This is How we Train Doctrine Writers?

Last month at the Army Force Management School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, I spent four weeks away from the Signal Center of Excellence where I am working to produce the Signal Regiment's first keystone field manual since FM 24-1 Signal Support in the AirLand Battle, published in 1990.  The manual I'm working on is FM 6-02 Signal Operations.  Within the Concepts and Doctrine Development Directorate, it consistently ranks in the top three of the director's list of priorities.  So, if you thought that the training I received at Fort Belvoir would help me speed along the development of FM 6-02, you would be making a logical assumption, but you would be wrong.

This is How the Army Runs?

I was sent to Belvoir to take the 4-week Force Management Course.  The Force Management Course is required training for me because I am an employee of the Capabilities Integration and Development Directorate at the Signal Center of Excellence.  All CDID employees take this course early in their careers.  The nearby graphic shows what the course is all about.  The folks who write the Danger Room Blog for Wired Magazine call this the Pentagon’s Craziest PowerPoint Slide.  They describe it as a "three-foot wall chart the military uses to explain its gajillion-step process for developing, buying, and maintaining gear."

A couple more zingers from DR:  "Stare [at it] long enough, and you’ll start to see why it takes a decade for the Defense Department to buy a tanker plane, or why marines are still reading web pages with Internet Explorer 6."

In DR's summary take on the DOD's Integrated Acquisitions Technology and Logistics Life Cycle Management. they call it "a twisting, endlessly-recursive, M.C. Escher-on-LSD three-dimensional hedge maze. Actually, it’s kind of amazing our troops have any gear at all."

And, what exactly, you may ask does that chart, er, horse blanket have to do ... no, wait, let me put it differently.    What what does the 4-week Force Management Course have to do with doctrine development?

Nothing, actually.

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Author's note:

See my April archives for several posts I made from Fort Belvoir. The Force Management Course is a great course. It's well run, the instructors are among the best you'll find anywhere, and the material is absolutely essential if you're going to work at the Pentagon or on a CDID staff or somewhere else in the generating force where your job is all about developing organizations, training, materiel capabilities, leader development and education, personnel (human resources), or facilities (military construction). My thinking is that CDIDs are the wrong environment in which to cultivate good doctrine developers. And I think that, if you're serious about developing a good, solid stable of writers, then the Force Management Course is the wrong kind of training for them.

twh