Stop Wasting Infantry’s Time: Mattis Task Force

Mattis' intent is spot on: increase the lethality of close combat.

As a former grunt, I'm all for more training, new ways of training, and less non-value add time sucks.

Mattis. Really like the direction he is going here.

As a retired infantryman I support Secretary of Defense James Mattis imitative and generally think the six points raised in the article.
1. End death by PowerPoint:
2. Stop peeling potatoes: Use infantry soldiers for infantry tasks -focus on the essentials.
3. Train like the pros: Update outmoded training and keep the close combat skills.
4. Add virtual training: where virtual training makes sense it should be applied for leaders and soldiers alike
5. Report real readiness: that is going to be challenging - readiness stovepipes will need to be reshaped.
6. Keep troops together: Important yet challenging. Minimum of 4-yera enlistments will help ensure units are together for three years.

"Speaking Wednesday at the Association of the US Army, undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness Robert Wilkie pointed out six problems the task force wants to fix, any of which would be a major effort on its own:
1. End death by PowerPoint: Over the years, well-meaning bureaucrats have layered on one training requirement after another — briefings on everything from highway safety to personal hygiene– that it cuts into training for actual combat. Wilkie, a reservist, estimated he spends 4.5 days of his 14-day annual training on such briefs. Now the Secretaries of the Army, Air Force, and Navy (which includes Marines) have all agreed to systematically cut back these mandatory training requirements.
2. Stop peeling potatoes: When commanders need someone to guard the base gates, run the gym, or perform some other mundane task, they often look to the infantry. After all, if you take mechanics or other technical troops away from their tasks, equipment quickly starts breaking down, but if you take grunts away from training, the damage isn’t obvious until wartime. The task force is working on a “workforce rationalization plan” to have civilians do such work so soldiers and Marines can concentrate on combat.
3. Train like the pros: As a Marine Corps general, Mattis once noted that infantry training hadn’t changed much since World War II, which he found unacceptable. Special Operations has led the way in borrowing training techniques from major league sports — personalized coaching, scientific nutrition, and constant repetition with careful monitoring of both physical and cognitive performance. Not everyone can qualify for special forces, but regular Army and Marine Corps infantry can replicate this kind of intensive, scientific training.
4. Add virtual training: Instead of reading PowerPoint or peeling potatoes, troops need to spend their time on realistic training — but field exercises are expensive, time-consuming to set up, and limited to the environment around the base. Fighter pilots and vehicle crews use simulators to train over and over in a wide variety of scenarios, many too dangerous for real-life training, before they go to the field. The Pentagon is now looking at VR and augmented reality technologies for the infantry as well. Mattis wants infantry to fight “25 bloodless battles” before they ever face real life-or-death combat, Wilkie said.
5. Report real readiness: Today, units spend a great deal of time counting the countable — how many troops they have, how much equipment and supplies — but that doesn’t capture the qualitative factors that make a unit ready for combat. “Clearly at the small unit level, the readiness reporting system fails us,” the chair of the task force’s advisory board, retired Maj. Gen. Bob Scales, said. He recommends a system that measures how much time troops spend in realistic training and how many have qualified in key skills. Wilkie’s office is working with all the services on how to assess real readiness.
6. Keep troops together: Since World War II, the military has treated troops as interchangeable parts, moving individuals from job to job, unit to unit, base to base. Career commissioned and non-commissioned officers in particular pay a penalty for staying too long in one job under a system known as “up or out.” That might have worked in the draft era, Wilkie said, when thousands of unmarried conscripts came in and out every year, but it doesn’t fit a force of long-service volunteers with families. It also breaks up the tight-knit teams that make a unit effective in battle.
This reform will be the hardest because it requires not just new orders in the Pentagon but revising venerable statutes like the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA) of 1980. “We can work with Congress to address that,” Wilkie said, “keeping units together longer, creating the team muscle memory necessary for success.”

FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC Orlando Illi Lt Col Charlie Brown Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price CPT Jack Durish Capt Tom Brown MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SGT (Join to see) Sgt Albert Castro SSG David Andrews Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. CPL Dave Hoover SGT Mark Halmrast SPC Margaret Higgins SrA Christopher Wright

The one point that definitely comes to mind for me is keeping troops together,as the 4th Division was being reactivated back in the sixties,I along with many other got to train from Basic to our arrival in Vietnam a period of about ten months,we knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses from long hours on the bivouacs and assorted ranges of Ft. Lewis that closeness was invaluable in the combat situations we faced during our tour,if you read any Military history you will find the Regiment system of the Old British Army where units were from the same towns and villages retained their cohesiveness under fire and displayed esprit de corps as a unit .