Always Be Training: QMN070
Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster Newsletter, Monday, 25 November
(This week’s report is a 9 minute read)
BLUF: Corporate leaders come to the US military year after year to try to understand how its services are so effective at execution. Part of the reason for execution excellence is the US military’s approach to comprehensive planning, but perhaps even more is the US military’s focus on continuous, all consuming training. Led by it’s frontline managers and often taking up every minute of every day, developing and maintaining professional capability is the evergreen activity of American servicemembers. There are at least ten principles by which the US Army approaches and sustains its training ethos - which I’ll lay out for you here.
Green Berets assigned to 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) move to a landing UH-60 helicopter for extraction during a training event near Nellis Air Force Base. Photo by Sgt. Steven Lewis, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne)
Brady here. One thing many veterans notice when they reenter the civilian workplace is that the emphasis on continuous training isn’t what it was in the military. In the Army you’re always training no matter where you are, what you’re wearing, or what time of day it is. It can get old, but treating every event in the workday as a skill-building exercise has its advantages. I believe one of the reasons the US military is so good at training is that armed service is by nature, as legendary strategist Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart explained, “casual employment” - meaning that soldiers rarely get to actually carry out war, and spend most of the time preparing for its eventuality. This week I’ll examine the US Army’s ten principles of training to illustrate this military mindset around training - so that if you’re interested, and you should be - you can apply them in your own work. It’s important to note that I learned most of these lessons by working with Noncommissioned officers (NCO), or frontline managers and masters of training, on the job every day for 10 years:
Leaders are responsible for training: This seems obvious, but restating who’s responsible for success is a common feature of military roles - it ensures everyone knows who’s being held accountable for success or failure. As with the US Army’s Principles of Leadership, leaders are expected to not only take but seek responsibility for the state of their unit’s skill and readiness. A culture of accountability ensures that those requirements that might otherwise fall through the cracks in day-to-day life get addressed along with everything else.
Frontline managers train individuals and small teams: The Noncommissioned officer (NCO), or frontline manager, gets a ton of responsibility and authority in the US military - so much that it typically surprises civilians to learn how much they do every day. But having your frontline manager responsible for continuous training has distinct advantages. First, it’ll make sure time isn’t wasted and that training is happening all the time - they’ve got the clock, so they’ll make sure it’s fit in. Second, it ensures that the skills being trained are relevant and common-sense - though many of the tasks are governed by manuals written at headquarters, the frontline manager will make sure that it reflects what’s really going on at the tip of the spear every day.
Train to standard: Have you ever had a work training event where time ran out and you never got to finish learning the task? Staying effective in the real world is about establishing performance measures and holding to them strictly - regardless of time. As the goal of training is to develop the the ability to perform a task instinctively, regardless of the conditions, frontline managers understand that developing a level of mastery requires focusing on a few key tasks in the performance measures and getting them right every time. This ensures that time isn’t wasted, and even if the event is cut somehow cut short, the most valuable parts are covered.
Train as you will fight (or execute): As you can imagine, the conditions in which the military may have to operate can be pretty bad - and not just the weather. Re-creating the operational environment is a major feature of effective military training - and can look like depriving soldiers of food and sleep, enduring extreme cold or heat, or reducing the number of personnel or amount of equipment in order to simulate the realities of combat. These conditions might be extreme, but they’re often the reality in which leaders will have to guide their organizations, so military training attempts to ensure the tasks can be accomplished even in the worst circumstances. Also - much like a more-holistic version of state-dependent memory, training-as-you-fight can ensure critical considerations take place even though everyone’s tired, wet or hungry on the battlefield, because everyone learned them when they were tired, wet and hungry in the training area.
Train while operating: Endorsed by Ranger legend Command Sergeant Major Don Purdy in Rule 32 in his Rules To LIVE By, “hip-pocket training” is a term for short training tasks upon which the individual or unit can train when it experiences inactive periods in any situation. I’ve seen snipers train on medical skills on rooftops in Baghdad in between overwatch duties and machine gunners outside Kandahar practice radio operation in between turns in the turret on a Humvee. Training while operating often also looks like turning every mission into a training event as well - senior NCOs will often come up with tasks to execute across an operation and evaluate them as part of the After-Action Review (AAR) following the operation. You’ve achieved “living” this principle when your organization is always training, all the time.
Train fundamentals first: One of the best NCOs I’ve ever worked with says that an organization can’t go wrong as long as it’s focused on being “brilliant at the basics”. In a military context, this usually looks like basic soldiering, “warrior tasks”,battle drills, fitness, marksmanship, and a few occupational specialty skills (all often colloquially referred to as “shoot, move, communicate” skills). The idea is that organizations that are proficient in fundamentals tend to integrate much more easily into higher level, more complex organizational tasks. Keeping most training events focused on those tasks that are most fundamental to it’s mission ensures that it’s not only more adaptable to changes in the operational environment, but most effective in it’s core job.
Train to develop adaptability: Believe it or not, almost everyone at some point or another will have to to perform tasks successfully for which they haven’t trained. By mastering those few key tasks mentioned above under challenging and complex conditions that are always changing, your organization can learn to tackle those situations that they couldn’t plan for. I’ve seen NCOs deviate from great training plans when preparing for deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq in order to inject that variability that forces leaders to adjust on the fly and make difficult judgment calls.
Understand the operational environment:In order to build effective training events that replicate the complex environment that their organizations encounter on deployments today, leaders use a model called the ASCOPE PMESII-PT Crosswalk. First introduced on The Quartermaster Newsletter this past summer by Kevin Todd, this model forces leaders to consider Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, Information, Physical Environment, and Time factors for every training event, and to do so in terms of Areas, Structures, Capabilities, Organizations, People, and Events. This makes sure the background and inter-related activities in a training event are as complex and connected as they are in real life.
Train to sustain and maintain: Building endurance in both the organization and individual is key to success in military operations. Things often take and last much longer than expected, and materiel support can, and often does, get interrupted. This is as much about preparing for the worst possible scenario as it is building habits that produce consistent success. Care of equipment is something that must take place no matter where or when, so getting good and rehearsed at it while still under favorable conditions is key to good execution.
Conduct multi-echelon and concurrent training: Does your organization have trouble coordinating between corporate headquarters and regional and local offices? Of course it does - all organizations do, to one degree or another. Multi-echelon training is an approach that allows multiple levels of the organization to train on different or complementary tasks all at the same time. In a military example, this takes place when infantry companies (~120 personnel) are in a field training exercise, and a battalion headquarters (next level up, about 500 personnel) uses the opportunity to practice managing combat operations by managing the training period as if it were a stretch of missions in combat area. This saves time and it helps fix a lot of problems that naturally come up between seams in the organization.
You can find the US Army’s approach to training in Army Desk Reference Publication (ADRP) 7-0 as well as Field Manual 7-0, entitled Train to Win in a Complex World. And keep in mind that any veteran you meet today not only knows these principles inside and out, they’ve lived them for years. Guys featured here like Chris Erickson, Chris Papasadero, Herb Thompson and C.I. Reichel were masters of these approaches and carried them out daily. This military mindset of constant, continuous training is key to finding the time and willingness to adopt most of the models we promote here on The Quartermaster - consider making your frontline managers experts on training, and making training feature of everyday work, in order to bring about top-level execution in your organization. (BJM)
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THE NEED FOR COMMUNITY: Senator Josh Hawley’s Speech at the 6th Annual American Principles Project Gala, Wednesday, November 20, 2019 (with video) (5 min) “Suicides in this country are at their highest level since 1938. Alcohol-related deaths the highest since the start of World War One. And drug overdoses are at the highest level ever recorded. The numbers are even more startling for the young. The number of 15 to 24 year-olds committing suicide is greater than at any other time since the government began tracking the data over fifty years ago. For girls and young women, suicides rates have doubled during the 21st century. Doubled. Taken altogether, nearly 36,000 American millennials died “deaths of despair” in 2017 alone.There is now a death from drugs or alcohol or suicide every four minutes in this nation. These numbers, these lives cut short, are tragic. But they represent more than tragedy. They evidence a profound loss afflicting this country, and they summon us to a profound need.” (BJM)
GROWING UP IN SELECTIVE WARTIME: His dad has been deployed 10 times. This is his message to other military kids (5 min) “Davidson helps his mom, Elizabeth, whether it's holding his youngest sister or reading bedtime stories to his three younger siblings. But Davidson does more than read books. When he was 6, he wrote a book about what a military parent's absence means to a child. Davidson's book is finally coming out just in time for this Veterans Day. It's called "Brave for my Family" and was published under a pen name, Davidson Whetstone. His father illustrated the book. When Davidson was 3, his dad was wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan days before Christmas in 2013. "My Mom cried and I was pretty scared that my Dad was going to die," Davidson wrote in the book. "We got on an airplane to Washington, DC." (BJM)
REAL, HARD DISRUPTION: AI is coming for white-collar workers (2 min) “But when looking specifically at AI — which has the ability to interpret voice commands, recognize images, and make predictions and decisions — jobs ranging from radiologists to legal professionals and marketing specialists could find themselves with drastically diminished roles. "There are a lot of high-skilled tasks that will be affected by machine learning, and that's going to be very disruptive," says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy. Those with bachelor's degrees will be much more exposed to AI than their less-educated counterparts, countering the longtime recommendation that more education will insulate workers from this disruption.” (BJM)
Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.
KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)