Q&A: Daniel Gardner
TRAINING READINESS PROPONENT:
Developing Policy and Providing
Advice For All U.S. Forces' Training
Interview with Daniel Gardner
Director, Training & Readiness, Policy & Programs Directorate
Office, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Readiness)
Gardner leads the recently commenced DoD Training Transformation Initiative and its three major capabilities of Joint Knowledge Development and Distribution, Joint National Training, and Joint Assessment and Enabling. He oversees efforts to alleviate encroachment on DoD training ranges and also guides the application of advanced technologies to make military training and education better, faster, less expensive, and available anytime anywhere. This includes oversight of the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative and its associated ADL co-laboratory structure. He serves as executive secretary for the Defense Science Board Task Forces on Training for Future Conflicts. In addition, as the OSD focal point for training and training-related activities, Gardner is the U.S. national coordinator for DoD training policies and programs impacting NATO and PfP training.
Prior to assuming his duties as director, he was the director for Joint Training in the Readiness and Training Directorate, responsible for enhancing and expanding joint training throughout the department. Gardner retired from naval service as a commander, surface warfare officer, with a sub-specialty in manpower, personnel, and training, and designation as a deep-sea diving and salvage officer. He received a Bachelors Degree in science from Baldwin Wallace College and earned a Masters Degree in management science from the Naval Postgraduate School.
Interviewed by Martin Fisher, MT2 Editor.
Q: Briefly describe the DoD Director Readiness & Training responsibilities as they specifically relate to training.
A: My directorate develops policy and provides advice and recommendations for the secretary of defense, through Dr. Paul W. Mayberry, the deputy under secretary of defense for Readiness and The Honorable David S. C. Chu, under secretary of defense for Personnel and Readiness on all policies, resources and issues related to the training of the Armed Forces of the United States.
On a daily basis, I serve as the career Senior Executive Service lead for overseeing the department’s Training Transformation program and its three major joint capabilities of Joint Knowledge Development and Distribution Capability and the Joint National Training Capability led by U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Joint Warfighting Center and the Joint Analysis and Enabling Capability.
My team and I expend considerable effort to foster the application of advanced technologies to make military education and training better, faster, less expensive and available anytime and anywhere. This includes oversight of the DoD Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative and its associated ADL Co-Laboratory structure. Dr. Chu is a member of the Defense Acquisition Board, and to support his participation we analyze systems acquisitions programs to ensure that systems training funds have been programmed and methodologies developed, so that once new hardware or software is delivered to the force, provides for the users to be trained to effectively use and maintain it.
I also serve as a co-manager of the department’s Sustainable Ranges Initiative to ensure the long-term viability, continuity and good stewardship of military training and testing ranges. Through a framework of continuing, cooperative and coordinated efforts within government and via partnerships with groups beyond installation boundaries, SRI is safeguarding these critical national readiness assets.
In addition to these responsibilities I serve as the U.S. National Coordinator to the Allied Command Transformation for DoD training policies and programs impacting NATO and Partnership for Peace training.
Q: Discuss Training Transformation significant successes in 2007. What do you see as some major issues you want to address? Describe the program’s goals for 2008.
A: My [MNF1] colleagues across the DoD components have worked extremely hard in an open, collaborative, transparent and incentivized manner to transform DoD training.
There have been many successes, however, it is important to note transformation is a dynamic process and not an end state. We have restructured the way we conduct joint training—among the services, coalition partners, interagency players and non-governmental organizations—to reflect real-world operations and capture dynamic lessons learned. We’ve also reprioritized our focus on deploying forces to provide them robust joint mission rehearsals prior to their deployment and operational employment in theater.
This year we will increase our emphasis in several critical areas. Examples include our need to address the training balance between lethal (force on force) and non-lethal (crowd de-escalation/cultural considerations et al) capabilities and to provide language and culture training to meet the varying degrees of proficiency levels required. Another focus area is what I call “whole of government or whole of nation operations.” In a major policy address late last year at the Landon lecture series at Kansas State University Secretary Gates’ message was “…if we are to meet the myriad challenges around the world of the next decades, this country must strengthen other important elements of national power both institutionally and financially and create the capability to integrate and apply all elements of national power…I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use ‘soft’ power and for better integrating it with ‘hard’ power.”
Program goals for 2008 in part include continuing the transformation process to evolve and enable the continuous, capabilities- based transformation of the department by preparing forces for new warfighting concepts and capabilities, and developing individuals and organizations that improvise, adapt and anticipate emerging challenges. We will apply greater emphasis to enhance irregular warfare capabilities to include counter insurgency training initiatives [psychological operations and civil affairs], information operations, language and culture capabilities and integration of Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization [JIEDDO] and improvised explosive device [IED] countermeasures into joint and service training.
Q: Describe one U.S. military training shortfall from either Operations Enduring or Iraqi Freedom that your office is helping to correct.
A: We are working to support the secretary’s direction to better integrate and replicate all elements of national power in DoD training, exercise and mission rehearsal events. Last year we established a Senior Leader Round Table for Stability and Reconstruction comprised of senior representatives from multiple federal agencies to help us address this integrated training need. We also have a number of studies underway on how to enhance small team lethal and non-lethal training in the home station environment.
Q: The Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative just celebrated its 10th anniversary What do you see as the initiative’s successes and near-term goals?
A: When the ADL Initiative kicked off in November 1997, some naysayers expected a short life, so one success is the fact that ADL is now 10 years old. More seriously, the ADL Initiative has been successful because it has focused on a vision of providing timely, affordable, and globally available access to high quality education and training, and has done so through a business model of collaboration and cooperation. This model has led to the highly acclaimed success of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, or SCORM, that has become the de facto global standard for the interoperability of learning content and the systems that service and manage that content. Another more recent success is the ADL-Registry.
The near term goals of ADL concern improvements to the ADL-Registry that will simplify and largely automate the registration of content developed by the services and components to create an immense supply of structured content objects. The full implementation of the SCORM and the ADL-Registry as directed by DoD Instruction 1322.26, Development, Management, and Delivery of Distributed Learning [June 16, 2006] are our major near term goals. At the same time we are also continuing to examine and pursue the integration of simulations, online games and technical publication standards into the ADL framework.
Editor’s note: A more complete discussion about ADL appears in the article by deputy director, ADL, in this issue.
Q: Do you consider the individual services have adequate training ranges to conduct live training events?
A: Yes. As a whole, our military training ranges are highly capable and mission-ready national assets. However, initial assessments conducted as part of DoD’s ongoing Sustainable Ranges Initiative comprehensive planning and reporting process indicates some potential shortfalls. In order to support emerging operational capabilities, greater amounts of training space [land, air and sea] will be needed, especially to accommodate the repositioning of forces from abroad and the increase in Army and Marine Corps active duty strength.
The nature of such shortfalls and the degree to which they impact our ability to train varies from service to service and range to range. Further analysis is planned with an eye towards developing and implementing corrective actions. We are also exploring how integrated live, virtual and constructive [LVC] training environments can help reduce the pressure to expand our training space. Shifting from current training paradigms to alternative training constructs and methodologies may also help reduce the DoD’s demand for greater volumes of training space, particularly as technological advances in operational capabilities are fielded. The department will continue to upgrade our ranges and instrument them to support evolving service and joint integrated training requirements.
Q: Describe how you see future DoD training programs expanding their interaction and interoperability with multinational partners?
A: We have a number of tremendous opportunities to build upon the gains we’ve made to date. In fact we must capitalize upon, leverage and integrate into our training base the expertise of leading nations and allies in functional training areas such as stability and reconstruction, peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. While cross domain/multilevel security information sharing remain as issues to overcome, from a policy and technology perspective, the extensions of training connectivity to other nations through existing pathways and nodes such as the Joint Training and Experimentation Network are blazing new trails in partnering with other nations. As with the successful collaborative extension of connectivity of U.S. Joint Forces Command to Australia and NATO’s Joint Warfare Center in Stavanger, Norway and elsewhere, we will work to expand this connectivity and interoperability with other interested nations.
Q: What do you see are your top three training challenges that the U.S. training and simulation industry needs to help solve?
A: Dr. Mayberry’s challenges to industry at Interservice/Industry Training Simulation & Education Conference 2007 mirror mine. We challenge industry to change the current business model in the provisioning of capabilities, especially to meet the new challenges in the non-kinetic operational environment such as humanitarian, peacekeeping, and stabilization operations and skill sets in language and cultural skills. There is also a lag today between the articulation of DoD policy and the delivery of industry solutions to provide interoperable and non-proprietary products and ones that are less tech heavy.
These industry solutions must have a big impact on the types of environments we are operating in and address required skill sets. They should facilitate collaboration between diverse groups and units in a live-virtual and constructive fully deployable environment through an open architecture with global and persistent reach and reach back. Finally, we must together solve multi-level security gaps and seams.
Q: Discuss the service-industry teams’ progress to establish and address training requirements throughout the life cycle of weapons platforms.
A: DoD Program managers [PMs] have made solid progress in considering Human Systems Integration [HSI][his] in the weapon/defense system acquisition process. Industry has made good progress as well, and in many technical areas has taken the initiative to exploit new technologies in HSI and bring them into the process. However, while contractor/factory training to “train the trainers” for the initial cadre of operators and maintainers is usually funded and developed, PMs—and industry—at times still have not taken the necessary steps to ensure more complete funding and development of comprehensive system training plans to address life-cycle training requirements. I would suggest that if a PM can answer the following two critical questions then he or she probably has a good focus on the issue:
Question One: How does training for the new weapon/defense system get incorporated into existing service specialized skill training courses?
Question Two: How does the system training plan assure configuration changes/ upgrades/modifications reach operators and maintainers in the field/units?
Addressing the issue with a department-wide process change, my staff was very actively engaged with the Joint Staff and the services, via the Joint Training Functional Capabilities Board, to add “System Training [ST]” as a selectively applied key performance parameter (KPP) to the warfighter requirements process. Program sponsors are to perform an analysis on the use of ST as a selective KPP. If analysis determines that ST as a selective KPP should not be incorporated, a summary and rationale of the analysis is to be provided to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council. Our rationale for including ST as a selectively applied KPP was strengthened by the U.S. Army’s inclusion of “embedded training” as a KPP in the Future Combat System, which is a very large and complex system-of-systems acquisition program supporting Army’s transformation goals, and the first major program to have a Training KPP.
Q: Can you preview your office’s projected policy-level initiatives and programs for 2008 that will impact the individual services and industry?
A: Absolutely, and I plan to urge the department’s leadership to push enterprise enforcement of existing policies on two tracks. First, system acquisition program managers should ensure that industry follows OSD guidance and regulations concerning compliance with integrated technical training standards. Second, within our area of purview, those commands and offices that conduct assessments and evaluations of training and training systems must generate and aggregate those assessments and evaluations in a meta-data registry.
We will develop policy to sustain equitable training focus across all six phases of a joint campaign plan; expand policy on accreditation and certification of joint and integrated operations training programs and capabilities; and develop policy for the certification of joint task force headquarters and pre-deployment in-lieu-of training, particularly for “unit re-missioning,” “cross service training,” and “individual augmentees.”
Over this year we will:
- Lead the collaborative, open, transparent and incentivized team effort to enable effective implementation of the consolidation of additional joint programs in to the Combatant Commanders Exercise and Engagement [CE2T2] account as directed by Congress.
- Focus efforts on providing a meaningful balance between lethal and non-lethal training.
- Expand the integration of the whole of government or whole of nation operational concept into a realistic pre-deployment training program.
- Continue support for advancements in cross domain/multi-level security solutions.
All in all 2008 will be a challenging and exciting year for training—especially joint training. ♦