GOV/MIL Stop Wasting Infantry’s Time: Mattis Task Force

[Housecarl]

Hummm....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://breakingdefense.com/2018/04/stop-wasting-infantrys-time-mattis-task-force/

Land, Strategy & Policy

Stop Wasting Infantry’s Time: Mattis Task Force

“All too often when we bring things up inside the Beltway, it immediately devolves to material and programs and technology," said Scales. "What we hope comes out of this is not just new machines but new ways of thinking about warfare at the tactical level.”

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on April 13, 2018 at 5:42 PM
71 Comments

ARLINGTON: Finding $2.4 billion for new infantry equipment was just the start for Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force. Now they’re taking on the hard part: getting the military to stop wasting the troops’ time.

PowerPoint briefings on personal hygiene, guard duty at base gates, shuffling troops from unit to unit and base to base every few years — all these things take away from building tight-knit teams and training them for combat. The goal, in brief, is to purge bad habits left over from the draft era, when conscripts were treated as free labor and infantrymen, in particular, as unskilled grunts. Instead, the military should treat Army and Marine infantry like fighter pilots, as highly skilled professionals.

Speaking Wednesday at the Association of the US Army, undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness Robert Wilkie pointed out six problems the task force wants to fix, any of which would be a major effort on its own:

• End death by PowerPoint: Over the years, well-meaning bureaucrats have layered on one training requirement after another — briefings on everything from highway safety to personal hygiene– that it cuts into training for actual combat. Wilkie, a reservist, estimated he spends 4.5 days of his 14-day annual training on such briefs. Now the Secretaries of the Army, Air Force, and Navy (which includes Marines) have all agreed to systematically cut back these mandatory training requirements.
• Stop peeling potatoes: When commanders need someone to guard the base gates, run the gym, or perform some other mundane task, they often look to the infantry. After all, if you take mechanics or other technical troops away from their tasks, equipment quickly starts breaking down, but if you take grunts away from training, the damage isn’t obvious until wartime. The task force is working on a “workforce rationalization plan” to have civilians do such work so soldiers and Marines can concentrate on combat.
• Train like the pros: As a Marine Corps general, Mattis once noted that infantry training hadn’t changed much since World War II, which he found unacceptable. Special Operations has led the way in borrowing training techniques from major league sports — personalized coaching, scientific nutrition, and constant repetition with careful monitoring of both physical and cognitive performance. Not everyone can qualify for special forces, but regular Army and Marine Corps infantry can replicate this kind of intensive, scientific training.
• Add virtual training: Instead of reading PowerPoint or peeling potatoes, troops need to spend their time on realistic training — but field exercises are expensive, time-consuming to set up, and limited to the environment around the base. Fighter pilots and vehicle crews use simulators to train over and over in a wide variety of scenarios, many too dangerous for real-life training, before they go to the field. The Pentagon is now looking at VR and augmented reality technologies for the infantry as well. Mattis wants infantry to fight “25 bloodless battles” before they ever face real life-or-death combat, Wilkie said.
• Report real readiness: Today, units spend a great deal of time counting the countable — how many troops they have, how much equipment and supplies — but that doesn’t capture the qualitative factors that make a unit ready for combat. “Clearly at the small unit level, the readiness reporting system fails us,” the chair of the task force’s advisory board, retired Maj. Gen. Bob Scales, said. He recommends a system that measures how much time troops spend in realistic training and how many have qualified in key skills. Wilkie’s office is working with all the services on how to assess real readiness.
• Keep troops together: Since World War II, the military has treated troops as interchangeable parts, moving individuals from job to job, unit to unit, base to base. Career commissioned and non-commissioned officers in particular pay a penalty for staying too long in one job under a system known as “up or out.” That might have worked in the draft era, Wilkie said, when thousands of unmarried conscripts came in and out every year, but it doesn’t fit a force of long-service volunteers with families. It also breaks up the tight-knit teams that make a unit effective in battle.

This reform will be the hardest because it requires not just new orders in the Pentagon but revising venerable statutes like the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA) of 1980. “We can work with Congress to address that,” Wilkie said, “keeping units together longer, creating the team muscle memory necessary for success.”

The task force doesn’t have any specific legislative requests for Congress, yet, but Wilkie is already explaining the overall idea. “I’ve already begun evangelizing this concept with the Congress,” he said. “I met today with several United States senators, also last Monday with staffs.”

Defense Secretary Mattis has empowered Wilkie’s office, the undersecretariat for personnel and readiness, to take the lead on the task force. (The first, equipment-focused phase was lead by the Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation office, CAPE). “Secretary Mattis has invested a great deal of time and effort into this undersecretariat,” Wilkie said. “He has tasked us with gauging the readiness of the entire force, enforcing decisions, making changes in force structure. We are no longer just an oversight body, because this is the Secretary’s priority.”

“I take Secretary Mattis at his word and to heart that this is the effort he wants to leave behind no matter now long his service as secretary of defense,” Wilkie said.
But how, I asked Scales and Wilkie, will the task force and the personnel & readiness office compete for attention with multi-billion dollar acquisition programs?

“Sydney…you’re a heck of a straight man,” Scales replied. “All too often when we bring things up inside the Beltway, it immediately devolves to material and programs and technology, (but) we don’t want this to just be an acquisition program, we want this to be a catalyst for a transformation of a level of war that has received so little attention….What we hope comes out of this is not just new machines but new ways of thinking about warfare at the tactical level.”

 

[Dozdoats]

Infantry motto:

Hurry

up

and

wait.

 

[Thomas Paine]

About damn time! Also maybe look at a minimum enlistment for Infantry say 4 years, it takes time to develop a skilled infantry soldier.

 

[AlfaMan]

Woohoo-unit cohesion and regular MOS specific training, keeping units together and getting rid of the endless BS briefings....and reporting real readiness levels, not spitting out figures the higher ups want to hear.

Isn't it awesome that the "patron saint of chaos" has ideas to actually make our troops better troops? God I love this guy!

 

[Millwright]

Wowwww

Actually addressing dogmatic issues.

 

[Jonas]

Get on with the program! I hope it works. May be just a little too much common sense.

 

[Maryh]

Yes, daughter found that readiness was a problem when she took her battalion to Afghanistan a couples of yrs ago.
She said she had a terrific time trying to get people who could deploy. Seems she had to do a weekly report too and if the numbers weren't up the higher ups weren't happy. Anyway, they trained and trained as her main worry was bringing everyone home in one piece. She was really hard on them to train up to go. Glad to say they all returned.

 

[night driver]

Maryh, I trust she has called home by now? IIRC she has her Bird, and then folks DO tend to get busy when the carp-fan powers up in their general part of the world.

 

[223shootersc]

Mattis cutting the BS stuff, a real Leader of Men

 

[Dozdoats]

Still nothing about ending "up or out?"

 

[Maryh]

Maryh, I trust she has called home by now? IIRC she has her Bird, and then folks DO tend to get busy when the carp-fan powers up in their general part of the world.

Yes, she is fine. I am the worrier that she could be stop loss again and pulled somewhere. That has happened. Thanks for asking. 4 war deployments is too much for me to deal with!

 

[cjoi]

Reminds of another thing to love about our CIC: he always remembers to thank military families as well as our military. Although the line “They also serve who only sit and wait...” referred to soldiers not immediately engaged, it always seemed to fit families of our military and first responders. Well done, Maryh! Thanks and especially well done to your DD!

 

[Maryh]

Reminds of another thing to love about our CIC: he always remembers to thank military families as well as our military. Although the line “They also serve who only sit and wait...” referred to soldiers not immediately engaged, it always seemed to fit families of our military and first responders. Well done, Maryh! Thanks and especially well done to your DD!

Thank you!

 

[CaryC]

Vietnam vet here, at least classified that way.

Never deployed to Vietnam.

The 2d Armored Division was tasked to be the point of the spear in converting, The Morning Report DD Form 1 from paper to computer, in 1973. For those that don't know, it's a report submitted almost every morning on the status, and accountability of every soldier in a company, or at least "was".

I mention this in relation to one of the points of Gen. Matthis. I was part of a group of 10 men, that worked at Div. HQ, with writing the program, data analyst, and liaisons with the company clerks. They kept the 10 of us together for the full mission, which lasted almost 3 years. No transfers in, or out during those 3 years.

It worked out really good. We got a Presidential Unit Citation. It was the first time in the history of the Army that the 2d AD, or any unit had a 99.99 % rating of troop accountability. We knew where every soldier was, out of 15,000 men.

Keeping the 10 of us together, sort of bonded us concerning the mission. We each knew what the other was looking for, and needed without being told. So when we handed something up the chain, or down the chain, it was a complete package.

Less bumps in the road, etc, etc. I don't see why that wouldn't work in a field unit, like Infantry.

And as a special note: me, and my wife, are fixing to go through our 3rd deployment of a son to a "combat zone". leaving for Syria on the 25th. The second for his wife.

 

[Jeff B.]

What's old is new again.

When I was a Battalion S3, I had the task of integrating CTT, SQT and ARTEP training into our training schedule and exercises. You'd be amazed/alarmed at the number of skills (on all levels) that many Officers and NCO's felt they inherently could do. Usually, giving one a try showed that the only way to achieve proficiency was to do something. The ADC of the 10th MTN DIV(LI) at the time, Colonel Mike Plummer spearheaded that initiative. Training briefs (on overheads, before PowerPoint) with him were always entertaining in one way or another. I used to wonder if our BC was going to get himself worked into a state preparing for these. In almost every circumstance that I recall, Colonel Plummer asked good questions and if your response wasn't what he wanted you got a bit of guidance, but in most cases, he simply wanted an honest and accurate answer.

As I retired from there as did Colonel Plummer, I expect that as the Clinton and later Obama Administrations came into power that many things not related to Unit's roles came into play, diluting the time available for training and focusing on different priorities.

Also, a note on readiness reporting. That was another of my tasks and from my days as an S4 became familiar with it. When asking some of the older Officers and NCO's about the reasons for USR's, I was told (never verified, but sounds reasonable) that when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted and there were large scale movements of Divisions to Florida and the Gulf Coast, military brass was shocked at the numbers of vehicles that were towed to deployment areas. What little reporting had been done was pencil whipped and many units were actually far from "combat ready" due to this. In my time, falsifying a USR was something that you simply did not do, even though the pressure to maintain your ALO rating was intense. An example... Mech Infantry Battalions had 2 M88 Tank Recovery Vehicles on their MTOE. This was a "low density" piece of equipment, as such, you could only afford so many days "Non-Mission Capable" (Out of Service) on your USR or it would drop your rating. I participated in many fire drills to requisition, borrow, trade or otherwise procure necessary parts to keep those beasts operational (track shoe and pads often) and maintain, properly our rating.

Equipment is just one aspect of readiness. Staffing is another and training is yet another. It's difficult for someone who hasn't been in the military to understand how complicated and difficult it is to maintain even a Battalion, let alone a Brigade or Division.

Jeff B.

 

[Millwright]

I participated in many fire drills to requisition, borrow, trade or otherwise procure necessary parts to keep those beasts operational (track shoe and pads often) and maintain, properly our rating.

We kept tabs our "unauthorized excess", during IG inspections it all got loaded on a 5ton and the driver went on a "linen run"...all day.

 

[Blue 5]

It would be great if they finally stopped forcing personnel to PCS every couple of years...the financial toll alone of having to move households makes it detrimental to retention and morale. Unit cohesion would definitely improve as well, and in some cases technical expertise would no longer be lost when personnel PCS. For example, when I was assigned to Vandenberg AFB back in the 90's as a new forecaster, it took me 6 months of hard work to get certified on all the space range-specific systems and procedures while also learning all the unique meteorological phenomenon of the Cali coast. However, I loved the assignment and would have stayed as long as they allowed me to remain. When I was forced to PCS 3 1/2 years later, I took all that knowledge with me but much of the system-specific experience didn't apply to my next assignment so I had to start all over in that area. It was very frustrating for me, and I'm sure it's a story repeated all across the military today.