Now all that may be true, and I certainly don't doubt it, but their needs to be a very solid debate about the time and money needed to deliver the right degrees of training. 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.
We review these issues constantly, but certainly not effectively. As a guy still in on the ground at the tactical level, I can say that one of our most pressing concerns is over how much we adhere to our older training & readiness manual (which made some concessions to ops in OIF and OEF in 2006), or lean more towards the prescribed pre-deployment training (PTP) programs prescribed by our Training and Education Command (TECOM) HQ. Gents, it is not an easy task.

I agree wholeheartedly with Ken and many other of you that we don't train particularly well (and sometimes seriously enough ), and that longer training windows would be optimal in some cases. The problem with getting the latter modified is that it takes years to turn the rudder. A patrial case in point is the Marine Corps start-up of its own 25mm Master Gunner course. For years on end, we have sent students to the Army course since our LAV-25s run the same Bushmaster chain giun. Advocates for our own school have been around almost since the first Marine graduated from Benning. The LAV-25 was introduced in 1984, and our pilot program is just starting this fall. There is something to be said for the Army program, but doing it in-house was generally preferred because of platform differences. Moving money and manpower around the Corps is like moving mountains sometimes.

It is true that we should be able to take a basically-trained conventional force, and with very little rudder steer, employ him in any environment. To a great degree we still go that, but somehow the term COIN gets used when in fact we are really just applying regionally-adjusted training regimens. If you look at the progression of vehicle check point training, you'd see a classic example. I never trained to execute a VCP in my life before late 2003, but damn sure did during prep to return to Iraq, for two reasons. First, we had used them the first go-around, and secondly, Division told us to.

Division told us to because a VCP is a very discreet skill set that requires a certain degree of standardization if you want to get it done right with minimum wasted movement and safety for innocent civilians We thought we were getting it right, and for the most part did okay, but axross all OIF rotations for all Marine Corps infantry battalions, it would take several years and hundreds of JAG investigation recreations before units in the field were able to prescribe the best happy medium for set-up, materials, and tear-down. At the outset, some of the worst violators of effective VCP execution were in fact not even grunts, but rather MP and artillery units employed as supply convoy escorts.

Where we get things screwed up, however, are when the business of standardizing something like VCPs (for distances involved, materials used, etc.) is hit and miss, or the evaluations at events like the old Mojave Viper employed diagrams that differed from other references floating out there.

And when it comes to the actual evaluation, why is it that a platoon commander is being evaluated by a corporal who is about to get out of the Corps in six months time, and certainly would rather be somewhere else not in the desert, and not in 100+ deg heat. The problem comes straight away from how we train, how we resource commands that do not have require T/O augmentation just to barely function, and how we look at events on the ground. "It gets the job done," is sometimes camo for just pure dumb luck, yet we don't realize it.

Something similar happened in detainee operations. These guys were not just POWs anymore where you could get away with 5 S's and a T. That took up training time and resources too, and since we did not get more dwell time tacked onto the equation, unit commanders had to (and will always do so) make some decisions about the likelihood of conducting a platoon in battle position defense vs. detainee training.

The pendulum has indeed swung too far at times, especially when "COIN" TTPs are all that we train to, at the detriment of retaining the ability to fix and maneuver (or defend as well). ####, the whole ability of infantry lieutenants to train effectively has shifted post 9/11, because so much of the standardization was pushed down anew, and from outside our normal doctrinal publication chain (where T&R review might come), by venues such as the Warfighting Lab. Training is served up so poorly nowadays that it is pretty easy to be dropped off at a training area, link-up with the contractor training and support cell, and start working lanes, without applying any thought at all towards the desired end result. It's great until your platoon commanders begin to grimace because Bob the retired combat engineer is tossing out training commentary at the school circle of Marines when he really should just be wiring IED sims.

I do think that up to now, the crop of battalion commanders have been savvy enough to know what they want, and to prescribe training that fits in with their estimation of the battlefield and its effects. My boss, for example, is working to get us away from the teat of predeployment training packages, and back to our T&R manuals. He succeeds at this to a great degree because he also succeeds at convincing HHQ to employ our unit in line with its doctrinal capabilities to the maximum extent pissible, rather than the square peg-round hole of armor in urban areas that deserve lightfighters. As our efforts progress, future commanders will have come up in environments that made cookie-cutter training the norm.

Other circumstances conspire to slow down progress, as when "Distributed Operations" became a vogue term and people started applying brain power to that drama...right in the middle of a very hot conflict. As if we didn't already have enough on our plate in Iraq during '05-'07?!? I look back, and besides a wire diagram that outlined manpower and a few historical examples, I don't know what DO really was designed to do, but I know that guys at Quantico who would otherwise be responsible for T&R manual development were seconded to the DO effort...and look at what we have to show for it. I clearly remember that captain who was supervising the participants at a T&R manual review conference. He was happy that he was eligible to retire within the year...I don't blame him.

I'd love to participate in any debate regarding the 5 W's of training and employment of the respective resources. Unfortunately, people usually only get excited about good initiatives in 3 year cycles, which not surprising, match up with the window before a guy gets his new set of orders and passes his turnover binder to another guy who starts out with great dreams.