Effective Training....

[Ken White]

With your permission...

Mostly 'cause I'm not awake enough to do it right.

Wilf will probably be along in a bit. Afternoon there...

[William F. Owen]

Are our training systems "barely post-conscript" (to quote Mr Owen)? If so, what about them is archaic? What constitutes "the basics" that would constitute effective training for a capable soldier and how should it be taught?

First off, excellent question, and yes, I need to have me feet held to the fire here. I do have great deal written on this subject, but have yet to mould it into a coherent form. But....

1. We need to focus more on a useful and defined level of individual skill and knowledge.
2. You can't train for every condition and for every type of conflict, so it has to be explicit in training that you are providing a basis for further training, that as yet, may be unforeseen - and yet "lessons learned" keep getting re-learnt.
3. We engage in a lot of superfluous process and procedures. Certain things at the squad an platoon level could be usefully simplified. Other things need to added.
4. We don't seem to understand some of the basics, (fitness, marksmanship, navigation etc.) to the extent that we can define the standard and then concentrate on how we achieve the standard - run 2 miles in 18 minutes carrying 22kg - how you get that standard, does not matter. It just has to be done within time and budget.

Now I can cite numerous cases of dissonance that I have either experienced or witnessed, but that's not really my point. My point is that we seem/may not to have as good understand of what is actually required, as we think.

[Eden]

and initial entry training. The US Army (my background) does indeed have a third wave, industrial approach to basic/AIT. I think we actually do a fair job of turning civilians into soldiers, but it is pretty much the same approach used during the two global wars: A small number of trainers with relatively limited resources use the assembly line approach to produce soldiers with a specified skill set. These are then fowarded to units where they have to have additional training before they are fully qualified. The training involves three major areas:

Socialization
Physical Fitness
Military skill (over 240 discrete skills for a Cavalry Scout, for instance: map reading, marksmanship, hand grenades, etc)

What is the problem with this logical, ordered approach to basic training? It is three-fold:

1. Trainer to trained ratio is too high. In some cases this is not a big problem. One man can train 100 men in physical fitness about as well as he can train 10. He can't do the same in, say, rifle marksmanship. As a result, a huge amount of the recruit's time is spent sitting around, waiting his turn on the range, or with the radio, or for his turn in the simulator. It is also harder for the trainers to detect and correct individuals having problems.
2. Training to the lowest possible standard. There is virtually no scope for allowing talented soldiers to learn at a faster pace. Budding SGT Rocks are kept back and forced to keep pace with all the Sad Sacks in their group. About the only area where they can get ahead is physical training. Again, this is partly due to a lack of resources dedicated to basic training, and also to the industrial training model, which values mass production over nurturing.
3. The system is ossified. When I left the basic training arena in 2002, we were still training recruits on React to Nuclear Explosion. We were not training them on many of the skills that would become important in Iraq and Afghanistan. Deleting or adding a task in the basic skill set took a minimum of two years to work its way through the various TRADOC hoops. Oh, we did what we could; we cobbled together a 'booby trap' lane, for instance, but on our own time and with resources we could scrape together.

The solution is not hard to imagine. We have more than enough motivated, talented NCOs to train recruits; they know how to train and what to train; they know what you need to train; they know how to turn lardies into studs; they know how to motivate and socialize. Imagine Gunny Highway back from Iraq for a two year tour as a basic trainer. Every four months he is handed 12 recruits and told to produce a ten-man infantry squad he would be willing to take into combat. He has access to all the equipment they would need and sufficient land and range time. He has sole authority to drop soldiers from training or recycle them. At graduation he determines what rank the soldier deserves, up to E-4. Something like that would work.

Here are the problems:

1. This would require a huge increase in the number of high-quality soldiers dedicated to training. The industrial model was chosen, after all, because it allowed for the smallest possible investment in trainers and training resources - efficiency, not effectiveness.
2. There would be some spectacular failures. When you decentralize the operation as depicted, there will be a small percentage of trainers who will turn out to be lazy, unproductive, sadistic, or simply crap. Some of these failures will involve dead, injured, or abused soldiers, along with varying degrees of property damage. Some, inevitably, will be highly publicized.

Bottom line is we will not improve basic training until we invest a great deal more resources in it and are willing to accept risk and the inevitable failures. I don't think it is a question of some new approach to training per se.

[William F. Owen]

Bottom line is we will not improve basic training until we invest a great deal more resources in it and are willing to accept risk and the inevitable failures. I don't think it is a question of some new approach to training per se.

Well OK, but given that very few if any armies have ever run comparative training studies, and even when they have, have failed to learn from them, we don't have any good data to base that assumption on - However, I think what you say is largely correct.

Problem is, basic training is not actually basic training. Since about 1915, it's been a ready made solider factory. You go from training to war. You join your unit, in combat!
As far as I have ascertained, only the Germans sent back experienced NCOs and Officers and bolted together new platoons in training and then deployed those platoons into combat, - as platoons, or squads.
The question I always want to ask, is that, if men posted to your unit, were just well trained in individual skills, - physically fit, could map read, call in fire, had good marksmanship, CQB shooting skills, weapons handling and field craft, plus basic medic, etc, etc. - could you teach him the rest, as part of a platoon, before it was time to deploy?

[Eden]

Wilf, now you are talking about something different. The US Army COHORT program had cadres training recruits and then the whole unit was shipped off to a parent battalion - so that you had a unit that had gone from basic training to (possibly) war as a single entity. They typically stayed together for for three years and, in my limited experience with them, were better units than those that used the normal individual rotation system.

Problem was, the US Army personnel system couldn't handle the change and a very promising system was abandoned. I'm all for depot battalions and regimental systems and unit cohesion, but that type of change is unlikely to arise absent some existential national emergency.

But we could, I believe, fairly easily improve the state of individual entry training - basic skills training - and make it easier for units in the field to integrate individual replacements even in wartime - If we devote more resources to the effort.

[Ken White]

Since I said we can and should do this better and the 'we' was the US -- most of the commonwealth countries do a better job than we do in my observation and experience -- I'll address it to us because though I think the principles broadly apply, each nation is different and the training regimen has to account for the entry demographics of the day in that nation.

I agree with Wilf's and Eden's comments above. Both explain very well why we do what we do and Eden explains much that is wrong. He also raises very valid points that must be considered so let me first offer some suggestions to accommodate those.

As he says, currently, a small number of trainers with relatively limited resources use the assembly line approach to produce soldiers with a specified skill set. These are then forwarded to units where they have to have additional training before they are fully qualified. There are two flaws with this approach which as he says is mobilization based. The first and quite obvious problem is that we need to be able to do that on a mobilization basis but we do not have to and should not do that now with a professional force.

The second is that the process of selecting which tasks are trained in the schoolhouse and which get trained after arrival in the unit is very badly skewed -- tasks which are difficult or expensive to train or which will have high failure rates (and thus reflect poorly on the training institution...) are selected to be 'unit trained' (the schools and centers get to do the final selection...). Thus the first step is to rectify those two mistakes. Both are equally difficult but not impossible, the former due to costs, the second due to the need for constant changes in 'Tasks, Conditions and Standards' caused not by changes in warfare so much as by the fact that the Bureaucracy involved is largely Civil Service and job security entail doing 'work' -- even if it is not needed.

The hurry up and wait syndrome can be largely eliminated with one measure. Adopt a Cadre system of Squad Trainers. For these trainers, hire recently retired NCOs on the same basis as used for Junior ROTC Cadet instruction; they draw their retired pay and the School pays the difference to bring their total compensation up to the level of not being retired. This contractual basis allows the selection and retention of good trainers (every NCO is far from that...), insistence refresher and update training, maintain a decent standard of fitness and appearance and so forth. They wear the uniform with all accoutrements and such plus a Drill Sergeant Hat in a different color. This will insure that most do not fall prey to the valid concerns expressed by Eden. You'll still not be error free but the number of personnel failures will be far smaller and you'll have continuity. These people need to be contracted to the Army as consultants and not as persons supplied by a Commercial organization.

Talented soldiers must be moved to Squads moving at a faster pace. This will be exceedingly difficult as cries of discrimination and the like will surely result. Documentation should preclude any real trauma from this but it will still be a distractor that Commanders will seek to avoid.

The system is slow to change because it has become highly bureaucratic and the Civilian employees involved have entirely too much say in what occurs. Their efforts to keep relatively soft and in many case not terribly productive jobs rules. This can be changed (but will be resisted. NOTE: I say this based on 18 years service as a DAC, starting as a GS 11 Instructor, Training developer and Branch Chief for seven years in TRADOC and ending up rather more senior and the supervisor of 50 plus military and a like number of civilian employees. I don't know everything but I do know sinecures, bureaucratic foolishness, make work and refusal to take responsibility when I see them. I also know how to fix them -- by eliminating positions... )

Eden ended with this:

"Bottom line is we will not improve basic training until we invest a great deal more resources in it and are willing to accept risk and the inevitable failures. I don't think it is a question of some new approach to training per se."

He is totally correct. Those things are the cost of doing it right -- the option is to continue doing it wrong and getting a marginally trained Soldier that succeeds in spite of mediocre training because he's a good fit for the job.

Among other things, a Squad Trainer approach as Eden and I suggest will allow the marginal recruit to be identified earlier and eliminated before the expense of training him and retaining him mounts. Better selectivity in recruiting helps but that still doesn't catch all the slackers -- no system will catch them all but a bunch of old NCOs working with ten or so Soldiers will enable most to be spotted very quickly; they can then be moved to a second or even to a third squad and if all the Cadre agree, he or she is history

If you want a quality professional force, the old, mass production idea of any warm body has to go.

So: What follows is an unconstrained answer to your question Note there is little new, only the trainer and the time really differ.

Step 1. Adjust the training process to account for today's professional force and save the mobilization based process for when it is needed.

Step 2. Convene a number of branch specific working groups of Company level officers and NCO -- no Field Grades, no Civilians, No 1SG/Co SGM/ Color Sgt and about four O, four NCO -- and determine a Basic Soldier Task list (generic) AND an Intermediate Soldier Task list (branch specific). Scrub the generic list with a second board of Co level O/NCO and produce a single desired list. Submit it to TRADOC for their Scrub and then appoint one -- only one -- non TRADOC GO as an arbitrator to produce a Basic list. The object of all that is to produce an accurate and not, as is currently true, a bureaucratically skewed and incomplete list of tasks for institutional training.

Step 3. Restructure training along roughly these lines. To break the five day week attachment and emphasize the 'you're no longer a civilian' aspect, establish 10 day modules of nine work days and one day off.

Module 1 - Barracks. Reception, processing, weapons issue, clothing and equipment issue, history and traditions, rules regulations and law, standards and admin. Regulatorily or other required social etc. classes, Care and cleaning of equipment (to include training, not expecting them to picj it up and do it right on their own), Daily PT including walking or marching everywhere (minimal close order drill [COD]; Fall in, Sling Arms, Port Arm, Inspection Arms, Left and Right face, column movements and no more; no shoulder arms, no flanking movements). No night training.

Module 2 - Road march (~3-5km)to Hut Encampment, initial field training, individual movement, basic navigation (without map or compass) as a confidence builder, Familiarization firing issue weapon(first and last day), Weapon and equipment care and cleaning under fikled conditions (again training, not DS goof of time), First Aid/CLS (all), field sanitation, field fortifications. Daily PT, alternating a run (not for speed or time) and a no pack but with weapon and harness march every day at random times, increasing from an initial one Km by adding 500m per day ending 4.5 to 5 km (3 mi). No COD. 20% night or low vis training (without NVG).

Module 3 - Road march (!4-6km) to new location, erection of tentage. 1/2 day on field living.Range period -- Known distance training followed by Field Firing/Trainfire etc. to include urban, semi urban, rural woodland and rural plains/desert settings. Entire time period; qualification on day nine followed by striking and turn in of tentage. No PT, No night training, concentration on weapon mastery. ~2 km road march to range and back with weapon and harness, no pack, no speed marches.

Module 4 - Road march (~4-6km) to new location. Field shelter living, field cooking to include, field sanitation, land navigation to include a test, target detection, observation and reconnaissance techniques, scouting, familiarization firing (other weapons). More field care and manitencane training. Basic tracking and tracking avoidance, rural and urban. Survival preparatory training. Buildings away from bivouac area used for classes, some meals but not for sleeping. PT consisting of random time exercises daily plus alternating run and road march with pack starting at 1.5km and adding 500m per day, ending at 5km (3 mi). 30% night or low vis training, no NVG.

Module 5 - Survival training, classes and preparation (2-3 days; PT only in this phase, exercise and easy timed run); Survival exercise (with pack and harness but no weapons or ammo; not an Escape and Evasion/SERE drill; two man teams directed; scattered drop off). Training phase 10-15% night, no NVG; Exercise 24 hours/Total of four or five days; pickup, return to garrison/barracks, clean up and maintenance. Yes, that's minimal and lets them learn enough to be dangerous -- better that than none and the combat arms guys get a second, harder dose later. Two day Training holiday, freedom of the post.

Module 6 - Cross country march (~3-5km) to Field, draw and erect tentage. Team training, arbitrary teams forced to work together and to implement previous training. Field firing, fire control and fire discipline. Land navigation, calls for fire. PT daily, random times exercise with weapons plus random times [not necessarily concurrent with exercise]alternating run, road, and cross country march starting at 2.5km and adding 750m per day, ending at 7km (4.25 mi). 40-50% night or low vis, no NVG.

To be continued...

[Ken White]

(I am not taking the rap for this tome...)

Contd:

Module 7 - Cross country march (~6-9km) to Hut Encampment. Issue and classes, NVG, laser pointers, etc. Squad movement, Squad tactics and exrecises, Field firing emphasizing fire discipline to include night live fire with and without NVG. Calls for fire. PT daily, random times exercise with weapons plus random times [not necessarily concurrent with exercise]alternating run, road, and cross country march starting at 3.5km and adding 750m per day, ending at 7km (4.25 mi). 25-40% night or low vis with and without NVG.

Module 8 - Cross country march (~12km, speed march) to Barracks; two days cleanup and maintenance. Cross country march (< 5km, no speed) to test area, Four day performance test under Test NCOs (Active duty SGTs/Cpls f/ Canada [no higher grades other than one Captain OIC, one SSG/Sgt NCOIC]; Squad Cadre not allowed in test area. Test devised by test cadre and changed for each iteration using standard set of test modules. Test runs day and night, roughly 50% night. Return to barracks by vehicle, two days cleanup and maintenance.

Module 9 - Abbreviated, three to five days. ASVAB retest, Admin processing, equipment maintenance and turn in.

There you have it; 85 or so days, twelve [strikeout]seven[/strikeout] weeks -- and that should cull out most of the unmotivated and produce a basic soldier who should be prepared for the real training which follows. Recycles encouraged. All they'll do is learn more -- simply changing instructors can enhance learning of identical topics -- and the cost is minimal.

For an infantryman, basically the same pattern, this time with Platoon cadre but small platoons of no more than 25 and a platoon cadre that mix the Retired guys on contract and active NCOs but no higher than SSG/MCpl (thus each can learn from the other -- ideally). The difference is that the modules are extended to 14 days, 9 or 10 to 12 working and 2 (minimum) to 4 (maximum and no more than once if at all) days off and that the same basic instruction is repeated but at an advanced level adding more sub tasks, skills and team training (2 man) instead of individual training is used early on using the coach and pupil method (to identify the high performers). Squad training also is introduced earlier, PT is an order of magnitude harder and night training with and without NVG, approaches 40% in total All firing is conducted at squad and platoon level except for some familiarization (other then issue weapon) firing and one four day block to allow another qualification for record (KD and field fire) with the issue weapon. This obviously provide some to much repetition in training subject dependent, something that is generally avoided now due to cost -- it's worth the extra money to embed and imprint good habits. All that training is Outcome Based, not rote and repetition tasks, conditions and standards stuff.

I wouldn't want much more COD than I outlined for the Basic period; for those who think it's important, add it in the barracks phases of the follow on training. Thus Intermediate Infantry training is about 120 days, 17 weeks.

The standard objections to all that are cost (to include the cost of tentage and the huts, not to mention the added ranges and ammo plus time and a few other things like more wear and tear on clothes and equpment), the vagaries of weather, and that many people will not be willing to enlist if they have to go through that.

My responses to that are; You get what you pay for; Soldiering is an outdoor sport; if they aren't willing to do that to become part of a competent professional organization that challenges people instead of encouraging mediocrity, they probably aren't capable of going to war and surviving without falling apart and better to find out earlier than later -- plus, it will deter the faint of heart from enlisting thus saving a dollar or two...

Eden said he was addressing Enlisted Initial Entry Training only, I did as well. However, I believe the Combat Arms Officer Basic Courses should replicate a combination of the above Basic and Intermediate training regimen (the same seven weeks should suffice for the individual effort, combining aspects of the enlisted Basic and Intermediate above) with only slight modification because those are basic skills better taught in an institutional setting than picked up by osmosis in a unit (and that new LT has to insure NCOs that work for him train their troops properly). In the institution you CAN have quality control; all units are not equal and will never be. The Intermediate OBC Phase would concentrate on Platoon tasks and would require, to do it right, about the same 17 weeks as the enlisted intermediate phase. I base this on watching and working a 9 to 12 week (it varies as Commanders cam and went... whims...) Armor Officer Basic Course do its thing over seven years at Knox -- that is just not enough time; we're being really unfair to those LTs -- and to their Troops...

Even unfair to the taxpayers who are paying the bills and deserve a better, more competent product -- officer and enlisted.

Obviously, the OBC students also require more garrison time for the really important things like Supply Officer, voting officer, etc. . Thus for the initial entry officer, about 7 weeks individual skills; 7 weeks garrison based admin and tactical training and 17 or so weeks in the field working on being a Platoon Leader -- and refining individual skills. Add a couple of weeks fore and aft for administrative processing and such and that hits about 35 weeks -- about 8 months. That's two months longer than the Marines Basic School now and one month less than it was years ago.

All that can probably be done for the next 20 year at the cost of one Zumwalt...

That's unconstrained -- you want a simpler less effective solution that costs less? Simply train people for two jobs higher than their theoretical next job -- almost all of them will serve in positions requiring that knowledge before they return to

[Fuchs]

What is the problem with this logical, ordered approach to basic training? It is three-fold:

1. Trainer to trained ratio is too high.
2. Training to the lowest possible standard. There is virtually no scope for allowing talented soldiers to learn at a faster pace.

1) That is a general resource problem. Civilian marksmanship training in a club is completely superior. Civilian fitness training is completely superior.

A Kindergarten worker in Germany needs several years of training to take care of a few children.
An army NCO gets a few weeks of trainer training before he's being sent to give recruits basic training.
It's a sad joke.

2) Different training/education speeds are rarely practiced anywhere. Germany has three parallel schools after 4th grade as one such example, but not everywhere. Only two of the three forms have an acceptable reputation. There's rarely a training/education system anywhere that does its job at different speeds.