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February 15, 2005

Go Fever Hits the Army

During the heyday of NASA, speed was of the essence. President Kennedy had sworn to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Accomplishing that goal meant wasting anything but time. Safety was never intentionally compromised, but NASA certainly cut corners when it believed it could get away with them, and they were not above taking calculated risks. From the Gemini 76 mission to 'All-up' testing to the Apollo 8 blockbuster mission NASA was willing to gamble when it felt it had to in order to meet the President's goal. The affliction was known as 'Go Fever,' the willingness to do whatever it took to hit the mark on the wall set by President Kennedy.

The Army has always impressed me with the ethic it instills in soldiers and units: the drive to accomplish the mission as long as there is any chance of doing so successfully. Give a unit a mission and its soldiers will drive on to get that mission accomplished unless it is absolutely physically impossible. If they're short some resources they need to accomplish the mission, they'll find a way to do it using what they do have. It's an impressive trait, and a necessary one in combat environments where the only resource that can usually be counted on is enemy forces. Unfortunately, I believe I'm seeing an area where that trait may be doing more harm than good.

Regular readers know that I have been deployed to Fort Bliss since June of last year training National Guard and Reserve soldiers for tours in Iraq. I believe that we have done our best to train those soldiers well, and that they left our care better-prepared for war than they were when we got them. But I also believe that we have not trained those soldiers as well as we could have. Not because we wanted to do anything less than our best, but because we have accepted shortfalls so often that we can no longer tell when training doesn't meet the standard.

Training units for Iraq begins with a list of requirements disseminated by FORSCOM (Forces Command). The list details tasks that individuals, squads, platoons, companies, battalions, and brigades must be able to accomplish to a P prior to going into theater. (The Army ranks all tasks trained as either Trained (T), Needs Practice (P), or Untrained (U). Trained means the unit is trained and has demonstrated its proficiency in accomplishing the
task to wartime standards. Untrained means the unit can not demonstrate an ability to achieve wartime proficiency. Needs Practice means the unit needs to practice the task because performance has demonstrated that the unit does not achieve standard without some difficulty or has failed to perform some task steps to standard.) Getting to a P on any one task isn't that difficult; some training and a practical exercise will normally suffice to reach at least a minimal P rating. But we're sending soldiers to war, so a minimal rating isn't really good enough for our purpose. Worse, the number of collective tasks we've got to train is huge: a company has to reach a P in 45 separate tasks prior to deployment. Given that we normally have only ~60 days to train a unit for deployment and that there are a large number of individual tasks to learn, mandatory classes that every individual must attend, equipment to draw, trains to load, and various other tasks to accomplish, reaching that P is a huge challenge.

The task list is not necessarily inappropriate; units in Iraq are called upon to perform a wide variety of tasks depending on where they end up. Yet by trying to make units jacks of all trades, we risk making them masters of none. The routine is familar by now: we develop a training plan that rotates units through selections of common tasks like mounted operations, dismounted patrolling, urban operations, and so on. Units go through each iteration and accomplish the requisite P at those tasks, then they move on to another lane and have to set aside what they just learned to assimilate the new tasks. By the end of the training rotation, units are reasonably proficient at the tasks they just completed, marginally proficient at the tasks from the station prior to that, and they barely recall tasks from earlier stations. The curriculum requires them to learn so many things in a such a short time they simply don't get the chance to repeat the tasks enough to gain long-term proficiency.

We then come to the question of resource shortfalls. The three Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) we've been able to use for training have been pale imitations of what units will have in Iraq, lacking proper protective devices and entry control points and constantly penetrated by civilian traffic through 'administrative' entrances that undermine the realism we strive to provide. The 'Iraqi villages' used to train units on urban operations are often little more than collections of Tuff Sheds. The vehicles the unit gets to train on are often markedly different from those they will operate in country, and we never have enough to equip the entire unit.

There are good reasons for all of these shortfalls. To build a single FOB that truly recreated those found in Iraq would cost millions of dollars and probably the better part of a year, time we simply didn't have when we began this mission. Building realistic Iraqi villages would likewise have required dollars and time we didn't have. And every vehicle we take for our training is a vehicle that's not available for operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. We can explain away all of our shortfalls, and we have.

Which is where the problem comes in. As time has gone by down here, we have lost more and more resources as the Army tries to divide a finite pool among its many missions. Each time we lose something, we protest the loss and figure out some way to do the mission as best we can without that asset. Less time to train? OK, we'll run more complex missions that force units to learn multiple tasks at once. No training set of vehicles for the unit? Fine, we'll give them our vehicles and evaluate them using GSAs or CUCVs. In each case, the motives are pure enough: we look to provide the best possible training to the units with the constraints we face while our superiors in the Army are trying to make the best use of limited resources. But I am concerned that the combination has created the impression that we can continue to train units just as effectively with fewer and fewer resources. And that just isn't so.

I am not for a minute arguing that the units we're currently preparing for combat are going to go to Iraq unprepared. The company commanders are solid and I think we've got as good a training plan as we can have given our constraints. But I would be lying if I said that our training was as good as it ought to be for soldiers going to war. Other requirements, for training units at the base, for units at other posts and for units going to war, and the hard math of a limited budget have combined to leave us short of many of the resources that could make this training so much more effective. Yet we keep on going, because just as for NASA in the 1960s, our deadlines do not vanish. FORSCOM gives us a date for every unit to deploy, and our mission is to get them as ready as we can in the time available.

So we will go on doing the best we can with what we've got. What makes the situation truly frustrating is that there's nobody to easily blame for the problem. I know for a fact that my superiors are pushing these concerns to their superiors in a bid to fix the problems, and I suspect that the people at higher echelons of the Army are aware of the problem but are doing the best that they can to fill everyone's needs to a certain minimum level. It's simply impossible for me to believe that anyone in the service is intentionally deciding to sacrifice the quality of training if there's any way to avoid it. Yet in some ways it's more painful to realize that the training is subpar in spite of everyone's best efforts, rather than because some people are failing.