Your Pro Citizen Newsletter 71: The Realities of Training for Professional Citizens

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Some of you aren’t going to like this.

It is unlikely the majority of individuals and teams in the readiness community are training with a purpose, much less managing their training programs. There, I said it. We can be as motivated and driven as Goggins, but practicing tasks with intensity and consistency does not directly equate to mission focused training. Individuals and small units in the community will conduct some truly great events; well-resourced and planned…but are they nested inside a larger training plan? From a big picture standpoint (big picture meaning your anticipated mission set) are you getting what you need out of your individual and collective training?

Any training event is resource intensive in some way; at least they are if done properly. Planning, preparing, resourcing, executing and then consolidating the lessons learned to apply to the next training event all take time and effort. Time that is limited by competing demands of normal life. The opportunities to gather your teammates together on a regular and consistent basis are not as plentiful as we would prefer. We must be deliberate and understand what we are trying to accomplish; training objectives must be clear and support a master training plan. Training is not a half-assed effort to check some imaginary block. We can ill afford to do things in the readiness community just to say we did them. It does not make you “high speed” to say you conducted a squad live fire exercise when in actuality it was an absolute unfocused goat rope when you executed it.

Many of us witnessed examples of skewed training focus during the mid 2000’s. Bandwagon fringe “trainers” readily sold out classes that promised to do all the high-speed stuff for unsuspecting Citizens. Four-man stack CQB brother, hell yeah! 2,000 round count two day carbine class man, better jump on it before it sells out. But what were the desired training outcomes from this madness? Was the average dude supposed to go back and teach his family the team CQB he learned as his ears were still ringing from the ‘9 bangers in the shoothouse all weekend? It is easy to self-inflict this flawed approach, we must be ever vigilant and see ourselves when it comes to training focus. It is not enough that we are doing things right, the second and more important part of the training equation is are we doing the right things?

Remember that three prong approach we always talk about in The Project; “see the terrain, see the enemy, and see yourself”. We have to take an honest pill and approach our training plans with eyes wide open. This brutal self-awareness will keep you and your group focused where they need to be.

Approach to Training

The absolute expert at training and training management is the US Army. I’m a bit biased of course, but there is not another organization on the planet that can put together and manage training like the Army. Don’t misunderstand this, they still have the uncanny ability to be their own worst enemy as well, training distractions and stupid stuff abounds. But when you get down to it no one else comes close on the scale and success rate the Army has. The thing that sets them apart is the process and framework that all leaders use (or are supposed to use). I have seen it done well and I have seen it done not so well over the years. My perspective is one of having planned training for my fire team as a young TL all the way through planning and resourcing training events for 15,000 soldiers as a division G3 trainer. I have seen it all…both good and bad training. Training events that had dudes come off lanes with well-earned pride and events that were so poorly executed they left units emotionally broken.

The one constant that separated great leaders from the pack was they expertly managed their training by following the training management process and framework. They always attacked the training problem set with an eye for detail and “would fight to train”. What does that mean for you and me as regular Citizens?

Challenges

High performing Regular Army units are good at what they do because they plan long term to stay in the “band of excellence”. What this term refers to is maintaining proficiency at a required level during the ebb and flow of training events through time. From division level organizations all the way down to individuals combat skills atrophy over time if they are not trained constantly. It is the old “use it or lose it” saying. Professional units such as the Ranger Regiment are peak performers because they are highly resourced and train relentlessly. The very bottom of their training band of excellence is most likely higher than peak performance of other non-specialized Army units. They have professionals who are always near the peak performance. Many of us are familiar with the feeling. For example, coming out of a two day defensive pistol class your confidence is high; the physical skill set has been honed for the last 48 hours. You are at peak performance for that skillset. Maybe a week goes by, then two, then Christmas and you finally go to the range after a few months. Your 25 yard B8 target now looks like a Wolf buckshot pattern. What happened? You failed to stay in the band of excellence and did not maintain the skills required for the task. The expectation cannot always be one of the post-class performance we talked about, but there has to be a training plan to maintain the minimum level of skill to stay in the band.

Time. A large factor in failing to stay in the band of excellence after you learn a skill is time. We humans are good at rationalizing things and declaring “I don’t have time” but usually this is not the case. What we don’t have is the driving desire to use our available time. Setting this human factor aside there is legitimately a finite amount of training time available. Compared to the massive number of skills needed to support the community defensive/preparedness/readiness endeavor the available time is microscopic. We don’t have the luxury of wasting training time on tasks that have a low probability of execution. The obvious approach is to down-select skills that you deem essential and prioritize them for your training. The dirty little secret is out of all those essential skills you will only be able to maintain proficiency on very few of them at any given time. And for those few you must execute them over and over each year to stay in the band of excellence. It is starting to make sense how this can get away from us isn’t it?

Too many tasks. Coupled with the limited training time available the sheer number of tasks we need to learn is a challenge. This is where mission essential tasks come in. These are the tasks you no kidding have to accomplish to be successful. There is a good philosophical argument to be made against this approach, if a task exists as a task is it not essential by default? If it isn’t mission essential, why does it need to be trained at all? Let’s look at it like driving a car. What are the bare minimum tasks you must do to get from point A to B? It probably boils down to start, steer, and stop. If you can do those three things you can accomplish the mission (the mission being get from A to B). The non mission essential tasks for get from A to B would be things like parking, driving in special conditions, putting fuel in the car, driving backwards etc. These supporting tasks are still important and should be trained, but we can achieve the core mission without them. The key is defining your anticipated mission in clear terms and prioritize training those tasks first (and more often) to maintain proficiency. For us in the Citizen world we cannot cast a wide net over the task choices and expect to maintain proficiency. It is humanly impossible unless you are training every day of the week and have an unmatched personal budget.

Summary. What is the answer? Only you can assess your anticipated task list, so the answer is one wrapped in ambiguity. My advice is to be honest with yourself and have reasonable (but still high) expectations from your training. From a small unit standpoint, I would rather have a well trained fire team who has done nothing but formations, techniques of movement, and the standard battle drills for the last 12 months. Link that with a few familiarization sessions on supporting medical and commo tasks and that unit will be far ahead of a “train on everything” approach. The team who does LDA crossings for an hour, a one-off shooting class, poncho rafts for a weekend, then an FTX with a live fire is probably not doing any of those tasks very well. Can we afford to have ourselves familiarized with mission essential tasks or do we need true proficiency? How do we define and measure this? All complex questions with complex answers. Start by determining what tasks really matter and focus there for your training plans. To quote Gunny Highway “ok let’s keep it simple. You have your weapon, you have your boots, at least you can walk into combat”. We will dive deeper into the details of how to build and manage training later this year, but I wanted to give you something to consider as we enter the summer training season.

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