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July 28, 2004

The Challenge of Training

We started our first FOB rotation on Monday, which is one reason why posting has been sparse of late. To translate the jargon, the training preparation for the 116th Brigade involves five nine-day rotations through FOBs, which are the camps where soldiers stay in Iraq. Each FOB is designed to train the unit on specific tasks; ours focuses on gunnery and convoy tasks. Others will train them on FOB security, urban combat techniques, patrolling, and so on.

When the FOBs are active, we treat the unit as if they are actually in Iraq; role-players approach the camp in search of jobs or simply to chat up soldiers, terrorists try to attack the soldiers in the camps or in convoys to or from training, and local villages react to the presence of soldiers nearby. Units that treat the local population well are rewarded with choice bits of intelligence regarding terrorist attacks, while units that mistreat the local population can find themselves dealing with hostile locals in addition to terrorists and insurgents. The intent is to immerse them, as much as possible, in an Iraq-like environment (although the weather has been blessedly cool of late) so they can make their mistakes now, rather than when they're in-country. It's a challenging mission for everyone involved: the unit undergoing training, those of us tasked to evaluate them, and the many people who have to play the local populace and OPFOR.

For my unit, the big challenge is an old friend: ego. This is not to say anything bad about the training unit; while it's inevitable that you'll run into some knuckleheads when you've trained as many people as we have (I think we're over 10,000 over the past two years), the vast majority of the soldiers we work with are eager to learn all that they can before they leave for the war zone. (Doubtless the knowledge they will soon be at risk of dying helps to concentrate the mind; I know that it would for me.) But even with that incentive, people remain people. By which I mean, nobody likes being told that they're doing something wrong. It's embarassing, it's frustrating, and often the soldiers and leaders already know that they screwed up; having someone following them around and pointing those faults out to them can wear them down. And learning is much like the proverbial horse and water: we can provide information to the units, but only they can decide if they want to learn it. It is incumbent on us to make sure that they learn as much as possible, which means we have to be willing to learn how best to teach them.

A good trainer is as much a diplomat and a psychologist as he is a subject-matter expert. It's not hard to learn Army doctrine and to watch a unit and determine what they're doing wrong. It is much harder to figure out the best way to get the unit to understand what they're doing wrong without turning the situation into an us-vs.-them battle. A trainer who steps in after every mission and explains precisely what went wrong and why may be absolutely correct, but he's unlikely to get the unit to change anything. He may succeed in bonding the unit against him, but that isn't really productive. Instead the trainer has to be a guide, helping the unit towards self-discovery. He has to determine what appeals will reach the unit, both the leadership and the soldiers, and then use those appeals to point them in the right direction. And if he does it right, they'll think that they came to those conclusions on their own, giving them a sense of ownership that they could never have if the solutions were simply handed to them.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem we face: we have to diagnose the unit's problems, determine the best way to fix those problems, and find a way to convince the unit that it's in their best interests to do so without making them feel as if you're talking down to them or trying to tell them their business. So how do you do that? Well, that's the real trick, and I'll talk about it tomorrow.