General William S. Wallace
Commanding General, US Army TRADOC
Interview with Army Times
2 October 2007
Army Times: [first words inaudible] … kind of a larger “why you're doing this.” I’m familiar with all your speeches over the last year or so and all the stuff you’ve said, but I just want to --
General Wallace: You’re kind of an Army of one, aren’t you? [Laughter].
Army Times: Yeah. I’ve been following you around. No, that’s not true.
General Wallace: I think the fundamental issue is, when I talk about global trends, I mean global trends. Shifting demographics, competition for oil, competition for water, youth “bulge” … all of those things, all suggest that, as General Casey has discussed, we’re in for an era – perhaps multiple decades – of persistent conflict. And yet you can’t really predict where that conflict is going to occur. It’s certainly going to be confrontation, if not conflict. And given all those ominous signs and uncertainties about the future, it suggests to us that we have to prepare leaders within the United States Army for a very complex environment in which our Army is going to have to operate.
We are of the opinion – perhaps have been of the opinion for a number of years – that in order to prepare organizations to operate in that kind of environment, you have to have leaders who are much more broad in their perspective and their understanding of the operational environment, and in how to apply the things they have been educated on to a very wide range of potential futures out there. The only way to do that is to accelerate the way we develop those leaders.
The question is, how do you develop those leaders?
Army Times: Talk to me about what your leaders look like now compared to what they looked like six years ago, when all this got off the ground.
General Wallace: That’s an interesting question. My perspective is that our leaders are much more attuned to the operational environment in which they’re operating in today than even five or six years ago. I think they fully appreciate the importance of cultures. I think they fully appreciate the importance of languages. I think they fully appreciate the differences that are defined by ethnicities and tribal affiliations and clan affiliations and all that sort of thing –probably to a much, much greater depth than the leader I was when I entered Iraq in 2003. And I’m talking about down to the lowest level. We’re talking about sergeants and Soldiers on the street. They really, really get it.
I think they’re much more comfortable today in an environment of decentralized operations. We used to kind of train at brigade/battalion level and execute at battalion/brigade level. Today we’re executing at platoon and squad level. We’re doing it very comfortably. In fact, the most successful commanders at brigade and battalion level are the ones who are very comfortable with the level of decentralization they’re allowing their subordinate leaders.
Army Times: So you take those leaders who have grown on the job over several deployments. How do you mold your developmental programs to speak to someone who’s pretty advanced at this point? Is that what you’re looking at?
General Wallace: That’s part of it. The other part of it, and perhaps the most important part, is to give that leader who’s had a relatively small view of Iraq, or a relatively small view of Afghanistan, and give him a broader perspective of what the possible futures are out there.
Army Times: You mean of what’s been going on while he’s been in his [inaudible]?
General Wallace: That’s part of it. It also has to do with making him more comfortable with, and being able to operate in, a multinational context – making him more comfortable in understanding and being able to cohabitate in the same battle area or area of operations as non-government agencies and interagency partners. [It involves] making him much more adept at understanding the capabilities, limitations, and how to leverage the capacity of Special Operations Forces that might be operating in his area of operations.
It’s almost like taking young lieutenants and captains and sergeants and giving them the same sort of competencies that, in previous days, we reserved for general officers, if you will, because that’s the environment we see out there. That’s the environment we see in our future.
Army Times: And they will be the generals one day.
General Wallace: They will be, and they’ll be a hell of a lot better than I ever was, that’s for sure, by virtue of that experience.
Army Times: Have these young leaders had any input into this program? Have they said, “This is what we want”?
General Wallace: We have done some surveys of folks who are in the institution – folks who are going to the Captains Career Course and the ILE at Fort Leavenworth, and to the War College [at Carlisle Barracks] – to ask them whether we’re on track or not. And by and large they say, “Yes, it looks good to us, but show us the money, show us that you’re actually going to do this. What you’re proposing – your initiatives – make great sense to us, but we’ve heard that before. We want somebody to actually produce this time.”
Army Times: That’s what these initiatives are.
General Wallace: That’s what the initiatives are.
Army Times: How many of these do you think will get off the ground in FY08?
General Wallace: I know with certainty that five of them are going to get off the ground, because we’ve already funded them and we’re already moving out. I know you talked to Tom Williams at Carlisle [Barracks] about expanding our health-and-wellness stuff, which I think is a marvelous thing that we should have done a long time ago.
Army Times: Army Career Tracker?
General Wallace: Army Career Tracker is well on its way. It’s fully funded, and it will probably be up and running within the next six months.
Army Times: I have a question about that. The Army Career Tracker sounds like a check-the-block mechanism rather than a leader-development mechanism. And maybe [it] would lead someone to check those blocks and not get promoted. Can you get promoted because you did a good job because you were --
General Wallace: Sure. I think the career tracker is additive to one’s experience, and it’s certainly not designed to take the place of efficiency reports and mentoring and counseling by the chain of command. What it does give the individual, though, is a dashboard to look at and say, “If I want to continue to grow in my particular skill specialty, here are some things I ought to consider, some courses I ought to consider, some on-line instruction I ought to consider, to make me better as an individual in my particular skill specialty.” And it also gives the opportunity to provide some suggestions to that individual as to, if they want to expand themselves beyond their current skill specialty, here are some things we would suggest they do as well. And since it’s an on-line system, it also gives us the opportunity to periodically send a message out to the individual that says, “We noticed you haven’t done anything in the last six months. Might you want to consider doing this, that and the other thing?” And it’s a mechanism by which we can administer this thing we call guided self-development. [With] self-development, you can be all over the map. But this is guided in the areas where the Army thinks you need to go as far as your particular skill set, but – even more importantly, perhaps – gives you some general direction in things that the Army is very interested in you developing in terms of your leadership skills.
Army Times: Would you use this in conjunction with your career counselor?
General Wallace: I would expect that the guy who is making [career] assignments, and even the platoon sergeant, might want to sit down and talk to you about what you want to do, given the career tracker. [The platoon sergeant may say,] “Here are some things I have seen that I would recommend for you to do, given my observation of your experience [and] your expertise while you’ve been in my platoon” or my company or whatever. So I think it has potential for being a coaching/mentoring/counseling kind of document as well.
Army Times: In addition to the career path. OK.
The MSAS is another one that --
General Wallace: That’s been around for a while. We’ve been tinkering with 360 assessments for a good ten years, probably, in the Army. Largely because of the population of young leaders we’re dealing with today, the feedback we get from them is that they want feedback. They want somebody to tell them how they’re doing. One of the best mechanisms to do this is this 360 assessment.
What we had, though, because everybody was in love with the 360 assessment … there were about eight or ten or twelve different instruments out there that one could use to make a 360 assessment. Through this initiative, what we’re trying to do is standardize the assessment to the degree where it makes sense to standardize it.
Let me tell you what I mean by that because there are … for instance, Special Operations Command has an assessment mechanism which they use – which I will not tinker with and we have no business tinkering with because it’s something that was designed for the Special Operations community and unique to their particular needs.
There are a number of assessment mechanisms that are used in schools like the Army War College, [which has its own] assessment mechanism. Relatively simple, [with a] very small number of questions, and that sort of thing.
What we’re trying to do with this program, though, is fill the gaps where there are no assessment mechanisms and create a reasonably standardized assessment mechanism for those areas where none exist. So all leaders, regardless of position, have the opportunity to be assessed by their peers and their subordinates and their superiors, and provide policy in place across the Army that says regardless of who you are, periodically you’re going to have to go through one of these assessments. And we’re working through that policy now, to put the --
Army Times: Periodically. It could be once a year?
General Wallace: I would expect it to be less frequent than that. Probably every three years or so.
The other thing we’re intending to do is, regardless of what assessment mechanism you’ve got – be it War College, this program coming out of Special Operations community, whatever – those assessments would be filed electronically in a portfolio that might be attached to your personnel file in some way, shape or form. So that over a course of a career, periodically you as an individual could go to that portfolio, pull it up and say, “Here’s how I was assessed as a captain, here’s how I was assessed as a major, here’s how I was assessed as a senior major, here’s how I was assessed as a lieutenant colonel,” and you can look at the different instruments and see how you progressed from a leader-development perspective. And importantly, a coach, a mentor – somebody who is skilled in reading these assessments and providing you direct feedback, one-on-one feedback – can sit down with you and say, “OK, I’m seeing a trend here where you’ve improved in this area, you’ve made great improvement in this area, this area looks kind of flat. Maybe there’s something that you ought to do to take that flat and make it a little bit of an incline.” And I as a coach can say what I suggest you might want to do is this, this and this.
The value of these programs is not just doing it. There is value in getting an appreciation for who you are and how other people think of you, but more importantly, what the heck do you do with that feedback? And generally those folks who are in this business for a living will tell you the best way is for a coach to sit down with an individual and develop --
Army Times: [The coach is] an uninterested party, not a chain-of-command guy?
General Wallace: Well, that’s an interesting question, for which I don’t have a good answer. It could be a chain-of-command person, but it doesn’t need to be. The reason I say that is the following. We have been purposeful in not using this assessment program and combining it with an efficiency-reporting type of program because it’s designed for a much, much different purpose. It’s designed for self-development, self-awareness, and the development of an improvement program, if you will, over the course of a career.
Army Times: More a personal mode --
General Wallace: It’s more of a personal thing, and we’ve been very careful not to try to confuse the assessment of self with your efficiency in position.
Army Times: An evaluation kind of thing.
General Wallace: Yes. If this became an evaluation tool, our judgment is – and everybody I’ve talked to says – that it would mess up the overall purpose of the assessment tool completely and probably make it of no use to the individual.
Army Times: Alright. I think I’ve got that one down now. We’ve talked about it quite a bit.
This emerging strategic design. COL Chuck Roberson was telling me it has something to do with other strategies out there.
General Wallace: Let me take you back a year or two. When I grew up in the Army school system, we taught folks about campaign design, and what we said was that you had to visualize an end state, you had to decide how you were going to achieve that end state, and then you had to direct pieces of your organization to accomplish the tasks that you decided on, then you lead the formation and continually assess the environment. So the model was visualize, decide, direct, lead, assess.
That model worked perfectly fine when you were dealing with an enemy that you fully appreciated and understood. It worked perfectly fine when I, as a squadron commander, could look across the border of East Germany into Plauen, and I knew what brigade was in Plauen, who the commander was, what kind of equipment he had. I could even read his doctrine if I cared to read his doctrine. I knew what avenues of approach he was going to use. All that stuff was pretty clear to me.
So given that context, I could very easily visualize what I wanted my organization to do. Now scroll forward to 2007.
If you don’t know exactly what the enemy’s up to, how do you visualize an end state? So what this does is it takes the very necessary step before visualization and says, “Before you can visualize any end state, you’ve got to understand the environment. You’ve got to understand the enemy. You’ve got to understand the population. You’ve got to understand the culture. You’ve got to understand all these different dynamics we’re involved with today in a contemporary environment.”
So we have quite simply … and it sounds like it would be something we should have figured out a long time ago, but we couldn’t or didn’t.
Army Times: The guys who are learning this now in SAMS, it’s normal for them. They’re doing it all the time.
General Wallace: You’re exactly right. So the model now is understand, visualize, decide, direct, lead, assess.
The other part of the model, which I think is important to understand, is that – given the environment and the dynamics in the environment, the fact that an organization operates in the environment, and whether you appreciate it or not, or whether it’s apparent to you or not – you alter the environment by your very presence. If that is in fact true, then one continually needs to reassess the environment, and reassess one’s understanding of the environment, to see if your vision needs to change or not. That is called framing and reframing the problem. I need to continually look back at the problem I’m trying to solve and see if the problem has changed or not. That’s what’s fundamentally different about this approach.
And how does one take that approach and incorporate it into our standard military decision-making model? Which is what that campaign-design initiative gets at.
Army Times: It’s interesting to hear you expound on all these things I’ve heard you talk about.
The NCO stuff, I really want to understand this stuff. This is where I really got stuck yesterday. It could be the language, it could be me, but it’s an Army cultural thing, I think, and these kinds of things.
But I want to get some details on revision and accelerating transformation in NCOES. Specifically what does that mean? The guys who are going to be in these programs, they’ll want to know what do you mean by “transforming”?
General Wallace: The first thing I think is important to understand is the conversion of those things that make sense into some kind of distributed-learning format. So a noncommissioned officer doesn’t have to sit in “the classroom” – be in the institution – in order to get those things he needs to continue to grow and develop as a noncommissioned officer.
There will still be institutional training called ANCOC and BNCOC. In fact, we’ll probably rename the courses because we’re going to change the direction of the courses. In fact, “Senior Leaders Course” and “Advanced Leaders Course,” I think, are the names we’re kicking around right now. But the intent is to … before one goes to Basic Noncommissioned Officer Course, [there is a] two- or three- or four-year period between the time a noncommissioned officer graduates from the Warrior Leaders Course and the time he enters BNCOC, [so] there is a series of distributed-learning modules we encourage him to complete enroute to the Basic Noncommissioned Officer Course.
That does a couple of things for us. One, it encourages the noncommissioned officer to continually learn, even in the absence of sitting in an institutional setting; and secondly, it allows us to take that institutional setting and design the course itself differently.
Army Times: Distributed learning would occur --
General Wallace: It would be on your own time.
Army Times: On-line or maybe --
General Wallace: On-line, something like that. But it would be over a pretty extended period of time. Because I fully appreciate that if we tell somebody you’ve got to do all this distributed-learning stuff, we put them in a position where they’ve got to decide whether they’re going to do this DL stuff at night or play with their kids or coach a soccer team or something like that. We do not want to put an individual in that position. So we extend the period. Maybe it’s three years, maybe it’s four years. The size of the instruction is such that one can easily do that in that period of time without it bringing stress --
Army Times: You would encourage them to do it. Would it be mandatory or --
General Wallace: Well, it will be mandatory for graduation from ANCOC and BNCOC. Because you’ve got to get the entire educational experience. If I show up at BNCOC, for example, having not done any of the distributed-learning stuff, I’m going to have a greater load during my institutional training to complete it in order to graduate.
Army Times: So you have to do it, but you’re giving them the opportunity to do it early.
General Wallace: We’re giving them the opportunity to do it early, and we’re also giving them the opportunity, by virtue of having done it early, to be a better noncommissioned officer as a result.
The other thing that we’re doing is … what we’ve come to realize for both BNCOC and ANCOC, frequently the individual who attends those courses has already served in the position that we are targeting the course against. So what we’re doing with BNCOC and ANCOC is we’re broadening the scope of the course. BNCOC traditionally has been a squad-based instruction. We’re going to expand it to squad/platoon, so that if you go to BNCOC, you do need to get some squad instruction because you may not have had that position yet, but chances are you’ve already had that position and we’re going to groom you to be a platoon sergeant. The ANCOC course will expand from platoon to company. So by virtue of going to BNCOC, we’re going to teach you a little bit about platoon operations, which you might still have an opportunity to do, but we’re also going to prepare you for company operations, which prepares you to be a company first sergeant.
So the idea is to structure the courses, broaden the perspective of the courses, so that we’re training you ahead of assignment in a particular set of skills, as opposed to shooting behind the target all the time.
Army Times: Which is what has happened over the past years.
General Wallace: It has happened, for a lot of reasons: operational tempo, the availability of people to come to school, and all that sort of stuff. But, over time, we have found that our courses generally … a significant portion of the population that attends the course has already served in the position that the course is designed to --
Army Times: Did ANCOC always prepare them for company --
General Wallace: ANCOC was designed for platoon operations. So we add company, add a little bit more perspective, and put platoon and company operations in, so an individual who goes into a first sergeant job at the company level has had some instruction at ANCOC for that future assignment.
Army Times: Where in here do the NCOs get an opportunity to be exposed to some of the emerging strategies like the field grades do? Do they have any of that in NCO training? Cultural stuff.
General Wallace: Cultural awareness and some of that stuff is being embedded in ANCOC and BNCOC. So some of the same broadening experiences that we have incorporated into our command and staff college, into ILE, into the War College, have also been incorporated into ANCOC and BNCOC at the appropriate level.
Army Times: Is it necessary to give them exposure to some of that strategic stuff that the officers get?
General Wallace: It depends on who you’re talking about. I think, for example, that our battle-staff NCOs – more senior NCOs who are going to serve on the battalion/brigade/division staff –probably need some of that. They probably aren’t going to be involved in developing strategy, but they’re certainly going to be involved in assisting in the development of strategy as they assist the battle-staff officer who’s going through the actual planning drill. So they need to be exposed to it, but they don’t need to go to School for Advanced Military Studies. But they do need to have all the skills and competencies associated with assisting in developing strategy, developing combat plans, and that sort of thing.
Army Times: The MTTs for ANCOC and BNCOC, how is that going to --
General Wallace: Gangbusters. It’s happening already. I think the number we’ve trained is close to 15,000 noncommissioned officers by mobile training teams last year. I think that’s the number.
Voice: The functional training and with the BNCOC [inaudible], about 2,500 just in BNCOC. But with all of the functions, it was up there.
Voice: 16,000.
Army Times: 2,500 BNCOC and the rest in ANCOC?
General Wallace: I don’t know what it is.
Army Times: We can just lump it all together.
General Wallace: The number that sticks in my mind is about 15,000 total.
Army Times: Last year. And the year before that, it was what?
General Wallace: Just a dribble. A couple of thousand, maybe, on the outside.
Army Times: What’s involved with that? This is going to just expand, it’s going to continue to expand.
General Wallace: The conclusion we came to in TRADOC was that the Army is so damn busy that they don’t have time to send people to the schoolhouse to get trained. So if nobody’s showing up for your school, why have the school in the first place? So the choice we had was to either export the school to the individual at his home station or reduce the size of the classes, but reducing the size of the classes doesn’t do any good because you still have this huge population of noncommissioned officers who need to be trained and educated. So we took the mobile training team route, which is a cooperative agreement between TRADOC and the unit. The unit, for their part, provides facilities, provides the Soldier, and, in some cases, provides equipment, and gives him the time off to go to school. We provide the curriculum, the instructors, and all the things one would get if you came to the institution for the training.
Every bit of feedback we’ve gotten from our NCOs is that this is exactly the right thing to do, exactly what they’ve been looking for, and they get the opportunity to get an education, but they get an opportunity to reacquaint themselves with the family at night as well. That’s a big deal. It’s a big deal particularly with the optempo we’ve got right now.
We’re trying to expand it. The only problem with mobile training is that we’ve got more people that want it than we have the capacity to provide right now, and it generally applies to high-density MOSs as opposed to low-density MOSs. By that I mean if I want to do an infantry BNCOC at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I’m going to have a whole bunch of people in school. But if I want to do some very technical, very low-density skill, where you only have one or two or three of these guys in the whole division, it is of little … it’s neither particularly effective nor efficient to send a mobile training team of three or four instructors to train two or three people.
Army Times: So they’re mostly being used for those high-density MOSs.
General Wallace: They’re mostly being used for high-density MOSs, and we’ve got an inventory of about 20 high-density MOSs that we’re attacking with mobile training right now. And it allows us to fit the educational system and instruction into the Army Force Generation Model. The unit knows when they can afford to let their people go to school, they know when their field training is going to occur, they know when their mission rehearsal exercise is going to be. So when they find that gap, they can plug our mobile training team into that gap and provide the education that their NCOs deserve and still meet their requirements associated with ARFORGEN.
Army Times: If you could briefly explain lifelong learning, that college? The difference between these two.
General Wallace: I talked about structured self-development a moment ago. [Structured self-development] provides a self-development mechanism through that dashboard, through the Army Career Tracker, that provides to the individual some suggested things that one might want to do through his own self-development. It provides the structure to do that, and the instruction itself – the enablers – are the instruction itself. The career tracker is not instructional; it’s just the mechanism by which one connects between your name, your Social Security number, the subject, and then to a particular course of instruction. This is the actual course of instruction itself.
Lifelong learning is similar to that, but it’s designed and targeted against your specific military-specialty stuff. All of it taken together provides for the noncommissioned officer corps – and potentially the officer corps – a structured program where you can go get the right instruction at the right time based on your particular circumstance.
Army Times: Are these too resource-intensive?
General Wallace: The development of some of the South American stuff is going to be relatively resource-intensive. We’re finding that to get a single-deal product, if you go out on the market and contract with somebody to do it, it runs a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a single product. We’re playing around with some techniques to obviate some of that cost. There are some software programs that allow the developer to go directly into the software and develop the program without paying some middleman to do it. We’ve got to play around with it a little to see if we can --
Army Times: Another important thing that’s not looking like it’s on the dashboard yet?
General Wallace: The only things that will be on the dashboard are things that are ready for prime time. What we don’t want to do is have somebody go to that dashboard, click on a particular topic, and it sends you to a page that says this page is under construction. That only has to happen once or twice before it completely turns off the individual, and we’ll lose them.
Army Times: Talk to me a little bit about this one. Any language? Language schools everywhere?
General Wallace: Speaking of under construction, that’s under construction. [Laughter].
Army Times: Policy being developed?
General Wallace: I’ll give you Wallace’s view. There are three tiers of language that we ought to be worried about. One is the individual who speaks a language and that’s his MOS. He’s the interpreter, he’s the translator. We do a pretty good job with those guys, in my judgment. Defense Language Institute, language immersion programs, and all that sort of stuff.
The bottom tier is kind of the survival language stuff: “I’m getting ready to deploy to Iraq, therefore I need to learn some Arabic.” We do a reasonable job with that through Rosetta Stone and other language capability that’s out there. But the folks in the middle are what this is targeted against. It’s got several aspects to it.
This particular aspect here talks about the development of language laboratories and language capability at select military installations across the country. So if you’re a commander and you’re getting ready to go someplace, and you have a language need, you can start sending your Soldiers to that language laboratory with the right kind of instruction – and get that instruction at home station rather than to have to send people to the Defense Language Institute or whatever.
Beyond that, and we’re working with the Department [of the Army] on an overall Army language and culture strategy targeted generally at the officer corps – but not exclusively – that will probably focus on a small group of strategic languages and will probably have some kind of incentive program that encourages officers and ROTC cadets and West Point cadets to learn a particular language. It incentivizes them to do so. But the language --
Army Times: You mean like with foreign language pay? Foreign language proficiency pay or something beyond that?
General Wallace: Well, it’s actually less than that. It’s not geared at proficiency, it’s geared at incentivizing the individual to take the language in the first place. And once one gains a degree of the language proficiency, then you can get into the language proficiency pay business. But we’ve come to realize it takes a long time for somebody to get to the 2-2 level in a language, which is what you’re required to have in order to draw language proficiency pay, if I’m not mistaken.
We send kids to school at DLI for 56 weeks, and many of them don’t achieve a 2-2.
Army Times: That’s true.
General Wallace: This is targeted at the general population of officers and senior noncommissioned officers, encouraging them and incentivizing them to study a language.
Army Times: What kind of incentive are you talking about?
General Wallace: We’re talking monetary incentives, probably. Particularly for the ROTC cadet. If you can put a couple of extra dollars of beer money in their pocket by virtue of taking a language course, then maybe they’ll be encouraged to take that course. But we’ve got a lot of work to do before we make that a reality – that whole strategy.
Army Times: I want to change the topic here for a moment. I want to talk quickly about the ten-week basic [training], which the Chief told me starts November 1st, and I just want to get you on that.
General Wallace: The 2nd of November.
Army Times: The other question is, I want to talk about the possibility of making TRADOC a two-year assignment so people can get over to the war zone. Then also why is it that, and I’ve heard you say this so many times. Why is the Army perceived as ordinary? What’s behind that?
You can take those questions any way you want.
General Wallace: Let me talk about the two-year assignment first, because I think it’s a relatively simple answer.
First of all, I don’t want to create so much turbulence in TRADOC that it becomes inefficient in terms of moving people around, but there is great value, in my judgment, in having combat veterans wearing the TRADOC patch. They bring credibility, they bring life, they bring energy, into the organization.
So what I’ve asked the G-1 and HRC and the Sergeant Major to do is see where we can accept two-year assignments in TRADOC, and to codify those assignments to the point where we can start moving people in and out without doing damage to our organizational structure in the process.
I don’t anticipate it being a blanket policy across TRADOC for two-year assignments; I think that would probably cause so much turbulence that it would cause us problems in terms of our effectiveness in training the force, recruiting the force, etc. So there will be some commands and some positions within TRADOC that are excepted from that two-year assignment policy. But where it makes sense, I would like to move people in and out of TRADOC in a more rapid fashion because I need the combat experience – and I think our combat veterans, in some cases, need a break. That’s good for TRADOC, and it’s good for the Army.
Army Times: Do you have any idea right now what percentage of TRADOC has the combat patch now?
General Wallace: I don’t. We’re still working through that.
Ten-week basic training. We’re going to do ten weeks of basic training starting on the 2nd of November. It will be a pilot during this fiscal year. We’re going to do it for the first third of the year. The last ten-week course will be complete somewhere around the 21st of March, then we’ll go back to our normal nine-week basic training for the rest of the fiscal year. We’ll do that, one, because we’re doing it as a pilot, to make sure we understand the second- and third-order effects of doing ten weeks of basic training; and secondly, because we anticipate a surge in our training population during the second half of the fiscal year, which we couldn’t get around in terms of scheduling and that sort of thing.
My intent is – given the pilot, and given the success of the pilot, and given that extra time after we’ve completed the pilot to make whatever necessary adjustments we need to make – that starting in fiscal year ’09, we will be at ten weeks’ basic training across the board.
Army Times: How are you going to do it? What’s the mechanism? Are you going to --
General Wallace: We’re going to add a week.
Army Times: -- add a reception battalion, take a week away from the drill sergeants on reset time? How is it --
General Wallace: We’re going to add a week.
Army Times: You’re going to add tasks?
General Wallace: We are not going to add tasks. And I have been very specific. We are not going to add any tasks. What we’re going to add is time, and give that time to the drill sergeant so he can ensure that individuals have mastered those tasks they need to master before they go on to AIT. That is the sole purpose.
Over my dead body will we add any tasks to basic training. But we do need to add a little bit of extra time and give it to the drill sergeant, which in my judgment will provide to the AIT commander a better physically fit, more mature, more disciplined Soldier who understands the tasks to mastery better than he does right now.
Army Times: Will that take any time away from something else?
General Wallace: No. Which is part of the scheduling issue in FY08. We’ve got to make sure that the graduations from basic align with the start dates of AIT. So we’ve got to do some magic there to make sure it all fits together before we can implement it full up.
Army Times: Ordinary Army? You sounded so excited about combatives, but they’re not in your recruiting ads.
General Wallace: But combatives, when you compare an F-22 flying at Mach 3, and an aircraft carrier at 20 knots, and a Marine climbing that mountain and getting the saber in his hand with the blues and all that sort of stuff, the Army just comes out in the perception of our population of potential recruits as ordinary.
Army Times: But you could do those ads, too. It’s about ads, like perception is reality.
General Wallace: We could do the ads, but there’s a certain intellectual honesty we need to maintain within our advertising. We shouldn’t be creating expectations we can’t realize. Everybody who joins the Air Force is not going to fly an F-22. Some of them are going to be driving fuel trucks, and some of them are going to be packing parachutes, and some of them are going to be doing other stuff. Everybody who joins the Navy isn’t going to be on an aircraft carrier. And everybody who’s on the aircraft carrier isn’t going to be doing some really cool stuff. Some of them are going to be cooking and loading bombs and all that sort of thing.
What we have been trying to do in our advertising is change that perspective of ordinary. There’s something special about Army Strong. There’s something special about it. If you, Gina, want to get a PhD in strength, join the United States Army. You can’t get it anyplace else. You can’t get it at Gold’s Gym, you can’t get it anyplace else. It comes from being a Soldier. And I can’t even explain to you how it happens, but it does. That’s what we’re trying to convey with the Army Strong advertising campaign: getting a little bit beyond ordinary into something special.
Army Times: It’s been a year now since Army Strong came out. Is there a discernible difference in --
General Wallace: When it first came out, we had a very, very nice bump in leads in general. People trying to access GoArmy.com, people talking to the Sergeant Star and all that sort of thing. Very nice bump. Then it began to drop off. It’s leveled out somewhat over time. It is a better campaign than what we had previously, but we haven’t sustained that bump we saw in November/December last year.
Army Times: Thanks for the extra minutes.
General Wallace: You’re welcome.
Army Times: Anything we missed that you want to get out there?
General Wallace: I’m just awfully proud of what the Army’s doing these days. We’re recruiting the right Soldier, we’re training him right. We’ve got the best-trained, best-equipped, best-led Army on the planet. Perhaps the best-led, best-trained, best-equipped Army that’s ever walked the planet. And not only that, young people come in the Army, and they are changed fundamentally by having served – and regardless of whether they serve for one tour of duty or for a lifetime, they go back to their communities, and they contribute in ways they couldn’t have contributed prior to having had that experience. I think it’s a powerful thing that the Army gives to the country, because we give it to individuals. We take ordinary people and give them the opportunity to do extraordinary things.
I don’t know if you want to share that with anybody or not, but I think it’s cool.
Army Times: Did you get that feeling when you went back to your community as a second lieutenant?
General Wallace: When I went back to my community as a second lieutenant, the Vietnam War was going on and nobody wanted to talk to me. They sure as hell didn’t want to talk to me in uniform. So no, I didn’t get that feeling.
Army Times: It’s a different country now.
General Wallace: The country has matured to the point where they can separate the warrior from the war. And whether you support the war or not, everybody supports the warrior, which I think is an extraordinarily powerful thing that we have been able to develop in this country and in our culture over the last almost-30 years now.
Army Times: Thank you.
General Wallace: You’re welcome.