FIXES
Why should we be surprised? We have no structured training process for commissioned officers to develop and sustain proficiency in these skills. As an Army, we have not identified the individual and team tasks every staff officer must perform during the planning, preparation, and execution of operations. It is no wonder we do not know what to do or how to do it. Where can a young S2 go to find them? Where does a young fire support officer turn? How about the S3? Where are their soldier manuals which describe tasks, conditions, and standards of performance? Furthermore, where are their team tasks and performance standards? We develop them for our soldiers and noncommissioned officers. Moreover, we demand they learn and master them and examine them to ensure they do. We even tie their promotion and assignments to demonstrated skill performance. Not so for commissioned officers. Strangely enough, we have not used the same training methodology for the commissioned officer corps nor demand we measure up. We have to turn this around.
As a first step, we need a full court press to build a basic task foundation for training staff officers. Assuming we will continue to fight combined arms warfare at the brigade level, we need to identify the individual and team tasks every brigade staff officer must perform to achieve and preserve synchronization on the battlefield. The Military Qualification System (MQS) series will not cut it. In essence, we need soldiers manuals for every staff officer and ARTEP Mission Training Plans for battalion and brigade staffs. The current MTPs, ARTEP MTP 71-2 and ARTEP MTP 71-3 are completely inadequate. We need to identify the right tasks with the right performance standards to deliver the outcome we expect. Unquestionably, this is the responsibility of the Training and Doctrine Command. But therein lies the rub.
In our drawdown of the Training and Doctrine Command, driven by other considerations, we have virtually eliminated our capability to execute the training development required to accomplish this vital task. In essence, we are combat-ineffective. Gone are the people and expertise that produced the soldiers manuals and the mission training plans which turned this Army around in the 80s. Our options, therefore, are limited. We can chose to restore it in a zero sum game, leverage the expertise which resides in our observer controller teams at our combat training centers, contract to get it done, or combinations of these methods. Regardless, our soldiers will pay the price until we do.
Assuming we build these tools required to establish a basis for training effective staff officers, the issue becomes how do we teach them these skills? Moreover, where do we teach them these skills prior to service in the field? In the field is certainly not the place. We cannot continue to learn at the expense of our soldiers as we do at our combat training centers today. Soldiers are not training aids. Train leaders first.
Therein lies another institutional problem. Within our officer educational system, nowhere in the Training and Doctrine Command do we train officers to serve effectively as battalion and brigade staff officers, particularly in combat conditions. We're not organized to do it. The only place we do it is at our combat training centers during after-action reviews. That is the wrong place to learn the basics and master the science of warfighting. That is where we should be demonstrating our art.
There are a lot of ways we could skin this cat, but in my view we need a school to do this. Branch-specific schools cannot achieve the aim. We need a combined arms school with a battle focus, not a process and briefing focus, where young officers from every branch can come and learn these individual and team skills as part of a combined arms staff. Moreover, it should be a prerequisite prior to assignment to any brigade in our Army. CAS3 with its current curriculum will not cut it, but perhaps it could adapt.
It is one thing to achieve proficiency in our schoolhouses. It is another to sustain it in the field, particularly in an environment of declining resources and opportunities to train with the combined arms team in the field. In this regard, computer simulations, both virtual and constructive, offer bright prospects, if not the only prospects for training above the battalion level. They provide us the most important and practical means of achieving and sustaining commander and staff proficiency; they provide the ability to repeat performance at low cost. Only through repetition-repetition-repetition can we build and sustain our ability to synchronize the combined arms team.
But first we need to change our simulations. We need to change them because they do not currently create the conditions necessary to effectively train commanders and staff. Consequently, we get a false sense of proficiency from our current simulations. At the NTC, brigade and task force commanders are often surprised and disappointed when battles don't turn out the way they did in simulations at home station. That is because our simulations lack fidelity with the conditions they face in live simulations.
But, again, there is the rub. The absence of individual and collective tasks for staffs spills over into development of simulations. Until we identify what individual and team tasks officers must perform to achieve the outcome of combat we expect, we are dead in the water. We simply cannot design simulations to replicate the conditions necessary to train the tasks to standards. We truly have the cart before the horse, and, until we lay this foundation, we will never achieve their full potential and training value.
The business of growing and training battalion and brigade commanders who have mastered the art of battle command is another thing all together. Only two of the twelve brigade commanders I observed had the right stuff--the skill and competency to get every dog in the fight at the right time and place, and guide his staff and subordinate commanders until it was achieved. That bothers me, too. As such, it calls into question how we identify, train, select, and develop brigade commanders. Except for a select few, our brigade commanders do not demonstrate a mastery of the science and art of war fighting. These devoted and talented leaders are simply not equipped with the battle command skills they need to effectively employ the combined arms teams. Why should we be surprised? Battle command skills and competencies are extremely complex and require years of training, repetition, and experience to achieve. We have no structured training system to develop these skills and competencies. Furthermore, most commanders get very few opportunities to learn or practice them in the course of a career. Two weeks at the Tactical Commander's Development Course (TCDC)--established to alleviate this problem--won't fix it.
To change the situation, we need to break a big rice bowl. Maybe we need to develop a structured training system for commanders. Maybe we need to test and examine an officer's ability to perform battle command tasks and display battle command skills before placed in command. We certainly demand it of our soldiers and noncommissioned officers. Why not ourselves? This means we would probably have to cull the herd early, identify the select few with exceptional potential to lead and master the art of battle command, then groom them through training and assignments for company, battalion, and brigade command. Maybe we need a single command track. Maybe it is time to fundamentally change the culture and perception of the officer corps, in which successful service to the nation, a successful career, even an officer's worth, is presently determined solely on the basis of his or her selection for command, regardless of tactical or technical competence. We might even have to jettison the fairness principle, in which every captain, by virtue of being a captain, deserves to command his or her 18 months. Maybe we owe it to our soldiers. They are carrying a heavy load--commanded by officers untrained to employ them effectively.
These are tough changes to make, but on the basis of what I have observed, they merit serious consideration. We need to change. What we expect our battalion and brigade commanders to do is incredibly difficult and complex, and few are armed with the necessary skills. We need to break another paradigm or two. Granted, our current system of producing commissioned officers served us well since the turn of the century. However, it remains based on a mass production approach to support requirements of Industrial Age warfare. Maybe the exigencies of a force projection Army, the requirements to mix and match unit capabilities, the enormous expansion of warfighting capabilities, and the complexity of skills required to achieve Force XXl operations demand greater specialization and focused training within the officer corps. Maybe in the Information Age, where time and the levels of war are compressed, and our national security strategy hinges on immediate response and force projection, we no longer have the luxury of assigning officers to perform duties they have never been trained to perform.
MORE FIXES
We could automate terrain and weather analysis and accurately display their effects on every battlefield operating system. Additionally, we could automate terrain analysis so it could provide us signatures of the best observation or communication sites on the battlefield. What about a terrain analysis which displays the inter-visibility lines throughout our battle space to facilitate effective employment of direct fire systems. All these would significantly enhance the performance of a brigade staff. But again, we have to define the staff's individual and team tasks, then determine how technology and information tools can be devised to enhance performance of those tasks--particularly as regards speed and accuracy.
Maybe we should also challenge the way we organize, train, and fight brigades today. At NTC, what we see are pickup teams, more often than not, with staff officers often meeting for the first time in the dust bowl. Fewer and fewer brigade commanders and staffs have an opportunity to achieve proficiency as a team in live or constructive simulations before they hit the playing field. Moreover, they don't train routinely with their combat support and service support units. They don't scrimmage before the game. These ad hoc arrangements, based on how we organize divisions, are barriers to building effective command and staff teams at brigade level. Team proficiency is very difficult to achieve in our brigades who are not physically located with their parent divisions. In light of the recent decision to station several brigades at installations far from their parent division, this problem will only be exacerbated.
When we consider the requirements of a force projection Army--which is expected to be ready and deliver quick, decisive victory--the way we're organized to train and organized to fight takes on more ominous dimensions. In effect, we will be assembling staffs and forces who have never trained together, except for an annual rotation to a combat training center. Perhaps distributed simulations could offset or alleviate this problem, but it's tough to build teams with electrons.
If we believe we should train as we will fight, why don't we organize the way we plan to fight--as a combined arms team at brigade level? Surely if we organize the way we intend to fight we could significantly alleviate some of the barriers to effective synchronization. It works in spades for the OPFOR regiment. It has also worked effectively for many years in our armored cavalry regiments.
Again, that would require us to break some rice bowls and eliminate or redesign division artillery commands, division support commands, division engineer commands, military intelligence battalions, chemical companies, and so on. Maybe we need combined arms brigades and a small division headquarters whose role is command, control, and sustainment. Then again, maybe we don't need combined arms brigades to fight wars in the Information Age. Maybe there is a better way to realize our full combat potential. That's what Force XXl and Joint Venture are all about.
A TOUGHER FUTURE
Fighting the OPFOR at the NTC is really about as easy as it gets. Why? Because the OPFOR is relatively predictable. How they conduct an attack from the march or defend from positions out of direct contact varies little from battle to battle. They organize to fight in predictable ways. They employ their fires by phase at predictable times and places. They shape their battlefields in predictable ways. Their formations and position of combat vehicles within formations are predictable. They adhere to a set doctrine and follow predictable battle drills. Discerning what they are going to do, when they are going to do it, and where they are going to do it is not difficult. Synchronizing combat power against this type of force is as easy as it gets. We are fighting a template.
But what about our future foes? What are the templates? In an era of potential conflict against information, industrial, or agrarian opponents, whose doctrine and tactics are far less predictable, what then? The difficulty of synchronizing the combined arms team under these conditions jumps an order of magnitude. Not only that, commanders and staffs of the future must become more adept at producing precise effects with fewer forces as we transition to an effects-oriented versus a force-oriented Army. In short, it is getting tougher to fight, not easier. Couple this with the need to incorporate information technology and master its use, and our task ahead is formidable indeed.
Finally, consider the increasing number of capabilities a brigade commander and his staff must synchronize as we embed a host of new digital technology and information systems in the force. Brigade commanders have not had J-STARS, RIVET JOINT, UAVs, EPLARS, PALADIN, brilliant munitions, APACHE LONGBOW, and COMANCHE, and a host of other new capabilities in their kit bag. The number of lookers and shooters which must be synchronized to achieve our full combat potential will grow dramatically. Given our poor ability to synchronize the combined arms team, our challenge seems even more daunting when we are pitted against a force whose methods of fighting will be less predictable. Again, the business of synchronization is getting harder, not easier.
CONCLUSION
DISCLAIMER: This article has been edited to remove any reference to specific units. CALL and the Combat Training Centers have stringent "non-attribution" policies and will not publish any individual-or unit-specific information.
Table
of Contents
The
Burden Our Soldiers Bear, Part 3
The
Battle Before: A Rehearsal
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
