Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 58

to Rowland.22 In addition, Rowland says that
“Company A, 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment …
received multiple iterations of cordon and searches, key
leader engagements, ambushes and raids (including an
air assault) over the course of the three-week exercise—all intelligence driven.”23 The 109th and 502nd
Military Intelligence Battalions provided intelligence
through their multifunctional teams.
Arguably, CTC-like training best represents the
integrated training environment. Yet, this approach is
undergirded by two key assumptions, the invalidation
of which could undermine its utility.
First, CTC-like training may not always facilitate
a higher degree of maneuver-intelligence integration.
During Gryphon Tomahawk, multifunctional teams
operated in concert with ground forces. Unfortunately,
they did not integrate as early or as often as needed,
nor at all necessary echelons of command.24 The extent
of the integration often pivoted solely on capabilities
briefs delivered to the maneuver commander, usually a
platoon leader.25
Second, CTC-like training presupposes the
availability of training management proficiency not
always present across battalion and brigade staffs
comprised mainly of company and field grade officers. Gryphon Tomahawk demonstrated, according
to Rowland, that “a high-quality training exercise
is possible at home station given thorough planning
and an adaptive and creative staff.”26 However, it
also showed that competency for planning, preparing, executing, and evaluating training represents
CTC-like training’s soft underbelly.

Training Management as a Lost Art
Among 100 promising captains recently assembled by Gen. Odierno during the inaugural Solarium
Symposium at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., mid-July
2014, one officer expressed a desire for junior leaders
to become “the experts at training that we [in the
Army] once were.”27 Even given innovations embodied by the regional alignment, live-environment, and
CTC-like training management approaches, there is a
shortage of training management expertise across the
captain and major ranks.
If accepted as true, this statement begs several
questions. What factors explain an erosion of training management expertise among company and field
56

grade officers? What lessons can senior leaders extract
from this lost art to animate the Army’s operating
concept? More specifically, what measures will enable
the Army to go back to the future to capitalize on the
integrated training environment?
Three factors help explain how training management became a lost art: ARFORGEN, the lack of
training management education within the institutional domain, and inconsistencies regarding how to
enable mission command in a home-station training
environment.
Army force generation. Senior leaders instituted
ARFORGEN in 2003. This constituted the single
greatest transformation to the Army’s readiness system since the Cold War. ARFORGEN serves as both
a supply-based and demand-based process designed to
systematize the progress of units through three force
pools called RESET, Train/Ready, and Available. At a
bureaucratic level, ARFORGEN represents more of
a “process of systems” envisioned to sequence, synchronize, and optimize disparate “organizing, staffing,
equipping, training, deploying, sustaining, modernizing, and mobilizing” systems.28
The extent to which ARFORGEN has streamlined
these systems is debatable. Col. Rodney Fogg, in a
strategy research report for the Army War College,
argues that ARFORGEN is misaligned with the
Army’s personnel management system—resulting in
a delay, if not a loss, of development opportunities
for junior and mid-grade officers.29 Fogg observes,
“the cohort of leaders developed in combat over
the last decade has become proficient at operating
within a fast-paced and rapidly changing tactical
environment.”30 At the same time, Fogg states that
they are “less familiar with how to use their skills in
the more regimented, policy-driven and regulated
environments while … in Army garrisons.”31
Lt. Gen. Michael Tucker, commander of First
Army, more directly criticizes the hidden costs of
ARFORGEN, particularly among company and
field grade officers. In a 2011 article, he writes that
much “unit structure and training competency that
existed nine years ago are no longer present.”32
The institutional domain. The institutional
training domain—professional military education,
in effect—should be the medium through which to
cauterize the hemorrhaging of training management
January-February 2015  MILITARY REVIEW