Jon Bate and Theo Lipsky
How can the Army know itself? In November 1976 this question was on the mind of Major General Paul Gorman, the deputy chief of staff for training at US Army Training and Doctrine Command. That month he told a gathered audience at Fort Monmouth that the Army struggled to know itself because it did “not have a lot of data being turned in by ordinary units trying to do their job in a well simulated operational environment.” So Gorman proposed a radical solution that he and his influential boss, General William DePuy, had been developing: the construction of a giant combat simulation in the wilderness to train soldiers and collect that data. With such data, the Army could learn the ground truth about the state of its operational force, as if gazing in a costly but unprecedentedly clear mirror. In doing so, it could learn what worked best in simulated war, and so ready itself for the next real one.
Though the Army has built the combat training centers that Gorman proposed and so gained its clear mirrors, it does not currently look at them. That is because the Army does not systematically collect data from those training centers owing to ambiguities in regulation. To meet the current interwar moment, to transform in contact now, the Army must capture rotational training unit performance in a structured, quantified, and regular way. The task is urgent because regular training center rotations reveal the true state of operational force as no report or inspection can. In doing so these rotations point the way to needed reform, but only if studied in the aggregate. Qualitative observations of the sort one finds in reports from the Center for Army Lessons Learned alone are insufficient. Longitudinal, structured data is also needed.
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