Military Review English Edition January-February 2014 | Page 77

H A R M O N Y I N B AT T L E
We suggest that the development of a logical
BCT training progression includes three crucial
components:
● Time set aside for senior brigade leaders to
consider their long-range training path as a group.
● A dedicated block on the training calendar that
gives the BCT commander an opportunity to see
every company commander in action.
● Zealous application of a commonly overlooked training step–retraining to standard.
This article offers one approach to a BCT’s training progression and the logic behind it.
Company-level combat readiness requires a welldefined training progression where our officers and
noncommissioned officers are repeatedly exposed
and trained to employ modern weapon systems.
Not unlike any professional athlete, the professional soldier must receive repetitive training on the
fundamentals before transitioning to more complex
schemes. Our teams must first learn the science of
employing fires platforms and then develop the
more complex art of synchronizing those fires with
maneuver. Brigade combat team leaders should be
comfortable with employing all available fires and
integrating all available platforms under pressure.
If we expect our leaders to confidently control and
employ indirect and direct fires in combat then we
must routinely construct stressful training scenarios
that develop this critical warfighting skill at home
station.
For more than 12 years, we have fought a different kind of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, one that
demanded extraordinary maturity and insight into
the human dimension of conflict. As a military, we
now find ourselves asked to prepare for a very different threat. The more conventional threats associated with high-intensity combat have now joined
the more familiar asymmetric threats associated
with counterinsurgency operations. What we face
now is a hybrid threat environment. Our challenge
is to prepare ourselves for decisive action while
sustaining the skills hard earned from a dozen years
of war. The fundamentals of training that were such
a clear focus through the 1990s are now unknown
skills for those below the sergeant major and battalion commander levels.
It is no longer a given that young company
commanders and first sergeants have the practical
experience to train and prepare for high-intensity
MILITARY REVIEW

January-February 2014

conflict. As a result, the more seasoned senior leaders within BCTs have to teach them how to train and
prepare. Cycles have developed in many corners
of the Army where collective training events are
of questionable quality—the emphasis is often on
simply just getting soldiers through the training.
Developing the individual skills crucial to collective
training proficiency is too often a missing building block in our training progression. A holdover
approach from the Army force generation era exists
that includes an unrealistic six-month program to
reach company-level training proficiency. Yet, we
are no longer tied to the stringent time constraints
placed on us between Operations Iraqi Freedom
and Enduring Freedom deployments.
The impact of this holdover effect is that time is
too rarely carved out for a disciplined adherence
to the eight-step training model (see figure below).
Although leaders are quick to identify areas for
retraining during a live fire “hot wash” (a debrief
conducted immediately after an exercise with the
participants), rarely are these identified weaknesses
addressed with dedicated retraining time. The
standard Friday retraining and recovery approach
is no more than a hand wave. In speaking with our
young sergeants, they lament the constant thrusting of their teams into one collective training event

Eight-Step Training Model
1. Plan the Training
2. Train and Certify Leaders
3. Select the Training Site
4. Issue a Complete Order
for Training
5. Rehearse
6. Execute
7. After-Action Review (AAR)
8. Retrain

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