Over the past year, the Army has added eight weeks to infantry one-station unit training and overhauled basic training.
And the Army plans to take it even farther, recently announcing that those changes will go into effect next year for armor units, followed by certain combat engineer jobs.
All of this is an effort to make soldiers in those close combat formations ready to fight from the day they arrive at their new units.
But don’t think that support unit training has been left out of the mix.
Gen. Stephen Townsend, the new commander of Training and Doctrine Command, told Army Times in a recent interview that while it’s not likely that advanced individual training for military occupational specialties such as signal, cyber and admin will be lengthened, they will see more soldiering, and their training will be more rugged, austere and geared toward fighting a near peer threat.
These changes dovetail with the larger effort across the services and the National Defense Strategy to shift focus from two decades of counterinsurgency to prepare for near-peer threats such as Russia and China.
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Townsend pointed to a recent culminating training event for signal and cyber soldiers in which they had to set up complicated communications networks and run those systems under the evaluation of their instructors, putting together the knowledge they’d gained in AIT.
But they did it inside an air-conditioned building with white lights and steady power. Not much different than a new unit showing up to a well-stocked forward operating base in a current theater.
The next classes won’t be so lucky.
That’s because FOBs are nothing but massive targets on the new battlefield.
“If we go to war against a near-peer adversary, we’re probably not going to deploy to some forward operating base,” Townsend said. “It’ll probably be some forest, some field. And those soldiers are going to be told, ‘secure your area and establish your activity.’”
So, across the schools, whenever possible, soldiers will be in the field more, doing their jobs in an expeditionary fashion.
That means those same signal and cyber soldiers will set up tents, string concertina wire, fill sandbags, pull security and run generators, all while building networks and doing their jobs under tactical conditions.
For some older soldiers, that’s simply a throwback to the old days. But for some of those who joined in the past decade, that’s a whole new way of doing business.
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For Townsend, a more than 36-year veteran of the service, it’s a way of training and deploying he’s seen throughout his career, most recently in Mosul, Iraq, where he led coalition forces to root out and defeat ISIS groups who controlled the city.
“Once we went on the attack in Mosul, all the coalition troops, American troops that were advising, we left the FOBs behind,” he said. “They lived out of their trucks, they lived in bombed out buildings, abandoned houses, rubble buildings. They would go in there and establish their command posts with whatever they had in their vehicles.”
Those are the big changes soldiers in training can expect across the force. But there are subtler changes that new soldiers will benefit from already in the works.
Townsend noted that the initial training for close combat soldiers is some of the shortest in the Army. That offered chances to lengthen it, providing a better soldier to the formations without extensive delays in filling the ranks.
But for linguists, signal, cyber and other tech-heavy skill sets, their schools can be up to a year long. There’s not a lot of room to lengthen training.
What they can do is increase soldiering within the schools. Over time, the tech focus in those training cycles led to a withering of the soldier or warfighter focus.
So, supply, admin and other support MOSs will see more combatives training, more physical fitness training and foot marching while they gain their technical skills.
“We are looking for ways to increase soldierization, warrior acculturation across AIT,” Townsend said. “We’re going to rebalance that so that soldiers don’t forget while they’re in AIT that they’re warriors.”
“I want those computer specialists, those admin, those linguists to feel like warriors,” he said.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
