Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 57

BACK TO THE FUTURE

An informal assessment of these exercises
indicates general advantages and disadvantages of
a regionally aligned training approach. The main
advantage is that this approach effectively synchronizes training in time, space, and by unit. However,
it seems myopically focused on maneuver forces
divested from the intelligence providers that should
situate their deployment. Another disadvantage in
the Pacific is that planners must determine how to
resource units over an expansive and noncontiguous region. One exercise participant reported that
as the 2nd Battalion transitioned from exercise to
exercise, soldiers often languished waiting for arrival of their equipment via contracted sea vessels.14
This countermanded their ability to train and rapidly respond to a contingency, causing one junior
officer to assess that Pacific Pathways “is minimally
achieving what it was briefed to accomplish.”15 Also
questionable is whether regional alignment is simply a move to solidify the “hub and spokes” alliance
system centered on the United States. This system
has provided security throughout Asia since World
War II, but it is under pressure from China’s reach
for regional hegemony.
Live-environment training. A live-environment approach expands the scope and audience
of training management to include soldiers with
less common military occupational specialties that
support intelligence, including analysts, teams,
and other capabilities.16 A pillar of the integrated
training environment, through live-environment
training soldiers can face real-world problems to
improve their competencies while concurrently
facilitating the missions of combatant commanders.
It is important not to confuse live-environment training with the Worldwide Individual
Augmentation System, however.17 The former approach attempts to build enduring command-support relationships to cultivate soldier competency
through on-the-job training. The latter forecasts
the need for augmentees and identifies candidates
to fill vacancies and niche requirements such as
collection management. Perhaps the most glaring
disadvantage of the live-environment training approach is its ad hoc quality.
Authors Gregory Ford and Ammilee Oliva, writing
for the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, state
MILITARY REVIEW  January-February 2015

the 25th Infantry Division uses “live-environment
training … to build capacity and capability within the
division’s intelligence warfighting function.”18 Ford
and Oliva assert that this live-environment training
program is largely predicated on “knowing who to
call.”19 Because of personnel turnover, it may be difficult—if not impossible—for senior leaders to replicate
the apparent success of this and other live-environment training across all branches and components of
the Army. Regardless of its ad hoc nature, live-environment training does help protect against a loss of
technical proficiency, in particular, by maximizing
training opportunities. In addition, it allows for decoupling the training of less common military occupational specialties from maneuver units comprised
mainly of infantry, armor, and field artillery skill-sets.
This is an important consideration given that a traditional CTC rotation risks subordinating the training
of highly specialized soldiers to the training objectives
of the maneuver commander. The increasing constraints on resources and time, caused by sequestration, can only increase this negative potential.
CTC-like training. According to Maj. David
Rowland, amid austerity, “brigades and garrisons will
need to leverage all available resources, necessitating collaboration among multiple Army commands
and requiring multi-echelon and multidiscipline
training.”20 In contrast to regional alignment and
live-environment training, this third approach to
training management replicates a CTC scenario to
certify deploying units using home-station resources,
third-party observer-controller-trainers, and a degree
of external support. Agencies such as the Training
Brain Operations Center, Joint Improvised Explosive
Device Defeat Organization, and Operations Support
Technology, Inc., provide the advantage of designing
realistic scenarios that are relatively affordable.21
Another advantage is that CTC-like training uses
mi