“It’s a revolution,” said Col. Dan Kessler, who directs the training here. He’s one of the young Turks who’s come back from combat determined to change the old ways.
In addition to a sense of urgency, combat has brought one other influence back home: you have to innovate, take risks, and try new things. That’s always acceptable out in the field. It’s not been so acceptable in garrison, where promotions seemed to come from “following procedure” and not making mistakes.
An excellent little article about what we are doing differently in boot camp to make better soldiers for the war effort. I posted this as an example as to what is required of today’s military, but it also has application to the way security contractors should think out there. Good stuff and it certainly highlights the importance of the kind of concepts being brought up under Jundism. –Matt
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‘Mindless’ Basic Training Gets Some Smarts
06/12/09
FORT BENNING, Ga. — When seasoned combat soldiers began returning from the war to help train new recruits here, the first thing they did was to stop training for what the Army called “convoy live fire.”
Nobody actually does that in Iraq or Afghanistan, they explained.
In fact, they said, much of what the Army was teaching its new recruits at this premier training center was wrong or irrelevant to actual combat.
Instead, what was being force-fed to recruits seemed drearily familiar to old soldiers who’d gone through “basic” here a generation ago. Marching in formation, for instance; rifle bayonet training that dated to World War I (“Lunge! Kill!”). And convoy live fire, a technique invented after Jessica Lynch was abducted in 2003, which became dangerously outdated almost immediately.
That it took five years to get this stopped says something about the Army.
It also provides a glimpse into a struggle inside the Army and, indeed, across the entire U.S. military. Let’s call it the combat military versus the “garrison” or “headquarters” or “always done it this way” military.
This is the dynamic behind Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ effort to refocus the gigantic defense budget on real combat needs for today’s wars – and the resistance from the bureaucracies and defense contractors entrenched around lower priority budget programs.
It’s nothing new that soldiers are returning from combat with better ideas on how to operate. What is new is that these soldiers are assuming higher command and are able to make changes.
Starting with the 14 weeks of basic.
For years – decades – basic training has had an unthinking, mechanical logic to it.
“We were dumb, marching privates,” says Sgt. Jermaine Trevillion, who went through basic training here in 1997. Now, after two combat tours in Iraq with the 1st Armored Division, he’s a drill sergeant.
“The training was mindless – here’s the material, memorize it,” says John Calpena, who fought with the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005. “Today the enemy is always changing his tactics, his operations. We can’t give soldiers mindless solutions. They have to think.”
Calpena is the command sergeant major, the senior enlisted soldier, of the 198th Infantry Training Brigade, which oversees all basic and advanced infantry training at Fort Benning.
During a week of field training, Calpena and others told me what lies behind their sense of urgency about making Basic more relevant. In the past, soldiers had the luxury of years of additional training before they might see combat. The peacetime Army could coast along.
Today’s soldiers are likely to be whisked from Fort Benning right into Iraq or Afghanistan. They will have to know what they’re doing from the get-go.
“It’s a revolution,” said Col. Dan Kessler, who directs the training here. He’s one of the young Turks who’s come back from combat determined to change the old ways.
In addition to a sense of urgency, combat has brought one other influence back home: you have to innovate, take risks, and try new things. That’s always acceptable out in the field. It’s not been so acceptable in garrison, where promotions seemed to come from “following procedure” and not making mistakes.
That’s why convoy live fire persisted so long.
In a convoy live fire exercise, soldiers stand jammed together on the open bed of a 2.5-ton (“deuce and a half”) truck and are driven down a road. At any given point, they open up on a target at the side of the road.
In Iraq, it’s been five years, at least, since it became too dangerous to ride in the open bed of a truck, which insurgents learned early on to target with mortars, RPGs and IEDs.
Instead, soldiers ride in closed vehicles, normally Humvees. When they are caught in an ambush, they have to decide whether to dismount and fight, or drive through, weighing the consequences of each action and deciding almost instantaneously. They have to think.
So convoy live fire is gone. There have been other changes astonishing to old-timers.
Old way: Soldiers sit in a classroom and get 12 hours of instruction on maneuver. When the 12 hours are finished, that box gets checked: they know maneuver. Then they get a convoy live fire experience.
New way: Soldiers get a fast overview in the classroom and vault outside into Humvees. They drive down a dirt road where drill sergeants have planted loud, but harmless, explosives to simulate IEDs, and then on to a mock village with innocent civilians and insurgents. Soldiers have to scramble to apply what they’ve learned. Afterward, they gather for an intense review session to go over what they did right, and where they screwed up. Then they do it again.
Old way: New soldiers wouldn’t be fully trusted with their own weapon until week three or four of basic training’s 14 weeks. They learned to shoot by crouching in foxholes and firing straight ahead while a drill sergeant yelled instructions. They couldn’t leave until a drill sergeant had “rodded” their weapon, pushing a rod down the barrel to make sure it had been cleared.
New way: Privates get their weapon on day three and are taught basic marksmanship right away. They are expected to clear their own weapons, under supervision, assuming responsibility themselves rather than letting that responsibility fall on the drill sergeant. By week seven they are maneuvering on the rifle range, reacting as targets appear – and quickly discerning whether the target is another U.S. soldier, a civilian, or a bad guy.
“Guys in the field (Iraq or Afghanistan) want soldiers who are self-confident, who can work under stress, and who can operate as part of a team,” said Kessler, who was commissioned from West Point in 1983.
In response, he said, training now focuses on outcome, rather than process — making sure a private has actually mastered his weapons skills, rather than simply making sure he has received the prescribed amount of instruction.
“It puts a huge responsibility on the drill sergeants,” Kessler said. “They have to be able to say that I will take this kid to combat with me in my platoon.”
It doesn’t always go smoothly, of course.
In 95-degree heat one morning, 100 troops sat on bleachers, waiting to head to the rifle range. They’d come in at midnight the night before from a long day in the field and were up again at 5 a.m. Now they were drooping, and several men in the front row had their rifles pointed at their boots.
“Hey – how about we play a little game,” a drill sergeant roared at them. “It’s called keep the muzzle off your frickin’ foot!”
An hour later, as his privates maneuvered on the rifle range, he was shrieking as a private knelt to change magazines: “Put it on safe! Always on safe!”
But the new-style training does pay off. This week, I watched as privates practiced urban fighting in a mock village of one- and two-story buildings set deep in the pine woods. Normally this is the kind of high-speed, exciting training that soldiers get only later in their careers.
Their mission was to assault a building held by insurgents. This is difficult and dangerous work, with a high likelihood of blundering and confusion. Off-duty soldiers play the bad guys. They and the privates are armed with paintball rounds, which can sting but not hurt. Each side is trying to win.
After drill sergeants handed the privates their mission order, the new soldiers drew up a detailed plan, assigned separate tasks to each squad – one to provide covering fire, one to rush the building and hold the first floor, one to rush the second floor, one to watch for bad-guy reinforcements to show up — and held rehearsals, just like a seasoned platoon in combat. Then, they executed the mission, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was impressive.
“They did it all on their own,” marveled their drill sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Andre Green, 30.
Green’s most recent combat tour was in Iraq with 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. It was nasty; on every patrol, it seemed, Green and his men got hit with IEDs. He came to equate survival with good luck – and good training. When he got back from Iraq he was assigned here as a drill sergeant, determined to train his privates to a high standard.
“When they leave here,” he explained to me one night, “they’re going straight overseas. So they’d better be ready on Day One.”
Now he watched proudly as his guys emerged from the building through a whitish gloom left by smoke grenades they’d detonated to mask their assault. Insurgents were dead; the platoon had suffered no casualties.
Green was impressed.
“I’d take these guys into combat with me,” he said softly. “Every last one of them.”
Story Here.