Patterson Trips II

Last week about forty Patterson students and faculty visited Fort Knox, which is currently the home of the US Army armor school and of a basic training facility. In addition to some time at the nifty high-tech firing range, we were able to talk extensively to the drill sergeants and to the armor students and instructors. Some observations:

• It shouldn’t be surprising, but the extent to which almost everyone in the Army has served in Iraq is remarkable. Almost all of the drill sergeants, officer instructors, NCO armor instructors, and captains (Fort Knox has both a captain’s and a lieutenant’s armor course) we spoke or met had combat patches from Iraq, and many had been on more than one tour.
• In relatively short conversation with the captains, I found a multitude of different backgrounds; one guy had joined the Army at 32, after previously having a standard MBA white collar career. Another had gone to the Air Force Academy and transferred to the Army after finding he liked what the Army did better. Another had enlisted before college, and returned after. Another was standard ROTC. I don’t recall meeting any West Point grads…
• The captains in particular were exceptionally open to discussing their Iraq experiences, and to discussing the general issues (both strictly military and military-political) surrounding the Iraq War. None were particularly dogmatic about any aspect of the war.
• The most interesting bit (for me) came from the meeting with the drill sergeants and their commanding officers. They discussed how basic training has changed in the last six years, and particularly in the last three. They emphasized the training regimen is determined through an iterative process of interaction between drill sergeants returning from Iraq, and more or less informal exchanges of information from officer to officer and NCO to NCO. I found this very interesting; it suggested that the basic training regimen at Fort Knox might be different than that at Fort Sill or Fort Benning, simply because the training personnel had different experiences and different contacts. I asked about this, and the major acknowledged that it was a problem; particularly in the last three years, soldiers arriving for their first assignments might have different skill sets depending on where they were trained. Apparently there’s now a move to re-centralize training doctrine, which of course has benefits and drawbacks; the local iterative process has the advantage of producing recruits with immediate, up-to-date skills, while the centralized process means that NCOs in Iraq and Afghanistan can depend on new soldiers all having a particular set of skills. It’s a trade-off, and one thing that I found particularly interesting is that in this discussion of transformation and training revision NO ONE mentioned FM 3-24; indeed, while the captains we spoke to later in the afternoon knew about it, none we spoke to had read it.

Sadly, we didn’t get to see the gold…