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Army
Army to Create Education Programs for Soldiers Who Are Too Busy to Go to School
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By Grace V. Jean
FORT MONROE, Va. — Repeated deployments have kept soldiers away from schoolhouses. But the Army still believes there are ways to provide learning opportunities outside of the traditional education system, officials said.
The service recently launched a five-year, half-billion dollar effort to expand education and training options for up-and-coming officers who may have significant combat experience but not enough academic know-how, Army Training and Doctrine Command officials said.
Education is crucial for leadership development because it offers commanders time to reflect, dissect and understand situations they have encountered on the battlefield, TRADOC officials emphasized. The problem today is that more often than not, that time is being shortchanged.
During the Vietnam War, soldiers who became battalion commanders had graduated from the Army Command and General Staff College. Before becoming brigade commanders, they had completed further education and leadership training at a war college.
Today, deployments are given top priority, so there are brigade commanders who haven’t been to a war college and battalion commanders who have not attended the Command and General Staff College.
Officials believe commanders will have to contend with more nontraditional conflicts, such as stability and reconstruction operations, down the road. This requires leadership development of a different vein.
“We will need a group of leaders who in the future are more savvy about context,” the commanding general of TRADOC, Gen. Martin Dempsey, told reporters at the base.
The Army foresees a future where troops will have to wage war among civilian populations in the middle of humanitarian crises and complex circumstances, said Tom Pappas, who conducts studies in the command’s intelligence office. “The operational environment will demand a force that can respond to combinations of traditional operations, irregular tactics and criminal activity,” he said during a briefing.
Soldiers who can understand the context of that environment, act appropriately and adapt will succeed in the Army, officials said.
The Army’s five-year plan to invest $474 million into revamping its leader development program will strive to prepare officers to take command positions in those future conflicts.
Rickey E. Smith, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, pointed out that if the service remains in persistent conflict in the future, it may not have adequate time to develop its leaders.
One of the biggest challenges is how to balance the tour lengths with the shrinking opportunities for furthering troops’ education, said Col. Daniel Shanahan, director of the center for Army leadership at TRADOC.
The traditional tour for a battalion commander serving in Vietnam was six months. For Shanahan, his tour as commander of a combat assault aviation battalion was two years. He served for three years as brigade commander while many of his peers are spending as many as four years in the billet. A command tour length of 48 months means that the Army has only one officer that rises to general officer rank rather than two. “It narrows the pool of talent that we have,” he said.
The Army two years ago recognized that this was a growing problem. It affects not only those in the commissioned officer ranks but also those in the enlisted corps.
A total of about 59,000 non-commissioned officers are behind in their formal education cycles because deployments have delayed their schooling time, the commanding general of the Army Human Resources Command, Maj. Gen. Sean Byrne, said at the Association of the U.S. Army annual conference in Washington.
A similar trend is seen among captains in the force, he pointed out. Many of them experience a second deployment before being able to advance their studies. That problem is being compounded by an Army-wide shortage of 2,000 captains and 2,000 majors, he said.
One school of thought is that the repeated deployments are providing real-world education so combat veterans can get by with less schooling.
“That’s incorrect,” said Byrne. “They’re doing [counterinsurgency operations], not full spectrum.”
The Army is looking for ways to give soldiers more time off between deployments. Officials are attempting to establish a rotation cycle so that forces are deployed for one year and return home for two. The current ratio is about one to one.
In tandem with that Army force generation model, TRADOC officials are exploring alternate ways to educate soldiers by offering assignments outside of traditional Army schooling.
For example, when Brig. Gen. Edward C. Cardon, now deputy commander of Army Command and General Staff College, was a brigade commander preparing to deploy to Iraq, he felt uncomfortable with the job that he and his troops would face there: policing a city and rooting out insurgents. He went to New York City and spent time with counterterrorism authorities who went door to door conducting interviews and gathering data. “What he found in that four-hour experience changed the way he thought about collecting information in Iraq,” said Shanahan. After deploying to southern Baghdad, the techniques that he had learned helped him better execute the mission.
A brigade commander, for example, could come back from Iraq, attend a school of advanced military studies and then work at the State Department or other agency for a time before redeploying, said Shanahan. “He’ll have that breadth and depth that could help him be the best brigade commander that he could be,” not only in a war of bullets and bombs, but also in the non-kinetic fight of winning hearts and minds, he said.
Officials are grappling with how to structure such a program. Wendell King, dean of academics at the Army’s Command and General Staff College, said Army officials are in the process of identifying categories of assignments that would be comparable to a year of schooling in Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
At the college, classes are experimenting with technologies such as the Sony eBook to improve the learning process. Officials purchased the eBooks, loaded them up with Army field manuals and other classroom materials, and gave them to a section of 64 students to use for the year.
“We know we’ll end up with that as a solution, and we’re debugging it,” said King.
The Army also is evaluating iPhones, iTouches and other interactive media tools for use by soldiers in schools and in the field, said Smith.
Dempsey told reporters that the Army is seeking training technologies that can replicate the complexity of the operational environment in the classroom, at home station, at the combat training centers and in the battle zones. A soldier who has experienced multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan has acquired significant knowledge. When he comes home, “You can’t take him and sit him in a classroom and start throwing PowerPoints at him,” he said.
Any equipment that the Army procures for the future, including the next generation ground combat vehicle, must have embedded simulations in it so that soldiers can train on it, whether on post or during deployments, Dempsey added.
For now, the focus remains largely on establishing the leader development program throughout the Army organization.
“The Army that learns the best will prevail in the future,” Dempsey told AUSA conference attendees.
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