Harmonizing the Army’s Security Cooperation Doctrine
aggregated into an overarching problem statement, which when
solved can have a profound impact on both efficiency and effectiveness of Army training and SC activities.
The first is “How Does the Army Efficiently Ensure Readiness
in Offensive, Defensive and Stability tasks?” Here the Army
must balance its appetite for rigor and realism with the budget
realities confronting readiness. The Army must also decide
what level of proficiency the Army must maintain on a perpetual basis. Looked at from a different perspective, this can also be
viewed as what level of risk in readiness the Army is comfortable
managing. Here it is clear that the CTCs remain an important
part, along with home-station training, to ensure readiness. The
Army must make difficult choices about how completely it can
replicate the environment, resource training units, and provide
feedback to training units in the form of observers and instrumented After Action Reviews (AARs).4
The second problem is “How Does the Army Provide U.S.
Training Partners to conduct SC without causing an associated
degradation in U.S. readiness?” Envisioned SC activities do not
include entire units, but usually leaders. Separating leaders from
their units reduces the unit’s ability to train as well as eliminates
leader ability to engage with subordinates in a manner which
reduces accidents, discipline problems, and loss of standards.
Envisioned SC activities often lack the rigor of U.S. training and
focus on small units or individuals. This dynamic makes it unlikely that U.S. units will be able to sustain readiness at company
through brigade echelons while conducting SC tasks. Here the
Army must ensure that quality resourced soldiers and leaders
are made available to conduct SC, forging positive relationships
with selected partner militaries, building professionalism and
capability. Simultaneously, the Army must prevent units from
becoming “hollow,” where the lack of leader presence negates
the unit’s ability to maintain or gain readiness.
The third problem is “How Does the Army Provide an Appropriate Coalition Environment to Units Training at CTCs?”
Neither the U.S. Army nor Forces Command (FORSCOM)
has ready access to multinational (MN) forces. The Theater
Armies have access to MN forces within their region, but lack
the CTC’s training venue. National Guard Units have access
to MN forces via the State Partnership Program (SPP) but have
focused efforts abroad and have limited access to CTCs currently. SC activities have traditionally been conducted in foreign
countries for a variety of reasons. Most significantly, foreign SC
has facilitated U.S. Army access to multiple countries, improved
the Army’s cultural skills, has served as a form of economic aid
to these countries thus making these activities attractive to the
host nation, and is less expensive than sending entire MN units
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to the United States for training. All of these concerns are valid.
These concerns are exactly why they have conducted SC abroad,
and have been the answer to question two above. But the Army
has never successfully answered question three except in Europe
at the JMRC and even then the solution was largely enabled
by NATO’s role in Afghanistan and the fact that JMRC is on
foreign soil.
If the Army decides that all three of the posed questions are
important and valid, then combining the three into a broader
problem offers an opportunity to solve several problems with
one manageable solution. The combined problem statement
is “How Does the Army Conduct SC Activities at our CTCs
while SC partners simultaneously provide the MN/Coalition
Environment our training units require?” The solution to this
problem is to force SC activities to occur within the United
States both as part of home-station training but more importantly as part of CTC rotations. It also means that the JMRC
should be viewed and used as a Coalition training center able to
conduct SC