The Army released its “Training for Full Spectrum Operations” field manual in December 2008. A few short months later, work had already begun on revisions.
The increasingly complex battlefield is prompting the service to rethink the way it trains for war. Troops can find themselves conducting offensive operations, defending against an attack or carrying out stability operations — building schools, meeting with local tribal leaders to help improve citizens’ conditions — all in the course of one day.
“It’s not specifically that you conduct offense, you conduct defense, then you conduct stability operations,” said Lt. Gen. Thomas Miller, commanding general of the First Army, Fort Gillem, Ga. “The approach is that those are always intermingled together … It’s just the dynamic nature of the fight.”
The revised “FM 7-0 Training for Full Spectrum Operations” will clearly lay out that it’s “not an ‘either or dilemma,’” Miller said at the Association of the United States Army annual conference.
“At 12 o’clock you can be conducting stability ops, and at 12:01 you can be in the middle of the biggest firefight,” he added.
To complicate matters, the amount of training time between deployments is relatively short — less than one year in some cases.
To organize training during dwell times, the Army has “mission essential task lists,” or METLs, which include core competencies and other skills that service members must master. In the past, commanders could simply check off the listed items that needed to be completed. That’s no longer the case, said Miller, who is responsible for training Army Reserve and National Guard units. The so-called “hybrid war” requires more items to be added to the METLs. Yet every aspect of offensive, defensive and stability operations can’t be crammed into 10 months of dwell time, he said. Commanders have to customize the lists and choose only the tasks that their units will need to know during their upcoming deployments. They need to learn these skills and “do them very, very well, rather than just go through a laundry list,” he added.
Furthermore, printed field manuals such as FM 7-0 are becoming outmoded. Web-based updates are the future. Printed matter is often outdated by the time soldiers receive it, Miller said.
The Army Training Network, a web-based information sharing portal that is still under development, will include lessons learned, tactics, techniques and procedures that can be shared in real-time, Miller said. The network will also facilitate discourse between units that are currently deployed and the ones that will replace them, he added.
“Everyone is savvy enough to know that everything we do has a very short shelf life,” he said. Officers who have already served in Afghanistan, Iraq or other areas of operation can’t assume that they’re old hands and know what to do. “Tactics, techniques and procedures change dramatically over a 12 month period.”
The enemy adapts, the unit gets smarter and better about the mission while it’s deployed, and higher commands may force changes as well, he said. Miller tells the Army Reserve and National Guard units: “We’re going to train you for the first 90 days, and after that you’re going to have to start adapting.”
Col. Mark McKnight, commander of the battle command training program at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., said his organization is revising training to meet these full-spectrum challenges. One change will be creating a balance among offense, defense and stability operations. There has been so much emphasis on stability operations that some offense and defense skills have atrophied in the higher ranks, he said.
“Some of our generations of officers may not be as comfortable as previous generations were in offensive and defensive skills at the division and higher levels,” he said.
His command is attempting to come up with the right blend of all three components. Current five-day training exercises may not be enough to show commanders the unintended consequences of not carrying out stability operations while simultaneously conducting offensive or defensive plans.
He currently needs simulations that can help demonstrate the second- and third-order effects that result from not paying the proper amount of attention to civilian populations while executing offensive operations.
Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, special assistant to the commanding general, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Monroe, Va., said that during his two tours in Iraq, his junior and noncommissioned officers were carrying out stability operations tasks for which they had little or no training.
“We are asking our people to do more than we have ever asked them to do before and it is extremely difficult,” he said.
That includes working in the small businesses and factories to help jump start local economies. “We had corporals and sergeants doing things in the business community that would just curl your toes,” he added.
Senior officers also require training for these nontraditional roles, he emphasized. He and his senior officers flew 19 Iraqi ministers and the deputy prime minister to Tikrit to meet with provincial officials. The idea was to prompt the national government to work more closely with the provincial government, which would in turn bring more services to the citizens.
“This was a major summit. Nowhere in our training base were we trained to do this,” he said.
Sometimes the training is right on the mark. Before deploying, senior officers on his staff carried out an exercise on a scenario where a local bridge was destroyed.
“We thought: ‘Come on, that will never happen. Give us a break.’” Within the first week after deploying, al-Qaida terrorists blew up a major bridge in his area of operations. It was back up and operational in 48 hours, which was important for local citizens to witness, he said.
“Divisions and brigades are being asked to do more than they have in the past, and frankly, we don’t have the subject matter expertise in our brigades,” Hertling said. “We have got to broaden our leaders to do more than kinetic operations and that’s tough.”
Staff officers used to take trips to battlefields such as Gettysburg before deployment. Today, they would be better served by field trips to cities such as Cleveland to see how their water plants, sewers, electrical grids and city councils work, Hertling said.
Besides negotiating with local governments and fighting insurgents and terrorists, officers have another element to contend with: interagency partners from the U.S. government.
The State Department, Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Agency for International Development are among the federal entities being asked to contribute more personnel and resources to stability operations.
Maj. Gen. Mick Bednarek, commanding general of the 1st Army east division at Ft. Meade, Md., said there are open questions as to who is responsible for training these interagency partners.
“You ask that question to three different people, you’ll get six different answers,” he said.
Culture clashes between the military and the other agencies are well known. Panelists expressed frustration about their civilian counterparts. Part of the tension stems from attitudes toward training. The military emphasizes it. Other agencies don’t hold it in as high a regard, they said.
“There is almost a cultural anathema against training in some of the other agencies that we work with,” Hertling complained. “It would be like telling a brain surgeon, ‘Hey, you’ve graduated from medical school, now never look at another book.’”
Part of the problem is that the military works on its own training cycles. Other agencies don’t have the same schedules. Provincial reconstruction teams — groups that are sent into theater to engage in nation building — are the sources of the most tension, officers said.
“If they’re not talking to us before the exercise or before going into an area, we’re going to have some pretty loose synapses I think,” said Hertling.
He described a situation where seven different reconstruction team leaders in his area of operation seemed to be going in seven different directions. A State Department employee he thought was sent in to sort out the situation didn’t see that as her role at all.
There have been steps taken to improve the coordination of training with interagency partners, said Bednarek. There have been a series of meetings with the provincial reconstruction team leaders to sort out their training requirements.
Col. Paul Funk, commander of the Combined Arms Center for Training at Fort Leavenworth, said some interagency personnel are trickling into the Command and General Staff College for intermediate training.
Miller said: “When we don’t get the interagency support that’s required, it passes the risks down to our soldiers and our units … It’s very frustrating. It requires a lot of audibles in combat, which is really not right.”
Some provincial reconstruction team leaders are linking up with brigade combat teams before deployment at the National Training Center in California in an effort to better coordinate the interagency efforts, he added.