I am going to rewind a bit and give a personal opinion on the “no difference between garrison and combat, leadership is leadership” mentality. I fully disagree, and my personal experience as a TL, SL in Infantry units, and my Instructor experiences in the garrison and field training environment, tell me that they are nothing of the same. Yes standing in a formation is the same wherever you go. But simply standing in front of that formation, doing regulation checks/corrections is not leadership. It is however one of the duties, but probably the most simple and easy one to do.
Leadership in garrison is all about looking pretty (meeting the regs), keeping your soldiers out of trouble (don’t make the unit look bad), keeping them ready in their specialties (technical training) and supervising them in garrison tasks (making sure those stupid tasks nobody wants to do, get done).
Leadership in field training is making sure soldiers are ready for the training, properly equipped, and gaining the specific knowledge, while attempting to learn your soldier’s capabilities and limitations. Then taking those, and further evaluating your soldier’s effectiveness. Then defining further training to make your soldiers more effective (i.e. preparing them for their mission in combat).
Leadership in combat is trusting your soldiers and their training (i.e. your field training leadership) and effectively leading them in their mission tasks. A combat leader must have the confidence of his soldiers, their loyalty, and the ability to trust his soldiers to accomplish tasks within the mission objectives. A good combat leader knows how to read his soldiers, knows how to advise his superiors of capabilities and limitations and knows when to jump out front and rally his soldiers to “FOLLOW” him through that door, up that hill and through that hail of bullets to get the mission objective done.
If Garrison and Combat leadership were the same, why would we have combat leadership schools such as Ranger school, when we already have MOS specific leadership schools like NCOES’s? Anyone who has stepped onto an actual battle field knows there is a difference, regardless if they will admit it or not.
The number one difference between garrison, training and combat leadership in my opinion. Is in garrison and somewhat in training you as a leader and your soldier’s failures are correctable, but in combat they normally result in a soldier’s death or serious injury, and become virtually uncorrectable until after the mission is completed.
Outside of that, I think the big problem is the context of the type of garrison discipline the Army wants and how it was lost in the first place. It was not lost on Sep 11, 2001. It was lost in mid 2005 through 2006, when the Army ditched the BDU’s and went to ACU’s without a clear regulation. It was Joe’s wearing fluff-puff uniforms and fucked up berets without clear regulations for NCO’s to enforce. Some NCO’s made shit up, some used the old shit, and some simply waited until the new reg came out. Then if we also look at the standards, height & weight, NCOES’s, promotions, etc. We can see that the Army granted the total force waivers in not meeting the standards due to ongoing deployments, etc. Hell the Army would grant entire unit’s waivers for important standards like “weapons qualification” as long as 70% could meet the standard. How can an NCO enforce a standard, if the Army won’t even enforce them?
I mean could you imagine Ranger Regiment (TL’s, SL’s and PL’s with limited experience, leadership schooling, etc), or Special Forces Regiment (no assessments, no Q course, no follow-on schools, etc) throwing their standards out the window, allowing leaders to not meet standards and still expecting them to perform to the same level? Well that is pretty much what the Conventional Army hierarchy did, while trying to learn and fight in a doctrine where they were completely unfamiliar.
The main point, the Army needs to re-define the standards, re-write the regulations to meet the garrison and combat force they want to maintain. Then they need to retrain the leadership as a whole in those new standards/regs and then have them retrain the force as a whole. I believe that is what the new SMA is trying to do, and I think it will take a long time to get it right again. Sometimes you just have to see outside of your A/O and get a good view of the bigger picture.
