By Jacob Loftice
The best training guidance I have received is “be able to do the things you say you can do.” Having the capability to execute your assigned mission is central to a unit’s readiness. It can be tempting to treat aspirations as facts and oversell your unit’s capabilities. However, units that do this ultimately do themselves a disservice, missing opportunities to build and maintain true readiness. In an environment with ever-increasing demands on resources, finding training opportunities is critical.
The following discussion shares my former unit’s approach to building capability while at home station and under the direction of two different battalion commanders. The battalion described is an M270A1 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) battalion. The particulars will favor this type of unit.
Overselling Creates Missed Opportunities
It can be tricky to assess yourself accurately. No one wants to be the unit that needs something, but when a unit overstates its capabilities, it communicates to its higher headquarters that it does not need any more time, resources, or support to achieve its mission. When an external evaluation or a combat training center rotation highlights readiness gaps, that unit has to cram unforecasted training into the time remaining before deployment, or it has to convince a commander to assume the risk inherent in a lower level of readiness. The former pulls Soldiers away from families during a crucial transition. The latter can mean an increased likelihood of mission failure and dead Soldiers. Being honest and getting readiness right matters.
Unrealistic Training
As a field artillery officer, artillery qualifications are central to readiness. However, how a unit executes those qualifications impacts whether or not it can actually conduct combat operations. To meet the minimum requirements for a section qualification, a unit must only occupy a firing point and run through the required tasks and fire missions in a simple, administrative fashion. This means conducting all tasks and missions in daylight conditions, minimizing displacements, avoiding utilization of MOPP (i.e. chemical weapon protection) gear, and never fully testing their communications plan. While that unit might report themselves as qualified, it is inaccurate to say the unit is combat ready. It has not trained or tested its crews in complex conditions that mimic the battlefield.
Identify Opportunities
The good news is there are simple ways to inject rigor into training and build capabilities needed for combat. A mistake leaders make is to accept compartmentalization of efforts. By this I mean there is a tendency to separate training from maintenance, maintenance from reporting, reporting from training, etc., instead of recognizing them as interconnected. This results in a tendency to focus on tasks and functions in isolation rather than in concert with interrelated tasks and functions. What I learned from these two commanders is that when you operate in a resource constrained environment, you have to recognize and capitalize on opportunities to integrate different aspects of your training.
Ways to Inject Rigor
A typical week allowed two days with a battalion-level focus. Mondays were focused on equipment and personnel maintenance, and Tuesdays were focused on Digital Sustainment Training. We had already mapped out our field training exercises (FTXs) and the specific benchmarks we intended to achieve at each. In between FTXs we determined that by synthesizing efforts, we gained about a training day a week. This is important because for the Army, your training level is determined by assessing the number of training days required to achieve a “T-1” rating. Understanding the training days we uncovered, we determined the tasks we could train without extended field problems. We focused these days on collective and individual tasks that would allow us to focus FTXs on more complex collective tasks and mission sets.
Integrating Maintenance
For any formation reliant on tracked vehicles first developed during the Cold War, maintenance is part of your training. Leaders who do not understand maintenance and operators who cannot perform basic troubleshooting are readiness assassins. To help address this, each Monday we had leader-focused maintenance training sessions. The required audience was platoon sergeants, platoon leaders, battery XOs, staff primaries, and battery command teams. Topics were determined by our maintainers and recovery personnel based on trends or as requested by attendees. We planned these sessions quarterly. Topics included self-recovery, rearm, refuel, and resupply procedures, and proper preventative maintenance checks and services of communications equipment. These sessions lasted no more than 30 minutes. In addition to equipping leaders to understand common issues and solutions, these sessions made sure those same leaders knew which subject matter experts within the battalion could address follow-up questions or concerns.
These sessions improved Soldiers’ understanding of their equipment and their comfort with basic troubleshooting and recovery, allowing them to address minor issues and return equipment to the fight as quickly as possible. This had the added benefit of protecting the more knowledgeable maintainers from performing operator-level maintenance tasks and conducting basic troubleshooting. During FTXs, operators could handle a greater array of problems without having to call the recovery or maintenance support teams, allowing everybody to focus on the more complex problems presented by a field environment.
Capitalizing on Battle Rhythm Events
We centered our Tuesdays on Digital Sustainment Training (DST). DST is a dedicated time to test the equipment and procedures required for fire mission processing and command and control. What DST should do is build complexity over time and have set criteria each week. What it often devolves into is getting part of your communications up and running, executing a few dry fire missions in the motor pool, and going home just before 1700.
To make better use of this time, we identified opportunities to incorporate tasks we needed to train into DST. One consistent requirement for our unit was licensing vehicle drivers and road testing individual vehicles. Both of these require vehicles and personnel to leave the motor pool, drive a certain route, and return. Up to this point, this had been conducted in a disorganized manner and was the responsibility of individual platoons or sections. We recognized we could gain training value from centralizing this effort as part of DST.
We started by establishing the battalion tactical operations center (TOC) and the administrative/logistics center (ALOC). Batteries formed the vehicles and crews into convoys and reported their departures and returns. This occurred while fire direction centers (FDC) independently worked on fire mission processing tasks. As we gained momentum, we exercised staff functions and gained experience planning and coordinating across the battalion. We used a mock fire plan to exercise fire mission processing and tied this into scheduled convoys. Battery commanders assigned each convoy a leader who planned and briefed the route, tasks, and procedures. Each convoy provided the TOC trip tickets, convoy reports, and called up checkpoints to facilitate movement control and battle tracking. This allowed the battalion to validate these procedures from the Tactical Standard Operating Procedure (TACSOP). Additionally, based on the vehicles headed out on the convoy, the ALOC would have appropriate maintenance and recovery assets on standby or embedded in the convoys to gain experience conducting field maintenance and recovery operations.
Over time, convoys began to include battery and platoon operations centers, which processed increasingly complex fire missions over greater distance and across the entire communications plan. For added difficulty, this training could be conducted in times of low light, in MOPP gear, or with injection of unscheduled tactical tasks. For instance, batteries could train on how to conduct a field artillery raid, stage a self-recovery scenario, or respond to a mass casualty event.
This approach created opportunities to refine our TACSOP and gain experience with routine reporting, movement, and firing point occupations without the need for an FTX. For junior leaders, they gained experience leading movements, establishing firing capabilities, and briefing leaders. Commanders and NCOs had opportunities for coaching, teaching, and mentoring.
Again, this allowed us to focus field training on tasks and functions only possible in a field environment. What we saw was that vehicles stayed in the fight longer, mechanics and recovery teams were not overworked, and launcher crews and FDCs were able to establish communications more quickly and maintain firing capabilities more consistently.
Build Authentic Readiness
Training is crucial to building and maintaining readiness. While certain limitations will always exist at home stations, there are opportunities to build realism and rigor into training that replicate combat operations. The examples provided show an approach that capitalizes on controllable, routine events and avoids wasting valuable field time on simple tasks. Leveraging such opportunities builds authentic readiness and assuages any need to oversell a unit’s capabilities.
Jacob Loftice is a US Army Field Artillery Officer with recent experience as a brigade and battalion Operations Officer and Executive Officer. He currently serves as the Operations Officer for the Army Multi-Domain Targeting Center.
