|
You can win at the National Training Center (NTC). You will encounter longer lines of communication, more arduous terrain, and a higher sustained operational tempo (OPTEMPO) than you can possibly experience at home station. The National Training Center is not designed to offer you a fair fight. The NTC operational environment will stress your ability to balance survival and support to an unprecedented extent. Winning at the NTC is a matter of proficiency in fundamentals. Boiling down the key to success at the NTC into one sentence, train vigorously on fundamental logistics and security tasks at home station in preparation for your deployment to the Republic of Mojavia. Establish proficiency in the basics, reinforce the standard, and develop ideas for refined tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) you would like to validate at the NTC, the world's premier heavy force training area. You might want your TTP to reflect theater immaterial procedures, thereby increasing your proficiency when deployed worldwide. Consider rehearsals and CSS battle drills at the company and platoon level.
I have observed two constants in the course of my tenure here, and we wrote this publication with these in mind. First, combat service support (CSS) soldiers know their jobs and ensure success at the squad and platoon level. Our CSS functions, IAW FM 3-0, Operations are accomplished because technically proficient individual soldiers consistently demonstrate the intestinal fortitude to overcome adverse heat or cold, lack of rest, and high OPTEMPO to get the arming, fueling, fixing, moving, and medical support accomplished. As leaders, we must reinforce the currently high level of technical proficiency in home station training. Second, despite consistently high technical proficiency at the squad and platoon level, support companies and support battalions continue to display glaring deficiencies in key areas that, if not improved upon, significantly negate the effectiveness of our soldiers as they go about their work.
Company commanders struggle to balance defense and mission support, most often leaving holes in the fabric of the former in order to accomplish the latter. Company level leaders have difficulty identifying surface danger zones, establishing adequate force protection SOPs, and enforcing rigorous pre-combat checks (PCC)/pre-combat inspections (PCI). Junior officers and NCOs are generally weak in basic land navigation skills.
At the battalion level, support battalions demonstrate significant difficulty establishing and maintaining the requisite communications architecture for basic command and control (C2) and logistics standard Army management information system (STAMIS) operation. Communications during brigade support area (BSA) displacement is a particularly weak area. Support operations officers do not integrate or synchronize logistics to shape the battlefield to support future operations. Forward support battalion (FSB) executive officers (XOs) and S3s wrestle with BSA defense operations, struggling most with reconnaissance and surveillance planning and tenant integration. Support battalion commanders, support operations officers, and medical company commanders often get so involved in the close fight that they collectively neglect their responsibility to logistically shape the battlefield for future operations and logistics synchronization suffers accordingly across the brigade. Casualty evacuation (CASEVAC), forward logistics element (FLE) operations, closed loop reporting, and CSS rehearsal execution are constant areas for improvement. Additionally, logisticians at all levels are rarely able to operate logistics STAMIS to its maximum potential.
We created this Newsletter in order to disseminate accumulated observer controller observations of negative logistics trends and offer you doctrinally based suggestions for reversing those trends in your unit. These TTPs are not a cure all. They are only a way to make logistics viable on the battlefield. We continue the work begun in CALL Newsletter 97-14, dated June 1997, which is still available and offers much valuable information.
I hope you find this publication useful. We welcome your feedback. Call or e-mail us with your ideas and suggestions, so that we can continue to provide the best possible teaching, coaching, and mentoring as we train units to win on the battlefields of today and tomorrow.
|
