By Ann Roosevelt
FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla.–The institutional Army must make adaptation an institutional imperative, said the commander of Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).
That means strategies must be more adaptable than they are today, Gen. Martin Dempsey said at the Association of the United States Army winter symposium here yesterday.
This is Dempsey’s third trip to the winter symposium with TRADOC as the Army lead for the conference this year.
The Army and industry must think “faster, flatter, more collaborative, and always resource sensitive,” he said.
Investment needs to be rebalanced, Dempsey said in response to a question from the audience.
It’s not a choice between investing in technology or in leader development, he said. It’s important that industry efforts focus on collaborating with the Army and on the conference’s theme–the importance of the small unit and individual soldier–while checking the investments in the president’s budgets and examining their own investments, he said.
Dempsey is already thinking of the near future–2020. “That’s what we’re responsible for and will be accountable” for, he told the audience. “We’ve got to take the mute off and up the volume on the near future.”
That also applies to the future years’ budgets, the Program Objective Memorandums, the POMs. “In the next four years, the next four POM submissions the (fiscal year) ’13-’17, the ’16-’20, we will build the Army that will be employed in 2020,” he said. That Army is being built in the full knowledge that the Army “will not be the Army we need in 2030,” he said.
Institutional strategies also must become more adaptable than they are today, he said. Concepts have to be revised every two years, and expecting “significant” reorganization redesign every five years. It means incremental modernization with five-to-seven-year procurement efforts synchronized to the Army generating force process.
It also means doctrine, training, and leader development needs to be revised every one to two years, which won’t be easy, Dempsey said.
If the Army clearly articulates what it needs, “you can deliver,” he told the industry audience.
At the same time, leader development is very important because those people are the ones who eventually are the decision makers, he said.
To emphasize that point, Dempsey said he visits the pre-command course at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. There, he promises students three things: the organization won’t be exactly what they need, the equipment won’t be perfectly suited to the task they’re asked to accomplish, and the guidance is usually a little late. This drew knowing laughs from the audience.
The Army needs to “win, learn, focus, adapt, and win again,” he said.
The TRADOC campaign of learning would start from the time someone enters the service and continue throughout a career, he said. It also means a convergence between the operating and generating force.
The future security environment will require the Army to continue with traditional knowledge, skills, and attributes, and also will require new attributes, such as “inquisitiveness, creativity, the ability to communicate more effectively, and the instinct to collaborate,” he said,
If people are the competitive edge for the ground service, then it’s only true if investments continue, he said. Thus, the Army needs industry to see opportunity and find the technologies to facilitate learning in an affordable way.
The Army strategy is not for soldiers to become jacks-of-all-trades, but to know their core tasks better than anyone else and be able to adapt to whatever is needed, he said.
Technology can provide prototypes to develop learning, where the goal is to provide training “when and where soldiers need it,” not where the institution chooses.
The goal of the continuous effort is to have soldiers who have trust and confidence in themselves and in their teams and are the masters of the most critical Army tasks and fully expect they will have to adapt in the future.
Training is the foundation for trust and confidence, Dempsey said, and is discussed in Field Manual 7.0, the premier service training manual released this week. “Just good enough is never just good enough in training,” he said.
Industry can help here, training scenarios that can replicate threats at home station and at training centers.
Dempsey envisions home station exercises using data from centrally managed databases creating complex and unpredictable environments. “I envision three to four training developers armed with two laptops,” he said. He envisions holograms and avatars for training. And he sees unmanned aerial systems to record field exercise performance voice and data. He also sees the in house ability to build applications and modify simulations for post-exercise efforts.
TRADOC is working on such things with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and is looking for other partners.
The last training revolution was built around combat training centers, Dempsey said. The next revolution in training must be built around a soldier’s home station.