Nearly a year after former defense secretary Jim Mattis inked a memo to create the first task force focused solely on making close combat formations more lethal, the group has coordinated efforts to add more than $3 billion toward that goal and now has another year to find a way to institutionalize its mission.
It isn't mostly about spending money on gee whiz gear for the grunts (although that is part of it), as the task force director explained:
While L’Etoile gets a lot of questions from reporters about new weapons, gear and progress in improving items such as night vision, targeting and the next generation of squad weapons, the director said that there’s a risk in simply looking at dollar figures and hardware.
About three months ago, he said, the task force shifted its main line of effort to manpower policy at the squad level in the Army and Marine Corps.
Some of that is also tangible. Adding strength coaches, physical trainers and nutrition experts that were common at SOF unit headquarters to the regular infantry formations was an uncontroversial first step in better meeting the needs of that physically demanding job field.
A lot of time in the past year, L’Etoile said, has been devoted to “socializing” ways of doing business, going after unit cohesion that produces a well-trained, stable and experienced squad ready for combat.
I like this--a lot. One day, as I wrote on the USNI Blog, we will really need the leadership and tactical skills edges when everyone on the other side is also--by technology--a marksman--which has long been one of our major training advantages.
And I should add that those highly trained infantry should be protected even more when they are just passenger spam-in-a-can riding in infantry fighting vehicles, as I proposed in Infantry magazine.
