'America's Broken Army' NPR Series. Cavguy makes COL Gentile proud ...
All,
I just learned an NPR interview the COIN Center gave in October was aired yesterday. In it, a MAJ "Neal" (can't anyone spell my name right?) Smith bemoans the lack of conventional competency in our force.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=99156039
Of course it's one quote out of an hour long interview we gave, but it does reflect the need for "balance" in the future between COIN and HIC tasks.
Quote:
All Things Considered, January 12, 2009 · America has the most battle-hardened Army in the nation's history, but it's an Army that may also be broken. The seven years of war — in Iraq and Afghanistan — have taken a toll on the troops, tanks and trucks, as well as on the Army's leaders.
.....
A Debate Over Training
That switch has sparked a debate inside the Army over what missions it can perform and how it should train its soldiers. The training, lately, is all about counterinsurgency, and some in the Army are wondering if the pendulum has swung too far.
"Obviously we can't go back to the extreme we were in 2003 where the force knew nothing about counterinsurgency," says Maj. Neal Smith, the operations officer of the Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center. He teaches people how to fight the kind of wars we're in now in Iraq and Afghanistan. "But we also can't go to a force where if a tank division is needed someday — no one knows how to move, defend, attack or move to contact anymore."
But even he worries about what today's soldiers are being taught: how to fight a classic ground war.
"The risk we run as a force is that we have a generation of officers [who] have spent five to six years [at war] that never have done their conventional competency," Neal Smith says. "And if we were expected on short notice to fulfill that conventional competency, we would struggle very hard to do it as well as we did in 2003 during the attack to Baghdad."
The problem is there simply isn't enough time to teach people how to fight both conventional and unconventional wars — the soldiers are simply at war too much and troops now have only about 12 months between deployments.
"The reality is we really only have enough time to prepare soldiers for the next mission they're going to face," says Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who runs the Combined Arms Center for the Army. He oversees 18 different schools and training centers, including the National Training Center. "Then as time permits, we'll operate across the whole continuum of intensity of ops."
The Army says it won't even be able to really begin training for all kinds of warfare until 2010 at the earliest, so for now, the focus is on hearts and minds, not tanks and artillery.
I think it went something like this...
yada yada yada... as Niel exposed his secret crush for Elaine:D
Yep listened to it this morn
Sure to be extremely popular in
some circles:wry:
Wake up, Reed, you spelled Nile
Nelly (not that there is anything wrong with that!!)
You just go ahead Nelly!!!
OK, you got me; I owe you one. First chance I get I will state publicly that the Army is loosing its Coin capabilities....NOT!!
But come on, dont ya' think that we knew just a little, little, tiny, winy bit about counterinsurgency in 2003 instead of as you say the extreme and "knew nothing" about coin?
Can ya help a fellow coin brother out here?
gian
Doctrine, Context and yet more...
I think there has to be a differentiation between doing some good training, because you are going to war in a place you know well, against folks you have fought before and the body of skills, drill and forms that you need to maintain an army to be ready for anything that it is likely to be asked to do.
I submit that the issue is doctrine. There is a pretty good body of best practice that can fairly easily accessed, by anyone prepared to take the risk of doing so.
Look at any military training problem and you'll usually find some idiotic body of opinion defending some ones empire or skill set.
Look out for people who believe that it is their job to "deliver training" instead of "teaching people how do things." and then testing them to make sure they can.
Could the 'truth' lie somewhere in between
Schmedlap and Eden? I place 'truth' in quotes because I fully acknowledge that 'truth' in training is very subjective, subject to interpretation and means different things to different people.
I think Scmedlap's version of unit training broadly tracks with my experience over almost 30 years of doing and another almost 20 of closely observing and 'overseeing.' I think Eden's comments also track with all that.
The important thing to me is to acknowledge that we are now training better at the unit level than we ever did -- but we still are not doing that as well as we can or should...
Eden says:
Quote:
"When is the last time anyone maneuvered a brigade in the US Army?... (and much else) ... Coordinated all of the above as a division staff within the space of three or four days?
We used to do that all the time...well, two to three times a year, anyway, and still screwed the pooch almost every time..."
I do not dispute that was done nor that it was training but I will point out that it was generally done poorly -- as Eden acknowledges -- and in my observation unrealistically only once or twice a year and with no penalties for failure or error.
That's a long way of getting to the major point -- how you train is a great deal more important than what you train.
It is far better for combat forces to do the basics well than to do the exotic or upper levels poorly...
Added: Wilf said:
Quote:
"Look out for people who believe that it is their job to "deliver training" instead of "teaching people how do things." and then testing them to make sure they can."
YES!!!