Training the Operational Staff

[Surferbeetle]

...and enjoyment of the rapid pace of change are some of the constants I have noted across the RA, ARNG, USAR, and DAC/DON/DOS continuum. As you note however, many of our military structures are still Cold War based and warfighting excellence does vary by individual, fire-team, and unit.

Staff work, although fun, can also be very challenging and unforgiving Nonetheless my guess is that there are city managers who would be able to fit in and contribute at the Corps or any other level. Dallas, for example, has a city manager who oversaw a FY 2007-2008 budget totaling $2.65 billion and oversees 13,000 employees.

I know that we did have a robust and very competent engineer staff, and a less robust and less competent civil affairs staff.

Being a member of both of these communities (civil engineer & CA-bubba) I am pleased by our successes and troubled by our failures. I continue to fight the good fight to prepare my charges within my spheres of influence and hope to have a couple of years left in me to continue the task. In the meantime I appreciate the teamwork in fixing our shared issues and know that when my time comes to move on things will be in good hands.

I can't vouch for their previous experience in the areas you mentioned, but I do know there were no '40 hour courses of instruction' offered on any of those subjects.

My G3 helped me to arrange for a slot at the 40 hour Civil Affairs Planners Course. The setting was superb, the USAF understands infrastructure even in Florida, and more importantly the team of instructors were superb as well (mostly Phd's with extensive DOD and overseas experience). I highly recommend the course as being beneficial to both CA and non CA troops.

I am talking about division and corps staffs, the operational level (at least in COIN) staffs that form the kernel of Combined/Joint staffs during deployments. These are structured for conventional warfighting, and must be augmented to obtain the kind of skill sets useful in (I'm holding my nose here) populace-centered operations. This is a problem for several reasons:

1. They are not, in fact, very common in the military, especially at the field grade level.
2. It takes a long time to grow a competent field grade staff officer. You can't just pluck someone from a city manager's office and expect him to be able to add value in the rarefied air of a three- or four-star headquarters. Thus it is rare to find someone with a specialist skill set who is also able to influence planning or decision making at the operational level.
3. Most of these specialists, while excellent engineers, city planners, or policemen, know squat about warfighting or counterinsurgency.
4. Augmentees, by definition, show up too late in the process of preparing for deployment.

So, while it is better to have these guys than not to have them. I don't see them as a silver bullet. The bottom line is we have a system of preparing large headquarters for operations that is basically a carbon copy of the one we used in the 80's and 90's to prepare for conventional war, only with a different scenario and some cultural sensitivity training thrown in. It doesn't work very well. Moreover, our division/corps headquarters are structured for the wars we would prefer to fight, not the one's we are currently fighting, as SecDef might say. Thus we send them off to the combat zone as ad hoc organizations.

Field grades do not grow on trees, but we have been making them for some time now (current promotion rates to the contrary) and people (military or civilian) are still trainable To echo your sentiment however, there are indeed no silver bullets and if this was an easy fix they would not hire us to solve the problem.

Balancing the risks associated with the COIN fight is key and it's my belief that by closely examining staff composition from Corps to Company it is possible to identify where we can change the current ratios of kinetic to non-kinetic personnel without enlarging current staff sizes. At these key points we should seriously consider taking the time and making the added effort needed to integrate more COIN experts.

This means actively tailoring units for the COIN fight just as we tailor Light and Heavy units for the conventional fight: specifically it means accepting an added level of risk and integrating more civilians and soldiers with needed COIN skills into the planning and execution of our COIN fights.

Full spectrum to me means the Army can break and build, not just break.