Army School System

Total Army School System

WASTED TRAINING DOLLARS

By CSM A. Kemp Freund

MDARNG 70th Regiment (Leadership)
Total Army School System Region B
Regional Training Institute, Maryland Camp Fretterd, Maryland

CSM Freund is the Command Sergeant Major for the 70th Regiment as well as the Commandant of the NCOES School at RTI-MD. He is a graduate of Class 43, USASMA.

Currently all three components of the "Total Army" are having a difficult time retaining quality troops. We rack the problem up as a cyclic that we see during peace time. Unfortunately, when we strive for full time peace, we must therefore plan for a peace time Army.

Interested and challenged troops will stay in. Pay and benefits, appropriate family facilities and good medical care are all important to retention. My purpose in writing this article, however, is to push what the TQM people would call "Customer Service." I call it "Sergeants Business" and to my recollection the title I'm using predates TQM. Even more specifically, I'm aiming my comments at how we set our troops up for failure when we send them off to school without the benefit of proper preparation.

The Total Army School System (TASS) is relatively new and a majority of its students are from the Reserves and the National Guard. Besides obvious concern about the enforcement of standards, the TASS schools could well be the answer to shrinking training funds in all three components. We all need MOS qualified and properly trained soldiers and leaders. This is a common problem that we have to address Army wide.

In a perfect situation, if we have a soldier in need of a school we should be able to enroll the soldier and send him or her to the closest location. Currently that is not the case. If you are a full time soldier you may fly all the way across the country to a school and in doing so fly over several Regional Training Institutes (RTI) that offer the same course. The problem is that the RTIs are all run and taught by soldiers from the reserve components.

The reputation that some schools (or academies) earned, correctly, is cause for concern. Whether they were National Guard Military Academies or Reserve schools, standards were not always evident. It is not, however, sufficient to eliminate reserve component schools completely. New leadership and a new structure for reserve component (RC) schools have made a vast improvement over the schools of just a few years ago. Problems are not unique to RC schools. As a graduate of the resident course of the United States Army Sergeants Major Academy, I can attest to the fact that there are some problems in all schools.

Exceptions to policy do not always mean that standards are being watered down or ignored. One major problem in any military organization is that we can find standards in many, conflicting, regulations. The schools are no exception. Before we indict the entire reserve system it is imperative that we get the checks and balances in place and give them time to work.

Consider this. About one year ago most RTIs were state military academies. They had a Table of Distribution and Allowances (TDA) that supported their mission then. Now they have a mission change. Their old TDA was strictly Guard. Certain people held certain ranks. The instructor's qualifications were, in most cases, current to teach in that school. Now we completely overhaul the school system. The National Guard loses a significant amount of teaching locations in favor of those that meet the standards as prescribed by TRADOC and enforced by the proponent school (in my case USASMA).

Throw in the fact that most of the personnel under the old TDA are in a new slot. One that requires a different rank and in most cases a new school. Also add that the RTI is responsible for the "environment" and the administrative requirements while the instruction is now the responsibility of USAR instructors who were normally "hosted" at a location but running the school themselves. TRADOC tells the two components to work together as one unit under, in most cases, National Guard leadership. I needn't remind anyone at this point that there has been, in the past, a certain amount of rivalry between the two reserve components.

Ignore the rivalry. Set aside the political differences between two groups that routinely compete for the same money, the same new people and the same desire to maintain key flag positions to remain viable in the eyes of the Pentagon and Congress. Now we have to work together and maintain very confusing and frequently misinterpreted standards that are being "assessed" before the ink on the new TDA document is even dry. We don't have the time to qualify the instructors before we see evaluators. This practice equates to taking an Air Defense Artillery Battalion and reflagging it as an Infantry Battalion and expecting it to pass an ARTEP within a year.

All the while the dynamics of integration are going on, the course writers do what they do best. They change things like Plans of Instruction (POI) and Course Management Plans (CMP) while leaving things like obsolete weapons systems and archaic terminology alone. It is a fact that students notice things like that. If an instructor mentions that the student will never use this piece of information because its relevance is obsolete, he or she is guilty of straying from the POI. This is a standards violation that does nothing but highlight the shortcomings of the course.

Another interesting point that needs to surface is that money is an issue. Printing costs at the school house level are soaring. Proponent schools have discovered technology that lets them send a CD to a school that includes everything for that course. The proponent school transfers funds for printing but it's not enough and it won't cover printing and mailing to the student. Feeding and housing costs are often "out of hide" for the RTI in favor of filling as many seats as possible with qualified students.

This brings me to the whole point of this article. What can WE do to make our soldier's the most qualified students? Simple preparation is the answer. Qualify all of your soldiers by regularly checking their DA 201, Personal Qualification Record and ATRRS information. I recently had an E-1 that lived at Ft. Bragg enrolled in BNCOC. He was somehow drilling with a Maryland Guard unit and was a team leader. In truth his ATRRS manager had never updated his ATRRS record. We sent his welcome packet to his unit who failed to give it to him in time to prepare for the course.

All leaders should be familiar with what enrollment standards actually are. First Sergeants and anyone else in the enrollee's support channel often ignore course prerequisites. Don't send a soldier to a school without personally verifying his or her height and weight, APFT ability, ETS (longer than 12 months after graduation) and the DA 1059 for any prerequisite schools. If the school is enforcing standards correctly, your soldier's trip to that school may be for nothing. Besides wasting current funds you have contributed to the loss of slots for future schools.

Command Sergeants Major should try this. Go to an RTI when you know they are starting a course. Go early because they'll start around 0500 so that they can get registration, the APFT and course orientation over with before POI classes begin. Sit near the table where someone is checking prerequisites. Try not to look too shocked when you begin to hear the same complaints from your soldiers regarding how one of your NCOs prepared them to attend. When someone gets dropped for violations of AR 600-9, look at the discrepencies between the unit's DA 5500 R (or DA 5501 R) and the one generated by the RTI. Is it the soldier's fault or the unit's that he failed to meet standards? Did the weight control people at the unit TELL him he was not within standards?

Schools are in existence to train soldiers. We have let down every soldier that we turn away. When we have 30 reserved seats for ANCOC and 30 for BNCOC, that's the number we're planning and preparing to train. In essence, every soldier that we turn away or that fails to report costs us money and weakens our argument for more training dollars. Take away the need to train and you can close the school. If we have one central location for all training within that MOS or skill, you can expect it to be more costly to run your people through that school. It's a viscous cycle and one that we all better start controlling now.

I'm only one school commandant that has seen this. I sit at regional and national meetings and hear stories from other teaching institutions that voice the same frustrations. Politics, apathy, ignorance and a lack of leadership are all contributing to the breakdown in our education system. We owe it to our soldiers to get them ready to attend a school. If we offer them a challenging and interesting course they'll go home happy. If you use returning graduates in accordance with their newly acquired skills and knowledge they may stay happy.

Anyone that wears NCO stripes is part of the solution. Taking care of all aspects of soldier welfare is our job. We are counselors to our soldiers as well as our peers. It is important that the soldier know what they need to do to perform to standard in any area. When they attend a school they represent your unit. Failure on their part, before they're even enrolled, is an embarrassment to the soldier and is probably cause for future problems. Too many problems from the same unit are cause, at least on my part, to question the practices of the unit.

I did learn one thing in six months at Ft. Bliss. When you take off all regular army, state and ARCOM patches and replace them with one school patch, a team begins to develop. We eliminate preconcieved ideas about a person's ability based on his or her component. The ultimate answer to this whole problem is to act like a team. Regardless of which fund our paycheck comes from we need to accept that we're all in this together. Without cooperation in the ranks we may as well turn the Pentagon into a large shelter for the homeless, one that we can all occupy.

CSM A. Kemp Freund Headquarters, 70th Regiment (LDR) Camp Fretterd 13720 Omaha Beach Circle Reisterstown, MD 21136

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