Effective Training....

[Infanteer]

First off, I've spent the last couple weeks reading many of the threads on this forum to ensure I've got a grasp of the debates and discussions that have already taken place. This is an impressive site with a high-level of discourse taking place.

I'm starting this thread as opposed to continuing the discussion from where it came from to avoid sidetracking its pages of discussion on strategy. My question revolves around these statements:

- Around six to eight months of good training versus our current 16-18 week norm is needed for the enlisted entrant; about a year for new officers. That will make them good enough if it's done right --and any combat adds impetus and reinforcement to all things learned and accelerates the attainment of skill. Thus it take seven to ten years in peacetime to develop 'expertise' but in wartime that can be halved in light combat as now or accelerated even more in heavy combat. It took about 18-24 months in WW II to turn marginally trained folks into pretty competent soldiers. The naturals, about 10%, can do it in weeks in sustained combat.

I am my no means convinced the UK or US training infantry men in a way best suited to the needs. Does it work. Yes, but how well compared to other approaches we don't know.

There is alot of focus on how to optimize unit organization in some of these threads, but I have a feeling that organization takes backseat to training. Now, I've read the idea of PBID and such things as Wagram's ideas on training but I've yet to get a sense for the specifics that many are advocating as solutions to the problems alluded to above. 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?

[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.

[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.