Q&A : Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell IV

COMBINED ARMS TRAINING PROPONENT:
Ensuring Training, Doctrine and Lessons Learned Support the Warrior



Lieutenant General
William B. Caldwell IV

Commanding General, U.S. Army
Combined Arms Center and
Fort Leavenworth

Commandant, U.S. Army
Command and General Staff College

Deputy Commanding General for
Combined Arms, U.S. Army Training

Director, Joint Center for International
Security Force Assistance

Caldwell’s decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), the Legion Of Merit (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), the Bronze Star (with one Oak Leaf Cluster), Humanitarian Service Medal (with three Oak Leaf Clusters), Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal, Presidential Service Identification Badge, Office of the Secretary of Defense Identification Badge, Joint Chiefs of Staff Identification Badge, the Louisiana Cross of Merit and the 2008 Honorary Rock of the year.

Caldwell graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1976. He earned master’s degrees from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and from the School for Advanced Military Studies at the United States Army Command and General Staff College. Caldwell also attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, as a Senior Service College Fellow.

Q: Briefly describe the role of the Combined Arms Center and its goals.

A: As the intellectual center of the Army, the Combined Arms Center fuels change across the Army by collecting, generating and managing knowledge, and providing relevant collective training to units on the road to deployment. The Combined Arms Center focuses on three enduring efforts that help us fuel that change and keep the soldiers on the ground fed with the most up-to-date information and understanding of contemporary operations. We do this by forming agile and adaptive leaders, who are forging a comprehensive approach to operations and fostering a culture of engagement with, and in, the information domain through our six major organizations: Combined Arms Center-Knowledge [CAC-K], Combined Arms Center-Leader Development and Education [CACLD& E], Combined Arms Center-Training [CAC-T], Combined Arms Center-Capability Development Integration Directorate [CAC-CDID], our joint centers—the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center and the Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance, along with the schools and centers of various Army branches.

These organizations assist soldiers by developing the doctrine that guides operations, encouraging forums for discussion and enhanced understanding of that doctrine through graduate-level educational opportunities and professional journals, providing realistic full-spectrum training opportunities in live, virtual and/or constructive environments, and building the capability and management tools necessary to successfully accomplish our mission across a full spectrum of operations.

Q: Please share your thoughts on how joint and service training must evolve to permit service men and women to effectively operate in the information battlespace of the 21st century.

A: First, I would suggest that we do not operate solely in an information battlespace. I believe a more accurate description is that the 21st century security environment our nation exists in and our forces have to operate in, is very complex and nuanced—socially, culturally and otherwise. The informational aspects of this operational environment are so inexorably connected to the other aspects of the environment that we should not think of them as separate or independent layers; actions in one invariably affect the others, either positively or negatively.

Our armed forces are the best in the world when it comes to traditional force-on-force war fighting. What we’ve learned over the past several years is that we need to be just as good at understanding the human and cognitive dimensions and applying that understanding in all our operations. In terms of training, therefore, what’s important is developing the competencies necessary to engage, communicate, collaborate and otherwise interact with the various publics and actors, both state and nonstate, who may affect our mission. The key here is a comprehensive approach to operations that deliberately recognizes the stakeholders in a given operation and seeks a cooperative relationship with the best organizations and people—both military and nonmilitary—to bring about mission success. This ability has to become a core competency of our armed forces, particularly for the Army since it operates in and among the people. The traditional skills of the armed forces are every bit as important as they have ever been. But, in today’s strategic landscape, what we say and what we portray has to be absolutely consistent with what we do. It is incumbent of commanders to develop their force to assure this consistency of deeds, words and images from the beginning of their operation through its conclusion.

Q: FM 3-07 “Stability Operations” was just released. Please discuss how service training must change to implement the manual’s tenets.

A: Future conflicts will increasingly be wars among the people. Consequently, conventional military success is not enough. Stability must also be brought to a region for the people’s efforts toward change to be successful.

Currently training is focused heavily on full-spectrum operations in irregular warfare. Using FM 7-0 training for full-spectrum operations as a guide, the Army will eventually transition training to increase our capability of conducting full-spectrum operations in offensive, defensive, and stability or civil support operations— anywhere on the spectrum of conflict or in any operational theme.

Realistic training conditions are essential to creating full-spectrum- capable units and agile leaders. Training conditions should replicate, as closely as possible, the expected operational environment. Fog, friction, ambiguity—all the elements found in fullspectrum operations and especially in stability operations—must be factored into the training conditions. As units master full-spectrum tasks, leaders must change the conditions to create uncertainty and to stress subordinate leaders and units. Leaders must learn to make rapid decisions, often without the help of a staff, with only partial or incomplete information. They must learn to be prudent risk takers.

FM 7-0 is fully synchronized with the concepts found in FMs 3-0 and 3-07. Just as FM 7-0 provides the concepts to help leaders train an expeditionary Army, the Army Training Network will revise FM 7-1 battle-focused training and provide timely and relevant Webbased examples, lessons and best practices on how to implement the full-spectrum concepts in FM 7-0. This innovative approach will help ensure that our troops always have the best practices for stability operations or any other operation in our operational environment.

Q: What is your vision for the role of training technology in future DoD combined-arms training?

A: Our forces will continue to improve their capabilities to conduct full-spectrum operations. We will continue to test and analyze our spinouts from the Future Combat Systems [FCS] program. We will need to replicate the current and joint training environments using combinations of live, virtual, constructive and gaming technologies. Those training technologies must be common or at least interoperable with and complementary to the training technologies used by the other services, agencies and government activities—and ideally with our allies. Our training technologies must support more than combined arms training; they must support the comprehensive approach as identified in FM 3-0 Operations. We want to be able to train commanders and their staffs or entire units using fewer resources, and not sacrifice realism. By linking virtual simulators, constructive simulations and games with unit instrumentation and other emerging training technologies, units can train in environments that surpass what we can accomplish in live training only—and, thus, help units achieve readiness faster in the Army Force Generation process. These technologies will allow units to repetitively conduct tasks under varying conditions to develop agile leaders who can solve problems intuitively because they will have seen similar situations, under varying conditions, in training. Technology will never replace sound leadership. Good leaders, however, armed with useful technology, will conduct good training to produce ready units; good training, facilitated by quality training technology, will help produce good leaders.

Q: What are several training technology gaps the combined arms community needs industry’s support to solve?

A: The Army needs industry’s assistance in creating the capabilities necessary to develop a fully integrated live, virtual, constructive and gaming training environment. Currently, we must use workarounds and “black boxes” to connect the four capabilities to our digital command and control systems since the standards and protocols for linking the communications systems and simulations are not the same. We are fixing that problem through the development of the live virtual constructive integrating architecture—a concept that has been approved by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council. In addition to remedying the connectivity gap, we need to be able to develop and field simulations and simulators much faster than the current process. While it is important that we field these training enablers more quickly, it is just as important that they require fewer people to operate them, that they are simple to operate, and that they are essentially turn-key operations, requiring minimal preparation time. By creating training technologies that are both simple to operate and realistically replicate the various operational environments, commanders can focus on training their units for their operational missions.

Q: Please cite recent examples of how combined arms lessons learned from Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom have been integrated into joint and service training.

A: The Army has a systematic and deliberate process of collecting, generating and managing lessons learned. The process has served the Army well in the past by integrating lessons learned into the curriculum at the schools and centers of various branches of the Army. Now though, we are seeing a greater external integration of lessons learned by our operating forces. For example, the 10th Mountain Infantry Division is among the many active duty units who are sharing best practices and lessons learned from their deployments with National Guard, reserve and other active Army units. In addition to military forces, we’ve had terrific success with sharing lessons learned about family readiness across the Army as well. Families have carried, and continue to carry, many of the burdens of our current operational tempo. Family Readiness Group Handbooks 07-23 and 07-30 have provided lessons learned from OIF and OEF to rear detachment commanders and the family support networks of our deployed forces, too. Our ability to provide responsive and timely lessons learned to the entire Army family for immediate integration and use has been vital to our success.

Q: What future challenges does the Army learning community face, and how will your organization address them?

A: The Army’s challenge is twofold. First, we must find ways to assimilate insights gained and lessons learned from the long war. At the same time, however, we must put these recent experiences in their proper context.

The Army has learned much since September 2001. For example, we have a much better appreciation of the important role strategic communication plays in conflicts where local events are broadcast, and sometimes distorted, to a worldwide audience. We have learned about the important role government agencies outside the Department of Defense play in stability operations. We’ve been reminded that the decisions and actions of junior soldiers can have strategic repercussions. Now we must find ways to assimilate, codify and preserve these, and other, hard-won insights as we prepare for an uncertain future.

The second challenge is the mirror image of the first: we cannot forget how to fight large-scale conventional wars. As a result of continuous operations in support of the long war, we have created a generation of officers who know how to serve as mayors of villages, how to stand up security forces, how to work with nongovernmental organizations to improve the lives of local citizens, who, in short, possess a variety of skill sets that far exceed those I possessed when I served at their rank. There is, however, a price to be paid for sending soldiers on multiple deployments in support of counterinsurgency campaigns. One impact is a degradation of skill sets that, while rarely needed when waging a counterinsurgency campaign, are vital to mission success in a large-scale conventional fight. We must maintain the balance between addressing the challenges of the present and preparing for those of the future.

I am confident we will continue to assimilate observations, insights and lessons learned while simultaneously placing the Army’s recent experiences in their proper context. Evidence of our ability to adapt includes new doctrine—the Army has rewritten its doctrine for waging counterinsurgencies and has made stability operations and civil support an integral component of Army operations—improved of dissemination best practices and lessons learned, and major revisions to programmed instruction for soldiers attending Army schools. We can readily see the success of the Army’s adaptability in our efforts around the world each day. ♦

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