MEETING IN THE MIDDLE
as the “face” of the program executive office (PEO) to operational Army units.
Not an acquisition officer by trade, Gin- grich comes to PEO C3T after serving as the director of resource management/G-8 for the U.S. Army Installation Manage- ment Command. Now, as the PEO C3T point person to work on complex issues of network modernization across the opera- tional force and with Army partners such as the Forces Command (FORSCOM), Training and Doctrine Command, Army Materiel Command and Army Cyber Command, Gingrich is focused on the goal of readiness in the field.
Gingrich provided his perspective on his new role, what feedback he’s gathered and how to implement changes so that the Army—and its network—is better positioned to ensure readiness, during a Q&A discussion in October 2016.
What are the recurring themes you are hearing from the field when it comes to operating the network?
Smaller, faster, simpler, standardized and more capability—that’s what everyone wants. Tat’s what the Soldiers are asking for. If that’s what they want and what we are giving them today is not meeting that, then they will be unwilling to learn how to use the system, they will not operate it to its fullest capability and their mission will be degraded. Tat is the challenge we are faced with today. One of the key fac- tors is complexity. Soldier training time is a finite commodity, and often we are hearing that they don’t have enough time to complete training requirements. When they do get trained on the newest equip- ment, they often PCS [permanent change of station] to a unit with older equipment, and that knowledge base is lost. Also, as the Army continues to field the network to lower echelons, signal Soldiers—who
58 AWARENESS ACROSS THE BATTLEFIELD
The 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division held its decisive action training exercise in October 2016 at the JRTC rotation at Fort Polk. Training included operational missions using the latest network-equipped vehicles, radios and mission command capabilities to provide on-the-move communications and enable advanced situational awareness. (U.S. Army photo by Nancy Jones- Bonbrest, PEO C3T)
are at the heart of operating this equip- ment—are in greater demand and not always found at the company or platoon level.
We didn’t get where we are overnight. We’ve gotten here because units are used to contractor support and they’ve lost the ability to do some of the basics. We were at war for almost a decade and a half. All of the Soldiers who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s understand the garrison Army and how we had to train ourselves and manage ourselves and manage our sup- plies. Ten, when we went to war and went to the ARFORGEN [Army Force Generation] readiness model and we were doing one-to-one rotations or less (one year deployed, one year at home), all of that knowledge and skills atrophied. Were you going to send your Soldiers home at night, or were you going to keep
them late to do a quarterly training brief, knowing they were going right back to Afghanistan or Iraq, right back to the same neighborhoods than a year ago?
they were in less
So we got out of that business. We got out of the business of taking our kit with us, and we created theater-provided equip- ment. We lost that unit-level maintenance capability because of that, and with it we created a customer type of environment instead of an owner type of environment. Woe be to the company commander whose equipment wasn’t ready in the ’80s and ’90s. You were vilified if it wasn’t in working order. So what we’re going through right now as an Army is that cultural change to get back to funda- mentals. We are relearning how we do training management and unit mainte- nance. Tere’s a lot that we have left to do,
Army AL&T Magazine
January-March 2017
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