Army brass fires warning shot about combat training

It's one thing when the "fundamentals" a team needs to improve involve things like blocking techniques or the proper position for fielding ground balls.

It's quite another when the team in question is the United States Army and the fundamentals in question are the skills and tactics necessary for the defense of this country.

Wednesday at Fort Benning, the subject was the latter. One of the speakers at this year's Maneuver Warfighter Conference, Gen. Robert B. "Abe" Abrams, told the assembled soldiers that right now the Army is "not very good at our fundamentals. We are not providing the time for our subordinates to learn what right looks like; we are not showing them what right looks like; and we are not giving them the opportunity to practice what right looks like."

The problem, Abrams said, is training -- specifically, he said, in the areas of tank gunnery, small arms and machine gunnery.

Of course, as we all know and the general acknowledged, it isn't as if the Army hasn't been busy in the 14 years since the terror attacks of 2001, fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in that time, leadership development has suffered: The Army must train leaders, Abrams said, by "throwing them curve balls," and they need to learn how to handle those curves in training -- not face them for the first time in combat. That means more live-fire exercises in training, something about which he said the Army has "gotten a little risk-averse."

Fortunately, according to one of Abrams' peers, today's soldiers are more than up to the challenge. Maj. Gen. James Rainey, former Infantry School commandant at Benning, video-linked from Afghanistan that the young men and women in service today "are smarter and more comfortable with adversity." With proper training, he said, "we are going to be just fine."

Unearned tribute

A former Nobel Prize committee member has underscored what many people have thought all along: The 2009 Peace Prize for President Barack Obama was an ill-advised choice.

Geir Lundestad, in a book to be released this week, writes that "even many of Obama's supporters believed that the prize was a mistake."

Certainly the election of the first person of color as president of a great nation stained by racial subjugation and genocide was a historic event. But historic significance is not a Nobel credential.

Even Obama and his staff, Lundestad writes, were "startled" by the award and considered not attending the ceremony in Oslo, but saw no graceful way out.

The president has 16 months left in office, and then the rest of his life. If he spends it the way Jimmy Carter has spent his, then maybe he can earn the award after all.

This story was originally published September 17, 2015 at 4:22 PM with the headline "Army brass fires warning shot about combat training."