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Description
Attention to detail and technical competence always have been the hallmarks of the Field Artillery branch. However in the War on Terrorism (WOT), FA units have performed a wide variety of missions, arguably more than any other branch.
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Initially in WOT, the FA conducted missions using its core competencies. Beginning with the ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan to entering Baghdad and removing the Saddam regime, units have performed their primary mission of synchronizing the integration of all fires to support maneuver and delivering timely and accurate cannon and missile fires.
But things have changed since the initial phases of those campaigns. In the almost four years since entering Baghdad, FA units and personnel have performed a myriad of nonstandard missions, including being assigned areas of operations (AOs) as infantry task forces; providing training oversight to Iraqi Army, police and border police units; providing convoy security; performing base defense force operations; providing personnel for military training teams (MiTT)--and more. Field Artillerymen have performed these nonstandard missions and performed them well--a tribute to FA Soldiers and leaders.
While there are benefits that come with deploying to perform these missions (such as leadership skills developed to their fullest), there are costs. Soldiers performing these nonstandard duties have difficulty maintaining proficiency in their primary duties as Field Artillerymen and fire supporters.
The easy answer to this problem is "Conduct sustainment training." But that assumes units in WOT have enough time to conduct the training and have experience performing the tasks in their core competencies so "sustainment" training will be all that is necessary. In fact, many of our most junior Soldiers and officers have not performed their core competencies since leaving their initial FA training courses because of the high operational tempo (OPTEMPO) of deployments in WOT.
Degradation Documented. Beginning in 2005, the FA School, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, saw the impact of degraded core competencies in the officers returning to attend the FA Captain's Career Course (FACCC). The school's survey of the FACCC students revealed that more than 90 percent of these officers had not participated in qualification-table training. Additionally, more than half had not been involved in the execution of a live-fire mission since their FA Officer Basic Course (OBC) or FA Basic Officer Leader Course III (BOLC III).
Instructors had to provide remedial training to get the students to a level of proficiency to complete the course. Some may say, "Well, that's the instructors' job." But the question follows: "How much good will the remedial training do if the young officer goes to a unit and trains for and deploys to conduct nonstandard missions several more times?" The lack of experience-based knowledge is creating a "bubble" in the career progression of officers and NCOs.
As awareness of this issue surfaced, the FA School began to look for ways to address it in its instruction. One of the first initiatives was the "Rapid Redesign of the FACCC," incorporating more situational-based practical exercises on not only counterinsurgency tasks, but also FA core competencies. (See the article "Rapid Redesign of FACCC: A Four-Week Process for Updating Courses for an Army at War" by Major Robert A. Krieg in the July-August 2006 edition.)
In July 2006, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army tasked Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) that then directed the FA School to assess FA junior officers, given the mission to execute FA core tasks or assigned in other-than-FA-specific missions during Operations Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Enduring Freedom (OEF). The survey was to determine if they had degraded basic branch skills and needed additional or refresher branch training. Using the survey of... |
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