Training logisticians in the objective force

Army Logistician, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Martine S. Kidd

Future conflicts will take place on an asymmetrical and noncontiguous battlefield, requiring increased agility, lethality, and survivability. One of the stated Army Transformation objectives is to reduce the combat service support (CSS) footprint needed to support this smaller, more mobile, and more rapidly deployable force. Consequently, future logisticians must support the full spectrum of military operations with greater efficiency than ever before. The Objective Force will require precise, distribution-based, focused logistics and better educated, highly trained logisticians, whose technical and tactical competence will become a decisive factor in fighting and winning our Nation's wars. A careful analysis of current training doctrine, compared to the future training concepts for the Objective Force, is needed to clarify the differences and understand where Army training is now versus where it needs to go in the future.

A lot of attention has been given to the materiel solution and the associated research, development, and fielding of equipment for the Objective Force and Army Transformation. However, the complexities of training have not been addressed fully, Objective Force training models are based on theory and concepts that deal only with how training will be done and not what that training will include.

Two central questions to be considered arc: How will the Army train and verify the critical skills and proficiencies of its soldiers and leaders? Given the immutable nature of war, are there certain immutable skills that are required of logisticians?

The Objective Force Training Plan

In October 1999, the Chief of Staff of the Army unveiled his Transformation Campaign Plan. Which outlined seven force characteristics: responsive, deployable, agile, versatile, lethal, survivable, and sustainable. These characteristics provide a context that has many implications for the CSS community.

How will we prepare Objective Force logisticians to master the anticipated changes in the battlespace, combat systems, communications architecture, and maneuver support plan? Training and evaluation is the answer. The Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) has identified three core professional military education domains that define the learning experiences of soldiers and leaders during their careers: institutional, operational, and self-development.

The institutional domain includes initial-entry training and all other forms of education and training offered on location at various TRADOC-sanctioned schools and by TRADOC mobile training teams.

The operational domain includes all learning accomplished during a soldier's assignments and while in the field, including rotations to the combat training centers, locally conducted training exercises, and operational deployments.

The self-development domain includes those courses of instruction a soldier pursues during his off-duty hours through distributed learning venues such as Web-based courses. Leaders support and monitor the development of each soldier's self-development program.

The training environment in which these domains will function has three components--live, virtual, and constructive.

Based on the current plan, most training will come under the operational domain, requiring unit commanders to plan, resource, and execute the training of their soldiers. The institutional training will be shorter in most cases, and the self-development domain will take on a more dominant role through required virtual, simulated, or embedded training simulations and correspondence courses that will be taken through distributed learning facilities and portals.

In response to the vision provided by the Chief of Staff of the Army and TRADOC, the Army Combined Arms Support Command (CASCOM) has drafted the CSS Transformation Training Strategy for Objective Force 2010. This strategy is an overarching initiative that encompasses the materiel, organizational, and training requirements envisioned for the CSS community of the Objective Force. A portion of the plan stresses flexibility and includes learning strategies and learning concepts that are nested with the professional military education domains and the training environments mentioned above. The learning strategies are

* Tacit learning management. CASCOM defines this as "explicit or 'first-hand experience' from the broad-based environment . . . [gained] out of experiences that have not been scripted into the training scenario or plan" CASCOM emphasizes that tacit learning experiences need to be captured and managed for use as lessons learned by all Army personnel.

* Knowledge management. This is the management of explicit and tacit knowledge, which is filtered through some form of information technology to improve the decisionmaking process of warfighters. Simply put, the Objective Force soldier and leader will be overwhelmed by data. A knowledge management system will break information into smaller, more manageable pieces, including the most critical information, and then turn it into knowledge that can be acted on.