Pick One Mission
By LtCol Brendan McBreen (ret.)
To build an effective infantry company, you need to:
PICK one mission. One company-level combat task should drive all training for the entire twelve-week quarter. One task provides focus, specificity, and measurability. You can’t do it all. Training to everything—a scattering of effort each week—leads to a lot of nothing. BRIEF your goal—tell a vivid story of a company in combat—and brief a date to deliver.
ASSIGN supporting tasks. DRAW a diagram to put tasks in context. One company task drives maybe five platoon tasks, eleven squad tasks, and 39 individual skills. ASSIGN your leaders—officers and SNCOs—specific tasks. Each task has one responsible expert, fired with initiative. This is your training plan, your team’s project for the quarter. MAP some of this training onto existing battalion events.
SET standards. KNOW the T&R manual. KNOW your infantry doctrine. ADJUST the published standards or ESTABLISH you own. Your leaders need to understand the tactical details of their tasks—the procedures, the terms, the standards, the numbers, the distance, and the time. Specificity is the key to effective training.
EVALUATE exhaustively. If half of your training time is unit practice and rehearsal, the other half is performance. Repetition under observation—“Unsat, do it over”— is essential. Competition between units breeds excellence, because competitors pay keen attention to how a task is done. RECOGNIZE success. CERTIFY units and individuals as competent.
UPDATE the SOP. When units train on specific tasks, they develop robust standard procedures. CAPTURE this. Each of your leaders should rewrite one page of the company SOP to share their expertise. Especially when you assign a unique task to only one unit—infiltration platoon, assault element, rear security squad, route reconnaissance team—or one individual—MACO, PZCO, CCPO— the entire unit benefits when these practices are captured in the SOP. This is why the MEU program works.
Your infantry company may never fight the one mission that you select. But all of your unit training—comprehensive and specific—will support all other company tasks. Focused training builds skilled units with confidence and competence. REJECT the shallow “jack-of-all-trades” amateurism of many training schedules. FOCUS on fewer tasks, done repetitively, to higher standards.
LtCol McBreen (ret) is the mastermind behind 2ndbn5thmar.com. He can be reached at bbmcbreen@gmail.com.