Note: In the lengthy blog post that follows, I am talking small unit operations. Primarily, I am talking company and below. Warfare is not intrinsically different at this level. By that, I mean that it does not demand a different set of skills. All warfare (at least the human variety) demands the same skills, but the skills are applied differently.

As with an earlier, related thread, I hope that readers will pick this argument apart.

Counterinsurgency (COIN) operations differ from operations in a high intensity conflict (HIC) or peacekeeping operation. Our recent COIN operations have revealed shortcomings in training that preceded recent conflicts and training that has occurred since then. That probably sounds different from my earlier rants in which I assert that “war is war” and that warfare is no different at the boots-on-the-ground level, but I stand by my earlier position. Operating in a specific operation – or even a similar operation in a different environment – differs significantly from the top-down. Wait a minute, did I just say it is different? Wait for it. BUT, despite the big-picture difference in terms of ends sought (ex. restore governance in COIN versus destroy military forces in HIC), different operations do not differ from the bottom-up or demand different sets of skills. Different operations merely demand that the same skills be applied to a different situation. Some conclude that in current operations, which are taking the form of COIN operations, our forces are not performing satisfactorily because they lack “COIN skills” or other COIN-specific training. The problem is not that our Soldiers lack the proper skills. The problem is that they have not been taught to apply them to enough situations.

The problem is our training methodology. For decades, training has been broken down into tasks that provide an 80-percent solution to most anticipated situations. I think it is fair to say that our current situation was not anticipated by the decision-makers and the tasks that units focused on were not part of any 80-percent solution for what we actually encountered. The lesson here is not that we need to become better guessers for future contingencies. The lesson is that we need to train in such a manner that future success is not dependent upon how fortunate we are in guessing at what tasks we need to train on. That means abandoning the non-professional approach to training and focusing on training professionals.

The problem with training Soldiers on tasks is that tasks are situation dependent. Given this situation, you perform this task. Well, what happens if you encounter a different situation for which you have not been drilled on what task to perform? A Soldier cannot adjust to the unexpected if he only knows “what” rather than “why.” Thankfully, the American Soldier is better educated and seems to be more intelligent than most of his counterparts among the ranks of our adversaries. This has enabled him to better adjust to the unexpected than his slower-thinking opponents. As always, the American fighting man facilitates our incompetence by ensuring that the worst laid plans work more often than not. He deserves better. Rather than teaching tasks, we need to teach skills and how to apply them in pursuit of a desired outcome. Teaching tasks is lazy and sloppy. It is one-size-fits-all. Given this situation, you do that. As if anything in warfare is that simple.

Now, only three paragraphs earlier, I poo-poo’d the notion of “COIN skills” and here I am now touting the virtues of skills? There is a lot of confusion and equivocation with these words. Some of the “COIN skills” that I have seen offered up include talking through interpreters, interacting with civilians, adhering to escalation of force procedures, and similar things that I would classify as general skills or derivatives of skills that Soldiers already possess or should possess regardless of what type of operation they participate in. I spoke through interpreters in peacekeeping and occupation (prior to insurgency) and interacted with civilians in both situations. And anywhere there are civilians (to include a HIC fought between Kuwait and Baghdad) there needs to be adherences to EoF procedures. Before pontificating farther, some definitions are in order.

Here is a sentence from FM 7-0 Training for Full Spectrum Operations, paragraph 2-28 (page 2-6)…

”Soldiers well-trained in basic tasks—such as physical fitness, lifesaving skills, marksmanship, and small-unit drills—are essential to units confidently and successfully completing collective tasks.”

See any problems with that sentence? Physical fitness is a condition. Marksmanship is a skill or set of skills. The way that I read that sentence, task = condition = skill = set of skills = drill. I suspect that the rationalization to make that equality hold up would resemble the exercise of demonstrating that 2 = 1. We conflate tasks, skills, and outcomes. To eliminate any confusion – or mitigate it as best I can – let’s clarify some terms.

- Outcome – a desired state within a given time period, expressed in terms of the locations and capabilities of actors within the physical and information environments and the impact of actions or inactions upon those environments
- Task – a duty to be fulfilled by a specified time or by a time based upon an event (ex: clear room of threats and safeguard noncombatants upon direction of squad leader); a task may achieve or contribute to an outcome, if the task happens to be appropriate, though this is kind of like saying that a 5/16 wrench may fit a bolt, so long as the bolt is not a 9/16 or a 5/32
- Skill – the ability to readily and effectively perform a learned set of actions (ex: identify the quantity, type, and degree of threats and respond appropriately); a skill may achieve or contribute to a wider range of outcomes, piggybacking on the previous example a skill is more like an adjustable wrench or, at the higher level, like an entire tool box
- Drill – an exercise performed for the purpose of learning or refining a skill (ex: “ready-up” drills or target discrimination drills with multi-colored target shapes); a drill does not achieve an outcome; it assists in learning specific actions, particularly those involving motor memory

Wow, this is starting to sound like doctrinal nonsense written by a committee of Colonels. No matter. I will type until my glass is empty.

Let’s look closer at skills. A Soldier needs essential skills. He needs the ability to perform those skills (1) in a wide range of conditions, (2) in response to many external (non-environmental) variables, (3) in any physical environment, (4) in consideration of the information environment, and (5) in synchronization with his unit.

1. The ability to perform in a wide range of conditions can be viewed as the Soldier’s specifications. Think of equipment that meets certain specifications, such as heat, pressure, charge, and so on. The specifications of a Soldier are expressed in terms of fear, fatigue, deprivation, and injury and each will have a different tolerance for each type of stress.
2. The ability to respond to any external variable involves (1) an assessment of the variable (civilian, enemy, adversary, unknown, etc) to include the ability of that variable to exert influence upon your unit, (2) the speed and likelihood with which that influence could be exerted, (3) determining a proper action or inaction (preparing, employing, or not employing, a skill or skills) based upon that potential influence, and (4) doing so with appropriate speed and intensity to effect the desired outcome.
3. The physical environment includes visibility, temperature, humidity, type of terrain, and all of the factors that we learned to include in our weather and terrain assessment. These factors can influence whether a Soldier is operating within his specifications. For example, very cold weather may mentally fatigue a Soldier if he is not mentally conditioned to refuse to succumb to the discomfort. Cold can also deprive a Soldier of dexterity and sensation in his extremities.
4. The information environment is the sum total of expressed, implied, inferred, or interpreted information, whether accurate or not, that is available to actors in a given physical environment, as well as actors outside of that physical environment who have conduits to the information.
5. In synchronization with the Soldiers’ unit means not just moving according to the proscribed formation or adjusting one’s rate of fire, but also doing what is appropriate for the mission and intent, to include adjusting to changes in the situation.

Soldiers do not need a new set of skills. They need to know how to apply them in a wider range of situations. The guidelines above, in my opinion, are the standards by which a Soldier can be said to be truly well-trained. Evaluating him on tasks? I see very little value in it. When I trained my units, I always wanted to know “why” Soldiers were doing things, not the finer details of “what” they were doing. I was not concerned about their ability to perform a specific task, under a specific condition, according to the specific guidelines that some outside evaluator was looking for (who was that guy, anyway?). I preferred to ask questions in order to evaluate whether Soldiers were making sound decisions…

“Why did you fire into that building? Did you perceive a threat? What type of threat? Did you realize that there were civilians in there? Is a guy wearing a suicide vest in a building 50 meters away such an immediate threat that you need to endanger the lives of half a dozen non-combatants? You say you didn’t see any non-combatants – could you have seen them if you were in a different position? If you had been in that position would you have compromised local security?”

So how do you establish a training plan for this? How do you establish a training plan that briefs nicely when your objectives are purely qualitative and the instruction deals largely with abstract principles? Where is the objective measurement and quantitative data that we can use to demonstrate how effective training was?

The obstacle, as I see it, is that you have Colonels and Generals and their Sergeants Major worrying about data to quantify individual, team, squad, and section training. What the boss emphasizes is what gets attention. Unfortunately, this data is worthless in determining individual or unit readiness. I see no magic fix for this, other than to re-educate senior leaders. Training calendars should be full of white space, not full of evaluations. Evaluations for what?! You haven’t had any time to train!

In my ideal world, training exercises would have less ambitious goals dictated from above. Rather than seeking to be a “T” on X, Y, and Z Mission Essential Task List tasks, units need to have the freedom to run through scenarios that they are expected to fail so that their weaknesses are exposed. Then they need time for the Company leadership to set about addressing those weaknesses with appropriate retraining. The typical field exercise that I saw in my brief eight years was about 90% dedicated to running units through lanes in which they were expected to be a first-time “go” most of the time. In the event that they were a “no-go” they had to jump through their asses to quickly re-cock and try to immediately get it right. Retraining? Sorry, you should have shown up prepared – that was the attitude. There is precious little time for training so it is all dedicated to check-the-block evaluations that “qualify” the unit for deployment. We cannot focus on training because it eats up valuable evaluation time.

If there is little time available for training, then there is certainly less time available for After Action Reviews (AARs). AARs are part of training, I know, but I am breaking it down into action and after-action. The AAR is a great opportunity for leaders to pose the “why” questions. Establish what happened and what the actual and perceived facts were and then start prompting “why” to not only tease out the thought process that Soldiers applied, but also to determine if they understood what was occurring. Did they act upon bad judgment or bad information? Was the bad information due to their inability to make sense of the situation? Maybe the problem is not marksmanship or individual movement techniques, but the ability to assess the situation. Just one example of many.

I did see some improvement in preparation for later deployments. Leaders recognized some of the shortfalls in our training. They realized that we were not doing enough training in urban terrain, not incorporating enough civilians on the battlefield, not concerning ourselves enough with the second- and third-order effects of our operations. Unfortunately, their approach to addressing this shortcoming was not very holistic. They chose to select from a menu of tasks – again, failing to teach Soldiers the “why” instead of the “what” and failing to give adequate training time to small unit leaders. Although less time was spent doing Table XI and XII and more time dedicated to the shoot house and CQM, which sounded nice at first, the shoot house quickly turned into a safety exercise with some added shooting. Soldiers did not train, so much as they performed drills. Example: Enter and clear a room (that is almost empty, always corner-fed, that you’ve rehearsed twice before doing it with real ammo, under conditions whereby you have all the time in the world to stack outside the door and chit-chat about whether and when you’re going to enter). That is not training. That is a game of Simon Says.

Some of us worked to overcome these issues. There were a handful of Officers and NCOs in every unit that I served in who were determined to better train their Soldiers than what the chain of command was concerned with. But it should not be that way. A dedicated core of individuals should not be viewed as troublemakers for trying to train their Soldiers at the expense of evaluating them. Evaluations are not training. They are exercises to collect data on how well Soldiers can perform a drill.