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NCO training overhaul on the way

Sgt. Justin Reagan is a paratrooper with 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.

A year ago, he returned from 15 months in Iraq, where he performed the duties of a squad leader. In November, he will be promoted to staff sergeant before leaving for a second Iraq rotation.

Reagan has led troops in combat doing a job above his grade, yet he only recently completed the Army’s most basic leadership course for noncommissioned officers, the Warrior Leader Course, for which there is a 25,000-soldier backlog.

The NCOs above him, Reagan said, showed him the ropes.

“Ever since I came into the Army, my squad leaders and platoon sergeants have set me up for success,” he said.

Reagan and others like him are the kinds of soldiers the Army is targeting in a wide-ranging overhaul of its NCO courses.

By September 2009, near the end of what Army Secretary Pete Geren designated as the “year of the NCO,” leadership courses required for NCOs’ promotion will have been redesigned and infused with the kind of studying, critical thinking and problem-solving normally found only in officer training.

Courses will stay the same in length and reflect the broad combat experience among NCOs.

“The requirements on NCOs today are so much greater than they used to be. They can’t just say, ‘Fall back on your training,’” Sergeant Major Academy commandant Col. Donald Gentry told Army Times.

The Basic NCO Course will become the Advanced Leader Course, and the Advanced NCO Course will become the Senior Leader Course. Each leadership course will undergo an overhaul to catch up to the experience level of the soldiers attending them.

Gentry said senior NCOs will emerge from the Sergeant Major Course with an officer’s strategic and operational understanding of the battlefield by studying the same lesson plan as Intermediate Level Education for majors.

Gentry and SMA Command Sgt. Maj. Ray Chandler are collaborating now with course development specialists at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., to make the change to the Sergeants Major Course.

Training like officers

Starting in August with Class 60, sergeant major candidates will be challenged to get out of their tactical comfort zones and learn leadership at the operational and strategic levels using the ILE syllabus almost word for word, Gentry said.

With the infusion of the same blocks of training that officers get, he said, “the sergeant major will be able to take on additional duties so the commander can go on and help take care of a lot of these complexities. That becomes key in this teaming because we’re all in the same fight. Everybody’s got to progress.”

More than 700 senior NCOs attend the Sergeants Major Course at Fort Bliss, Texas, each year.

The details are not yet complete, but Gentry and Chandler are working to incorporate almost all aspects of the ILE course, except for things such as electives and courses that apply only to officers.

But the shift in bringing officer-like training to the NCO is not meant to change what NCOs do. Rather, it is intended to bring NCOs up to speed on the progression of battlefield complexities that officers regularly study.

“We don’t need a bunch of chiefs, but a better equipped force” that can execute what the commanders expect them to do, Gentry said.

The relationships between senior NCOs and commanders have morphed in recent years with the bond of combat, and some believe a commander shouldn’t make a decision without his senior enlisted weighing in.

“When a command sergeant major takes the reins, he is really expected to be the ‘everything’ guy,” said Sgt. Maj. Tom Peil, operations sergeant major with 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, at Fort Stewart, Ga. “The gap between what the sergeant major and a lieutenant colonel do has closed, and the dimension they operate in is much broader than before. It’s taken on a life of its own.”

Primed for leadership

Enlisted soldiers comprise about 80 percent of the force, and with Army leadership predicting at least another decade of persistent conflict, those soldiers, especially NCOs, will be called upon to perform increasingly sophisticated tasks.

Changes to BNCOC and ANCOC programs of instruction are already being tested at the NCO academies at Fort Knox, Ky., and Fort Benning, Ga., and will be incorporated at the Army’s 30 NCO academies by September.

In ALC, sergeants and staff sergeants will get trained in squad- and platoon-level tasks. In SLC, sergeants first class will be primed for platoon leadership and formally learn first sergeant duties in preparation for their next grade, even though many have already performed those duties in combat.

In both courses, a four-day field exercise is being replaced with multiple maneuver scenarios using simulators.

“Taking [these NCOs] to the field for four days and making them hump a ruck is probably a waste of their time and talent,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Clarence Stanley, commandant of the Armor School at Fort Knox. “But if I can run them through four days of simulations and make them run 40 or 50 scenarios over and over and over, at this point, I’m trying to stimulate their brain versus their feet.”

Instruction at Benning and Knox also includes discussion of the Army’s new operations manual, including the new stability operations doctrine. It’s not part of the program of instruction, but soldiers are required to read the chapter on full-spectrum operations and use it as a foundation for everything they do in the course.

“A lot of these Joes, you tell them, ‘Hey, we’re going to a fight’ — all they think is offensive operations, shoot them in the face and they’re looking to kill the enemy. They have no clue on stability operations, civil support operations and how important that is to the overall process,” said Fort Benning NCO Academy commandant Sgt. Maj. Zoltan James. “But they are going to get familiarization with it. They’re going to vet it, internalize it and hopefully, when they get back to their operational units, they can have a clearer vision of how things are going.”

Instruction at BNCOC and ANCOC, Stanley and James said, was always based on narrowly focused standards of repetition and memorization, which worked to get students to graduate but didn’t impart any critical-thinking skills.

“They could perform the task, but they didn’t understand the impact and how it connected two or three levels up,” James said.

When he took over six months ago, James said, the soldiers coming through the school were light years ahead of his cadre in experience and had more knowledge than what was contained in existing training packages. So now he hand-picks combat vets for his teaching staff, and together — using input from students — they are molding the curriculum to suit their needs for ALC and SLC.

For SLC students, James brings in lieutenants and captains from Benning’s officer leader courses to participate in command post exercises, giving training scenarios a “live” feel with real officers, who also benefit from the interaction.

In ALC and SLC programs, soldiers are given timed tactical training problems where they have to work through a mission objective and develop plans of action to achieve an outcome — an exercise usually only done by officers.

“They’ll probably provide a 50 percent product that wouldn’t be effective, but they take the learning process from that,” James said.

At Fort Knox, tankers in ALC who, under the old BNCOC, would have focused all their training on the workings of a tank and how to command it, are learning how to move a platoon out of an area when overwhelmed and how to do a cordon and search, an activity at company level or higher.

As staff sergeants, soldiers are now being taught how to conduct a raid, how to do tactical site exploitation and how to use and implement the availability of and characteristics of Army aviation, which is something they wouldn’t normally get until they were a sergeant first class or a lieutenant, Stanley said.

“Building intellectual capacity is like giving people a bigger battery so you have more to store and charge when you need it,” Stanley said.

“Our youth are much more intelligent in a different way than when I came out of school. Our children are educated differently, so we can’t just say, ‘Go out and do it because I said so.’ They’re inquisitive; they want to know the why. So we’re physically changing the Army training philosophy to what we call outcome-based training so they understand the why and the how and the actual experience of doing it.”