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First Army preparing to reorganize training

First Army will consolidate its training sites and streamline the way it prepares soldiers for combat over the next three years.

Lt. Gen. Thomas Miller, commanding general of First Army, said he envisions going from 10 or 12 mobilization stations to six or seven, and focusing specific types of training at specific locations. Final details of the plan were not available because they have not been approved, but the move would allow Miller to alleviate some of the strain on his trainers and the equipment he has available for training.

“This rearranges things instead of trying to do everything at all locations,” Miller said. “It focuses the energy, but I’ve got to be aware that I’ve got to be able to flex it, too.”

For example, Miller said, he would like to use Fort Hood, Texas, to train most of the large logistical formations, such as sustainment and combat aviation brigades. Fort Bliss, Texas, could mostly work with military police and soldiers preparing to conduct detainee operations, and Fort Lewis, Wash., could be used for Air Force and Navy personnel undergoing First Army training, he said.

First Army, which has its headquarters at Fort Gillem, Ga., has a primary mission of training, validating and deploying reserve-component soldiers.

The organization must keep up, in real time, with what is happening and developing in theater while also preparing for the future and any contingencies, Miller said.

“I’ve got to make sure I’m investing energy in the long-term aspects of training the Guard and Reserve, which is not just training for [Operation Iraqi Freedom] and [Operation Enduring Freedom],” he said. “That transformation effort, to me, is keep your eye on the current mission but you must invest some energy into preparing for the future.”

In 2008, the 9,500 trainers at First Army prepared about 90,000 soldiers, airmen and sailors for combat, and Miller anticipates that load to remain the same this year even as troop levels change in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The decrease in forces in Iraq and the increase in Afghanistan — mathematically I don’t know what that means to me yet,” Miller said. “What you hope is the withdrawal in Iraq over the next couple years does in fact allow the reserve component to increase their dwell time. But obviously we’re not sitting here like potted plants. We’ve kind of been watching this and have done our own war-gaming so we will be able to respond to whatever [Forces Command] tells us.”

Of the 90,000 troops trained last year, about 65,000 of them were in the Guard and Reserve and almost 20,000 were sailors and airmen preparing to take on what traditionally have been Army missions overseas.

First Army also trains troops preparing to deploy to Guantanamo Bay, the Sinai Peninsula and Kosovo.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, First Army has trained more than 530,600 soldiers.

“We’ve essentially trained and deployed [a force equivalent to] the entire Army,” Miller said.

In January 2007, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that Guard and Reserve troops would be mobilized for no more than 12 months at a time. That meant the components had to start training their soldiers before they even went to their mobilization stations in order to maximize the amount of time, within that 12-month window, they spent in theater.

“The 12-month [mobilization] policy has put a great burden on the reserve components to do a lot more training than they typically have done,” Miller said. “We’re seeing units show up at mobilization station at readiness levels, to me, that we’ve never seen before.”

All Guard and Reserve units are training quickly enough that they are spending at least nine months on the ground overseas, he said.

Specialized training

First Army designs the training based on the complexity of the deploying unit and its mission, Miller said. The process is more complicated when units such as a brigade combat team or aviation battalion prepares to deploy, he said.

On average, brigade-level organizations spend 60 to 90 days at the mobilization station, Miller said. Battalion-level units need 45 to 60 days, and company-sized elements typically take 30 to 45 days to prepare before deploying, he said.

“Every organization gets a specially tailored training plan,” Miller said. “There’s no ‘one size fits all.’ “

First Army also relies on commanders in theater for guidance on what’s happening on the ground, particularly in areas such as rules of engagement, escalation of force, culture and language, he said.

“About 80 percent of the training would be pretty much the same based on the mission,” Miller said. “It’s the final 20 percent that you’re trying to provide the final flavor to where the soldier understands the uniqueness of [OIF] versus [OEF].”

One unique mission that recently was added to First Army’s training repertoire is preparing agribusiness development teams for deployments to Afghanistan.

The training program for the ADTs so far has been ad hoc because the mission is relatively new, said Maj. Gen. Mick Bednarek, commanding general of First Army’s Division East. But the training continues to evolve and become more refined as more teams are formed, and trainers are pulling together experts from the deploying team and its home state to help them address issues such as economics, agriculture, farming, soil and energy generation, he said.

When Col. John Smith, commander of Division East’s 158th Infantry Brigade, got the mission to train the Indiana Guard’s ADT, he raised his eyebrows, scratched his head and went to work developing a plan to combine war fighting with farming’s many complexities.

“I’m a boy from the city. I just thought it was a bunch of guys that were going to go out there and teach the Afghan farmers how to grow crops,” said Smith, who also trained ADTs from Texas and Tennessee.

Smith and his staff pulled together all the information they could about the first agribusiness teams to deploy to Afghanistan, enlisted the expertise of agricultural scientists at Indiana’s Purdue University and began to replicate Afghan farm land at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center near Camp Atterbury, Ind.

“There isn’t any manual, there isn’t any guidance of how to train agribusiness development teams,” Bednarek said. “What we did … is figure it out, put the concepts on paper, form them and then physically make it happen and execute it well above the standard that anybody ever expected.”

As the Army’s missions evolve in Afghanistan and Iraq, Miller said he is focused on making sure units continue to receive the training they need to deploy and fight.

“My number one objective is to keep everyone focused … regardless of the density of those forces that we may get assigned for training, and not let the idea that violence is decreasing in Iraq [lead us] to train with any less vigor,” he said. “We can’t get picked off at first base here. It’s still volatile. It’s still a combat zone.”

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Staff writer Gina Cavallaro contributed to this report.