Photo By Sgt. Carson Gramley | Staff Sgt. Jason Grey, a platoon sergeant with Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine...... read more read more
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U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND -- Junior infantrymen from Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force – Crisis Response – Central Command, began a series of lectures and courses aimed at improving their small-unit leadership skills in the Central Command area of operations, Feb. 5, 2015.
By borrowing course materials and knowledge from formal Marine Corps training schools, Gunnery Sgt. Jeffrey Wright, the company gunnery sergeant, created a course schedule focusing on important leadership skills.
“I borrowed the phrase TSULC, which is the Tactical Small Unit Leader’s Course… and it’s essentially like a squad leader’s course but for team leaders, that was the intent behind it,” said Wright, from San Jose, Calif. “However, the problem I identified with that course was that it was mostly live fire with only a few classes.”
Wright said that while live-fire ranges are very necessary practice and good for muscle memory, they don’t always provide the knowledge base needed for a leader to understand the logistics of moving Marine rifle squads from one position to another.
“A leader… his weapon is his men. If he can’t properly employ them, then theoretically he’s weaponless,” said Wright.
Lance Cpl. Aaron Colwell, an assaultman participating in the class, said he sees the need to groom young leaders for the future, and thinks this course has the potential to do that.
“This is more of an informal setting, [than the schoolhouse]. We’re able to ask questions freely in the middle of a lecture and have more of an open forum for discussion, whereas in the schoolhouse it’s going to be a more formal pen and paper setting,” said Colwell, from Corpus Christi, Texas.
The course is two weeks long with a mostly classroom setting, so Wright decided early they’d have to be creative with their newly designed curriculum.
“We’ve been having the first sergeant run these ethical decision-making games. So basically it’s very scenario based, where you have a couple of role-players and then the leader is presented the scenario and he reacts a certain way,” said Wright. “Afterwards the class debates whether it was good ethical decision-making or bad ethical decision-making, and it gives them a chance to discuss in an open forum and try to understand; what was the decision-making process?”
Many of the Marines participating are either current or potential small unit leaders such as squad leaders, team leaders or even platoon sergeants. Some of them might have to attend formal schools such as the Advanced Infantry Course and Wright says this will help prepare them for that.
“The goal is to bridge that gap, to set up a course that starts feeding those bread crumbs of infantry knowledge to our team leaders, who are eventually expected to move on to become squad leaders,” said Wright. “They can start getting the knowledge now, instead of waiting until they’re a squad leader.”
“I think this gives us a good understanding of what we’re going to be walking into when they do send us to those leadership courses,” said Colwell. “Now we get to kind of have this in our back pocket, and have some knowledge to pull from.”
| Date Taken: | 02.05.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 02.11.2015 08:10 |
| Story ID: | 154183 |
| Location: | (UNDISCLOSED LOCATION) |
| Hometown: | CORPUS CHRISTI, TX, US |
| Hometown: | SAN JOSE, CA, US |
| Web Views: | 533 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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