US Army Chief of Staff Re-Ups on Training Centers

Group Editor Marty Kauchak reports on the US Army Chief of Staff’s comments on training during his 2021 virtual AUSA Global Next keynote address.

In attention-getting remarks, Gen. James McConville, US Army Chief of Staff, told AUSA viewers he wants to emphasize training for small units like squads, platoons and companies, rather than for larger formations, such as battalions and brigades.

The senior Army leader also solidified the role of the Army’s Combat Training Centers (CTCs) in service readiness (NTC Fort Irwin, California; Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, Louisiana; and Joint Multinational Readiness Center, Hohenfels-Grafenwoehr, Germany). The sites permit an entire brigade to go through pre-deployment training at once. He asserted the centers “are not going anywhere,” but significantly added, commanders should see them as the “pinnacle” of training – instead of emphasizing battalion and brigade-level preparation for the CTC deployments when they train at home base ahead of time. In a clear message to the Army’s training enterprise, he added, “The philosophy of where we’re going is focus on the squads, the platoons, the companies … to get them right.”

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The Army is issuing a flurry of new doctrines and strategies. Indeed, McConville added, in one instance, the Army will also implement a new system to schedule when and where units equip, train and deploy, called REARMM (Regionally Aligned Readiness & Modernization Model). That system should bring more predictability, he said, both for overstressed troops and for Army planners figuring out when best to modernize a unit’s gear.

And in a bit of serendipity, this 16 March the Army also released the unclassified portion its Arctic Strategy. Perhaps as a ‘teaser,’ the Army four-star rhetorically asked if a new CTC might be needed to best support future service personnel stationed in Alaska.