Because of last year’s public tragedy regarding the space shuttle NASA is being forced to deal with the systemic failures in it’s own culture that make such tragedies inevitable. News reporting on the story lately focuses mostly on NASA’s bureaucratic antecedents as the chief cause. I suggest a similar catastrophe may wait in the wings of the U.S. Army’s training infrastructure.

Most intelligent counselors would probably agree that a holistic approach to almost any system construction, repair, review or whatever is likely to be the wisest course of action. It therefore should come as no surprise that the Army, in its attempt to transform its Officer Education System (OES), would take into account the entire spectrum of officer education and training from beginning to end. It may also come as no surprise to some, that the Army leadership responsible for this transformation is happily and collectively singing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" while riding this OES Transformation Convoy to Abilene.

Over three ago the group of Army colonels known as the TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command) assistant commandants met in the ballroom of the Chamberlin Hotel at Fort Monroe, Virginia (TRADOC headquarters) to be given the news that Army Chief of Staff General Eric K. Shinseki and TRADOC commander General John N. Abrams had decided that the Army initial entry lieutenant course was going to be transformed into something that would better prepare new lieutenants to assume their duties as "fighting" platoon leaders. What was needed was a "hooah" course – a curriculum that would imbue the "warrior spirit" into these young leaders. This course would be taught at the home of the Army’s Infantry School, Fort Benning, and would provide every new lieutenant with the common denominator "infantry" cultural ethos.

Since that fateful gathering in the Chamberlin Hotel, the transformational leadership has managed only to provide the American taxpayer with a bill – and not much else. Certainly, changes have been made. The site of the "hooah" course is now designed to be conducted at no fewer than four locations: Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Sill, Oklahoma; Fort Bliss, Texas; and Fort Knox, Kentucky. Of course, these locations are home to combat arms branches (Infantry, Field Artillery, Air Defense Artillery, Armor – respectively) so the "warrior ethos" is in no real jeopardy. This means, of course, that now there needs to be a training cadre established at four locations vice just one. The question being asked by all the branch schools now is: "We were going to have to surrender billet positions to Fort Benning that would leave us in a difficult manning situation. Now, with four locations to support, how will we possibly remain academically capable?"

The amount of manpower, travel, conference assistance and general administrivia in support of this endeavor is staggering when one considers just how precarious the whole OES infrastructure is. To begin with, the idea for the "hooah" course is said to have stemmed from the colossal failure of the Army’s pre-commissioning program that includes: the United States Military Academy (USMA), the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), boasting on it’s web page "The Best Leadership Course in America." and the Officer Candidate School (OCS). Essentially, the "hooah" course recreates what the cadets, students, and officer candidates should have learned during their pre-commissioning training. So now, the lieutenant curriculum, known as the Basic Officer Leader Course (BOLC) looks like this: Phase I (Pre-Commissioning) training on common skills, basic soldier skills, and providing a common warrior training experience prior to being commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Phase II (Warrior Ethos) training on common skills, basic soldier skills, and providing a common warrior training experience prior to attending the next phase of training. Phase III (Branch) training on the technical and tactical skills of the branch into which commissioned. Transformation of the pre-commissioning program as a means to avoid duplicative effort is evidently considered a lost cause. In any event, the BOLC will commence operation in FY 06 according to Accessions Command chief LTG Dennis D. Cavin (recently told to pack his bags by the Army Vice Chief of Staff, General John M. Keane) in a memo under his signature dated August 15, 2003.

Reviewing the details of Army senior leadership’s inability to manage a better scenario for the lieutenant training program may prepare the reader to absorb what is in store for the remainder of the OES conundrum. The two remaining parts of the OES holistic infrastructure are the Captains’ Career Course (CCC) and the Command and General Staff Officers Course (CGSOC). The CGSOC may already been practically replaced by its transforming entity known as the Intermediate Level Education (ILE) course. And since ILE costs more than CGSOC in manpower and resources, and since the BOLC costs much more than does its predecessor in manpower and resources, the CCC is on tap as the pigeon bill-payer. The trouble is, CCC transformation was recently put on hold – by at least a year – by order of the new TRADOC commander, General Kevin P. Byrnes. He has probably heard from many of the school commandants that the initiative in the CCC transformation is not much more than a bundle of failure and a miscarriage of true leadership. With much of the CCC transformation curriculum relying on Distributed Learning (DL), a program yet to produce any real and consistent substance after $1B investment and nearly nine years of trying, it’s no wonder General Byrnes is questioning the wisdom of its direction. Some are asking why Army captains need such a radical change in curriculum structure given their superior showing in the latest demonstration of war-fighting prowess from Basra to Baghdad.

Like NASA, the thing that may need transformation most in TRADOC is the HQ TRADOC bureaucracy. It’s not that the collective wisdom needed to bring about real transformational progress in officer training isn’t available within the command. However, senior leadership trumps wisdom. It doesn’t take too many back seat drivers to lose one’s way – it just takes a crew on the road to Abilene with a myopic bus driver. General Peter J. Schoomaker, the new Army Chief of Staff, will decide if General Byrnes can drive the TRADOC bus in the right direction. And General Byrnes will have to surround himself with the kind of leadership that can see a train wreck on the horizon and will tell him true. Which means that he may also have to do some serious transforming in the TRADOC headquarters, and not just with majors and lieutenant colonels.

One thing is certain – the Army OES is broke "big time." The captains’ course is under severe pressure to pare down from an average of a 26-week curriculum to something like four weeks in residence and four weeks DL. This is considered necessary to pay the bill for manpower and resources diverted to BOLC and ILE. BOLC is scheduled to kick off on the bet that it’ll be paid for and with the certainty that the Army’s pre-commissioning program will never pay the dividends it should. The tragedy of captains’ training is that, given that captains are called upon to serve not just as critical staff officers but also as the force’s company commanders, the consequences of what comes out of this transformation process won’t really be known until the crash, when the pundits will sit around and talk about how the real cause was the bureaucratic culture in TRADOC known as the "Abilene Antecedent."

Respectfully.

A SENIOR TRAINING OFFICER