FORT HOOD, Texas - On Thursday, Jan. 15, the Army’s senior logistician, Lt. Gen. Gustave Perna, stopped by Fort Hood and had a Leader Professional Development luncheon at the Freeman Cafe Dining Facility.
After enjoying a baked chicken lunch, Perna discussed several topics that pertained to logistics and also touched on Army-wide topics, such as unit readiness and leadership development. He began by outlining his strategic readiness focus.
“My problem is that we’ve created some great Soldiers in the last two wars, but we’ve really forgotten how to do logistics,” Perna explained. “We’ve forgotten how to project ourselves, we’ve forgotten how to sustain ourselves and we definitely don’t know how to operationally execute logistics on the battlefield.”
The chief of staff of the Army’s number one priority is leadership development, so Perna went further into detail on how this relates to logistics by discussing how current leaders can produce future leaders with the ability to go into the field and push Soldiers with standards and discipline to achieve logistics on the battlefield.
He asked the group of senior leaders, “Do we have leaders who really understand how to run motor stables anymore? Do we have leaders that know how to push fuel on the battle field? Do we have leaders that actually know how to walk out into a motor pool and diagnose trouble with a tank?”
These rhetorical questions were directed in a manner to make the group think about how they are passing on the knowledge their commanders and mentors taught them. He expressed his concern with the Army’s current readiness status by comparing it to our status during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After referencing several situations from that time period, he suggested a solution.
“How do we get ourselves back in the game? How do we make sure we can do all of that? Coaching, teaching, mentoring, OK? Training, training to standard,” He concluded.
Date Taken: | 01.15.2015 |
Date Posted: | 03.04.2015 21:03 |
Story ID: | 155963 |
Location: | FORT HOOD, TX, US |
Web Views: | 175 |
Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Lt. Gen. Perna discusses leadership development with Fort Hood Soldiers, by 1LT Barry Stevenson, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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