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Army engineer divers are a little-known bastion of professionalism and leadership within the Engineer Regiment. A single 25-Soldier detachment can provide combat, general, and geospatial engineer support to theater commanders, combining mission requirements of sapper, vertical, horizontal, and topographic (bathymetric) units, while completing these requirements underwater. Essayons is the unit's founding principle as divers train on the equivalent of nine mission-essential tasks to meet the full spectrum of Army engineer diving responsibility. Collective tasks include-
* Underwater heavy construction.
* Underwater cutting and welding.
* Salvage.
* Demolitions.
* Hydrographic survey.
* Hyperbaric medicine.
* Beach and river reconnaissance.
* Bridge reconnaissance.
* Side scan sonar.
* Mine and countermine operations.
* Repair of other vessels operations.
* Search and recovery operations.
* Dewatering operations.
* Ships husbandry capabilities.
Since 2001, the 74th, 86th, 511th, and 569th Engineer Dive Detachments have been continuously deployed to Kuwait to support U.S. Army Central Command missions. As with many other theater engineer assets, there is no centralized combat training center (CTC) to support unique diving training requirements, requiring commanders to apply Objective T standards to guide the training evaluation of mission-essential task (MET) proficiency for enduring deployments.
Objective T is training guidance that is meant to ensure that the Army has a common standard for assessing and reporting readiness for decisive action by establishing objective task proficiency evaluation standards. The most challenging standard to achieve under this rubric is the one associated with the dynamic and complex environment, which requires achievement of the highest overall assessment. The dynamic environment is defined as a situation in which operational variables and enemy tactics, techniques, and procedures change in response to the execution of a friendly unit's mission. A complex operational environment requires a minimum of four operational variables such as terrain, time, military, and social. Like other noncombatant engineer units that contain low-density military occupational specialties, diver units do not have a CTC to establish complex and dynamic conditions to easily evaluate training. For engineer divers to meet the established criteria within Objective T, the unit must devise a complex and dynamic training opportunity, which cannot be achieved in the 25-foot depth available at Fort Eustis, Virginia. Previously, engineer divers had maintained a mutually beneficial relationship with the U.S. Army...