Putting the D in METT-TC

[Ken White]

While I share your fear that the current climate militates (pun intended) against fixing the training problem, I r an optimist -- there's got to be a Pony in there somewhere...

[tankersteve]

Mike, Ken, et al:

While I agree with the trend toward mediocrity (the lack of selective promotions in the Army officer corps is a glaring example of this) exists and is rampant in our society, there are things that can be done to mitigate its effects and one was mentioned, Unit Manning.

If units were stablized for 3 years, with all leaders having stability in jobs, then the company commander would be comfortable saying that '3d Squad' is running a 72-hour patrol. He would know how 3d Squad was trained, be comfortable with their performance during LFX and FTX, MRE, etc. He would know that all/most of the Soldiers had been in the squad for a year, were really proficient in their tasks, and any team leaders that were not up to snuff were either retrained to an acceptable standard or replaced with someone who could hack it.

However, the Army and ARFORGEN, is putting folks into bad positions where no one knows anybody else. If you don't know them, how could you ever trust them? (Personal example - I am reporting to a brigade 3 shop going to A'stan. I will be reporting in mid July. Main body movement is in August. I bet the BDE CDR has a lot of confidence that I can work a request for air in a TIC or thoroughly understand the ROE...)

The Army has shown that it can change. It wants to do unit manning. We cannot blame this on bureaucracy, although we did for years. It was poor leaders not understanding the problem or willing to fix it. Instead, the Army sucked it up at the battalion level.

I hope the Unit Manning initiative gets activated again, after ARFORGEN and OPTEMPO levels off.

Tankersteve

[Pete]

It's been 26 years since I was in the Army, so my observations about training at the unit level are probably out of date. At the time it seemed to me that the individual training of soldiers was almost invariably the Task-Condition-Standard stuff as it was written in the Soldier Qualification Test manuals with little deviation, especially if there were training inspectors with clipboards making the rounds. Unit training, on the other hand, was always an imitation ARTEP (Army Training and Evaluation Program) in which we tried to do everything at once--fire the howitzers, either live or dry, camouflage the guns and vehicles, have a chemical agent attack, and occasionally have aggressor activity on the perimeter.

When I'd suggest that we ought to concentrate on particular tasks until we got them right, the standard response was to "Train the way you fight," which meant to do everything all at once. My feeling was that we were doing everything in a sort of mediocre way, and if we didn't focus on getting specific things right we'd always be half-*ss. I was in field artillery, so the main ARTEP criteria were the speed and accuracy of the fire missions--all the other stuff was of secondary importance. Before the ARTEPs came along in about 1978 the artillery used to have "service practice," which meant firing the guns without all of the other distractions getting in the way.

In one of his books Russell F. Weighley said that of all the branches in the Army the artillery comes the closest in peacetime to doing what it does in war, so perhaps the units I was in had it better than I realized. I never went to the training center at Fort Irwin so I have no experience of how good the simulations there are.