The document discusses the cyclical nature of military training and readiness over time. It argues that past approaches which treated training as a cyclical process led to diminished combat effectiveness. Instead, it advocates for an approach where units train based on their specific mission requirements and the conditions they would face in battle, from the individual task level up to large-scale exercises. This mission-focused training model improved readiness by ensuring skills were practiced concurrently and in realistic combat scenarios.

1. Cyclical Destruction of Readiness
In response to a response to a serving Army officer who noted that the cyclical nature of training and
readiness was cyclical, I differed as follows:
Readiness in the official example drops for over a year and barely makes it back to what they had at the
beginning. Why not start from where they are and make them better?
The concept of cyclical readiness/performance is a very old concept which was purged from the Army
after Vietnam because of the repression of combat effectiveness that it caused. In order to deal with
this bloody error, Systems Engineered Task and Performance engineering tied to specific missions was
borrowed from Strategic Air Command which they developed to deal with an inherent personnel glitch
that assigned less than the best pilots, Pilots did not want bombers. Transports were resume
enhancing. Fighters were macho.
Part of the exercise of the systems engineered SAC bomber force was the “operational readiness test”
inspection in which the wing or squadron was scrambled into a combat exercise without warning. Pilots
who failed were demoted and transferred, new guys got a double promotion and bonus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command_(film)
And the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkQr2T83UJc
And then there was Khe Sanh in which Close Air Support was Danger Close as was Combat Service
Support
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQjdNK6lhdM

2. About the time I was assigned as an instructor in Aerial Surveillance at the Army Intelligence School, we
were given an extensive study from DA that outlined for each MOS the tasks and occurrence by type
units. The tasks were defined into Action, Condition, and Standards (ACS). The Task orientation model
was a revolution from the subject matter approach as one used subjects to perform tasks. We had a
week long course called Order of Battle using an OB with the usual holes but without the fillings
somewhere else. This course was dropped because Order of Battle is a process, not a subject.
Fast forward past Relook, I was working for the Reserve Officers Association as Congressional Liaison
during a period when the Reserves were going to be scrambled again, and the Congress made it a
requirement that in order for an RC unit to be paid it had to have a bona fide mobilization combat
mission in order to be paid.
This lead to the Capstone program which linked every RC unit to mission to one or more Capstone
missions. Mine, as C), 304MI (USAR) was Capstone to 49th AD TX MG which was Capstone to III Corps

3. which was Capstone to NORTHAG for a corps counter attack mission in the North German Plain against
an Soviet force breaking through.
Army Doctrine under the Battalion Training Management Program required me to develop a Mission
Essential Task list drawn from the official list but as linked and enhanced by METT‐TC. This gave me a
mission focused list that required the 304th to be able to established a flexible and fast moving direction
finding and analysis base and capability requiring rapid rearward deployments (us in trucks, they in
tracks).
It also stressed traffic analysis only to the point of finding the flanks of a tactical net with a hint of what
kind of unit it was. This was not the extensive network and node analysis, and it had to be done fast,
and over ranges so great that relays by RATT rig were used to transmit call sign, frequency and azimuth.
Thus the conditions under which the tasks at all levels individual to division occurred in a highly mobile
environment that defied sequential subject matter slicing and dicing. It also created a conflict between
MOS related tasks and unit related tasks. IMHO using operation training funds for MOS placed personnel
before operations.
Despite the hindrances the end result was that all those Capstone together sought to create training
exercises in the Capstone METT‐TC, the larger the better. This was expressed in large scale CPX's in
which I as a G2 Intelligence controller for the 75th MAC wrote OPFOR plans for the conquest of
Northern Europe including a complete order of battle from which the pieces could be fed into the
exercise including call signs, frequencies, personnel, current equipment, et al.

4.
From this menu, I would feed the pieces not available from front line units into the chain of command to
influence their development of enemy disposition and composition, from which the unit had to alter the
balance between resource and demand.
This Capstone/METL process brought all parties concerned together to find problem areas and fix. These
included coordination with the Canadians and British in the NORTHAG mission. Included was the
relations of everyone in the COSCOM, and Army Rear in both CSS and Rear Area Security.
This gave rise to the single greatest rise in combat effectiveness the Army since the last successful war.
It took Kuwait, and Baghdad. The changes to the NORTHAG mission was merely a change in battle area,
while most of the carefully worked out processes did not change. One result. You can get your ID card,
and DEERs card at the local National Guard Armory instead of a transcontinental voyage to the Active
Army post that used to do this.

5.
The method of training for units, regardless of size, was to train in the context of METT‐TC and METLA in
exercises, the bigger the better. Size matters. Before Vietnam, infantry and armor training was hill top
goose egg oriented. There were squad sized hills, platoon sized, company size, battalion and higher hill
top goose eggs. One always pins the enemy down and maneuvered to the flank. This ignored the fact
that what a squad went after in a battalion size hilltop was not a squad sized hill top. In the 3AD in 64,
the fall and winter exercises at division and brigade level was the only place I got a different set of
conditions, tasks and standards from which I needed a set of SOP's that could be invoked in short order.
This hill top fetish was the legacy of Korea where there were only hill tops and targets. In the latter
stages of the Vietnam War, ARVN forces facing NVA forces in the Iron Triangle found that the Soviet
doctrine placed fire traps in between the forward elements on what used to be the flanks of the hill top.
None of the skills were circular or sequential. They were concurrent and spontaneous. Given that the
realistic, the sensory inputs include stimuli that activated the Autonomic Nervous System which were
recorded in the human data base. These were too complex to chart or graph except by the original
environment. This called for training to be a constant in which the SKA and METL of each successive
level became the function of the leader and NCO in charge. It put the NCO in charge of individual
training in what was called "hip pocket" training.
I focused my training on recreating a combat scenario the complexity of which I controlled to exercise
the unit. This started with the 304th in an assembly area in northern Germany with just bivouac was the

6. environment....which they were useless at when I assumed command. In three years I could be doing
electronic warfare direction finding against an advancing force and shift my SCIF and Headquarters to
another location to hit the SP in 45 minutes without warning and maintain control of RFDF operations
on the move and into the new area without break.
I enlisted in an Army in 1957 when #10 cans were used to blouse boots, shiny belt buckles front and
back and the indentation of paragraphs, along with properly prepared three ring binders was the
essence of combat readiness. I was a butter bar in an Army were combat readiness was the folder the
greeter on the training site had to show the visiting dignitary, and the number had to be right.'
For reasons I can only guess poorly the concept of concurrent task and performance oriented training
and operations based on the Unit METL which was derived from a specific order of battle in a specified
operation order was deliberately eradicated by Anal Retentive fascination with spit shine and
appearance. This took out a working system with the foundation of it all, real war missions. And,
Combat Service support abolished along with the hierarchy of general officer commands above Colonel.
The chain of command doesn’t have links for the chain.
There are mistakes being made in Afghanistan and Iraq that us fat old guys from the rag tag rabble that
was the Army in Vietnam would never have done. Vietnam was a system of dots and circles. Circles
were the range of the guns, dots were the troops. One never put a dot outside a circle, and rarely left
any dot without a bunch of other circles surround. It meant the two minutes after a surprise ambush
was initiated, artillery rounds would have been under way. That was not counting the mortars.

7. It meant that like several thousand years of combat experience called for taking the high ground, which
seems to have been transferred to the enemy.
The current absence of a Capstone like program linking unit to specific battle plan recreated the pre‐
Vietnam error of inventing the enemy, OB and all, in the training package. Absent the influence of the
larger picture, the smaller picture is irrelevant.
In 1942, the US Army in the Philippines folded like a wet sack in the face of inferior forces. They had
been subjected to a lethal dose of neatness.
The hatches of the Fleet at Pearl were open to make it less sweaty for the Inspection Party.
Gordon S Fowkes. M.Ed., KCTJ, LTC USA RET
110606
Saturday, July 04, 2015