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Isn’t it time to revamp Marine Corps field training?
Exercises in which a Marine Corps battalion or larger unit participates— e.g., the Combined Arms Exercises at Twenty nine Palms, California, and the Team Spirit exercises in Korea—tend to provide very little good training, waste valuable training time, and squander material resources that could provide more training benefits if employed elsewhere.
The stated object of these exercises is to give all players realistic training and exposure to the fast-paced, tiring, and problem-prone environment of combat. In reality, the troops spend lots of time sitting around and waiting for higher echelons to make decisions and solve problems. The troops spend only a fraction of the exercise in tactical movement. What should be training for all Marines becomes training for the battalion staff. Because the exercise is a tactical scenario, concurrent training during idle time is usually not allowed. Time that is not spent training is boring and can lower troop morale. Some would say that this is how combat really is. Battle is not continuous. But do we need to practice how to wait?
Another troop morale-reducer is the “rehearsal” of an assault one morning so that it goes well in the afternoon when the observers are there. The rehearsals are just like play rehearsals:
They prepare the players for a staged performance, and deviation from the script is not encouraged. Budding junior leaders are not given the opportunity to get lost, or to feel their way. Instead, the route is carefully walked beforehand, and sometimes marked, with every movement practiced so it looks professional to the observer. The troops see through this sham—they joined the Marine Corps for action, not to be actors in a play produced by the battalion
staff and watched by the opening night critics.
The exercises in the Delta Corridor at Twentynine Palms are the same each time. It is common practice for key members of a battalion staff to observe another battalion’s combined arms exercise before deploying their own battalion to “the Palms.”
The story is similar every year at Tok Sok Ri, Korea. The same beach is used over and over again, and the inland objectives are attacked the same way each time. Each attack, command post, and logistics site are based on “what they did last year.” Although a large extent of this is because of political limits and agreements on the use of land in an already crowded foreign country, the rest is nothing but grandstanding—it is not combat training. Why else would a permanent, concrete reviewing stand have been built overlooking the landing beach at Tok Sok Ri?
The live-fire portions of these exercises leave much to be desired. It doesn’t take a lot of gung-ho motivation for the troops to sit in their holes and watch the air strikes two miles away. Likewise, listening to the artil-
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create some original ones. It will be the unexpected, unorthodox moves by the enemy that will hurt us in combat, because we’re trained to fight only an orthodox opponent!
Marines are motivated and willing to learn. Time, ammunition, and away- from-home-station training opportunities are scarce. As Marine Corps leaders, we must make the most of these resources, abolish the show-time aspect, and train our troops as only we know how.
me either, but...
- Double sea pay.
- Eliminate the basic allowance for quarters.
- Double the time in grade requirements for all promotions.
- Restrict commanding officer evaluations for promotion purposes to “recommended” or “not recommended.”
- Eliminate all promotion boards.
- Base all promotions on the results of competitive exams.
- Combine the administrative and operational chain of command so that operating forces are tasked only from a single source. The good book says: “No man can serve two masters.” The Navy hasn’t picked up on this tenet of basic leadership yet.
Most of the Navy’s woes can be attributed to too many chiefs and not enough Indians, ill-defined chains of command, and too much time spent on education that there is no time to use.
If the aforementioned suggestions are implemented, the Navy will save enough money to buy two new carriers and have enough left over for a beer bust. For their planes and air crews, we could buy the Thunderbirds from the Air Force for one carrier, and put the Blue Angels on the other—those guys have been goofing off for long enough anyway. It’s time to get them back on board ship, earning their keep.
There is nothing wrong with the U. S. Navy that can’t be fixed, and I’m confident that the men to do it are already on board. Good luck to you, Shipmates!
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