for urban warfare with the introduction of innovations such as the Dismounted Austere Shoot House (DASH), enhanced urban-training aids and a new Urban Operations Exponent Program.
CAPTION: Australian soldiers explosively breach a method-of-entry training door during urban clearance training at Greenbank, Queensland. Photo by Corporal Janet Pan.
DASH supports evolving training requirements through an engineering process to maintain safety and range performance, while facilitating safe and realistic urban live‑fire training.
WO2 Phillip Brown, School of Infantry Urban Training Team (SoI UTT), said DASH featured modular partitions enabling the deployment of training grenades and breaching tools, such as shotguns, for methods of entry (MoE).
“The DASH supports breaking in and fighting through a single-storey building,” WO2 Brown said.
“It has supported the development and refinement of infantry urban tactics, techniques and procedures, including close-quarters battle, method of entry and command and control – skills that contribute to what is required to win the complex urban fight.”
Development of the new MoE breaching doors was driven by ideas originating with training-team instructors and executed with Directorate Land Ranges staff.
The breaching door system incorporates a sacrificial insert made from plywood or corrugated plastic and fitted within a modified door frame.
It replaces traditional solid-core doors and allows the use of significantly smaller explosive charges while still achieving the desired training effect.
Sergeant Casey Morrison, SoI UTT, said the system could be rapidly refurbished, allowing for quick reset-and-repeat serials, increasing training throughput while maintaining realism.
“This is about developing appropriate targets and policy to address risk for our combatants, which we can do through reducing the training or the target medium, or reducing its thickness,” Sergeant Morrison said.
Captain Lachlan Roe said UTT trained soldiers to operate against near-peer adversaries in contested urban environments as part of the integrated force.
“This new training marks a starting point for our soldiers to develop their core skills over their career and become well-rounded and more lethal operators in the urban environment,” Captain Roe said.
“With more than 50 per cent of the world’s population living in urban environments, our infantry needs to be competent and confident operating in those environments.
“If we don’t have standardised training, it essentially risks our soldiers having fragmented, unit-specific procedures and tactics, which are born out of necessity rather than a standardised framework that we can all operate from.”
Lieutenant Edward Toohey, 3RAR, who was part of a multinational regimental officer basic course undertaking their first urban operations training at the School of Infantry, said DASH and the training package was a lot more dynamic than he expected it would be.
“This package is being rolled out across the RAR [Royal Australian Regiment, and when DASH live-fire facilities are available, this will enable advanced training outcomes,” Lieutenant Toohey said.
“I think that’s going to make us a lot better across the board.”
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