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    Solarium: Warrants need training, Army over-relies on contractors

    Solarium: Warrants need training, Army over-relies on contractors

    Photo By David Vergun | Lt. Gen. Robert Brown, commander of the Combined Arms Center, gives feedback during...... read more read more

    FORT LEAVENWORTH, KS, UNITED STATES

    01.19.2016

    Story by David Vergun       

    Defense Media Activity - Army   

    FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. - Two major problems impact readiness, warrant officers said at the first-ever chief of staff of the Army-sponsored Warrant Officer Solarium, at the Command and General Staff College, Jan. 15.

    First, the Army is too dependent on contractors to maintain front-line equipment. Second, warrants are not getting all of the technical training they need to lead in their traditional role.

    CONTRACTOR DEPENDENT

    In the last 14 years of warfare, a surge of forces and new equipment made it necessary to hire new contractors to maintain forward-based equipment, Chief Warrant Officer 3 James Morris told Lt. Gen. Robert Brown, commander of the Combined Arms Center, and other senior leaders.

    Furthermore, there just wasn't the training time available, he added.

    "Now the time has come to reclaim our equipment," said Morris, who provided his own example.

    "I'm an electronics-maintenance technician," he commented. "I work on communications devices, radios, night-vision, other equipment. A lot of stuff that came out over the last 10 years I'm not allowed or capable of working on."

    There's often no technical manuals to repair or fix this stuff, "so that essentially turns me into a logistician," he said. For instance, "if a broken radio is brought to me, I have to determine if it's under warranty, who fixes it, when to expect to get it back, and determine whether or not to order a new one, things of that nature.

    "It takes my technical abilities away and makes me more generalized as a logistician."

    Many of the approximately 85 warrants agreed and had similar experiences.

    Chief Warrant Officer 3 Heath Stamm had other concerns.

    "In a decisive-action fight with a peer-level competitor, when we're taking ground and moving, when bullets start flying, how willing will these civilian contractors be to fix that digital system" as movement into harm's way commences, he asked.

    "We haven't fought a frontline fight in a long time," he pointed out. "People say we were in Afghanistan, but we were static. When we start moving and taking ground again, that's going to change the dynamics.

    "Everywhere you see a contractor in the field, you should probably look and say 'where's the warrant officer that needs to replace him,'" he continued.

    Stamm summed up his feelings for warrants taking control: "I'm the technical expert on that system. One, I'm cheaper; two, when bullets start flying, I'll continue working on that system."

    Chief Warrant Officer 3 Nick Koeppen agreed that the Army is over-reliant on contractors, particularly during deployments.

    The Army can send only so many people overseas, he explained. "When we deploy our aviation units, we're not taking our maintainers and our warrant officers with us. So we have contractors fixing our aircraft. Then, what happens when we bring them back and we're expecting our guys [to fix them] who've never had the training and experience? They can't fix it."

    WARRANTS LOSING TECHNICAL EDGE

    Morris said that not only is the Army over-reliant on contractors, warrant officers themselves are not getting some of the crucial training needed for them to lead in their traditional technical role.

    Noncommissioned officers and even privates are getting trained up on new equipment first and the warrant officers are not being formally inserted into the process, he said.

    Morris provided a recent personal example.

    The new M-1135 nuclear, biological, chemical, reconnaissance Stryker variant came to Fort Carson, Colorado, and a FLMNET, or field-level maintenance new equipment training team came out. Their trainees were 94F maintainer enlisted Soldiers "who worked for me," Morris said.

    "So I inserted myself into that two-week class with all the privates and specialists on my own initiative, because I want to know everything technical going on within my sections," he said. "I don't like it when my Soldiers know something and I don't, so I try to learn everything I can. That's an issue."

    Morris said he'd prefer to be trained first because chiefs are supposed to be the subject-matter experts on systems they're responsible for. The commander should feel confident that his chief warrant officer is trained up on everything.

    Also, having that training would better enable the warrants to determine what's needed in the maintenance program and in the training program, he said.

    Then, "when the team does come to train, I can assist with the training," Morris said. "That builds confidence in the Soldiers that their leaders, the warrant officers, have the competence to teach them and to train them."

    The enlisted Soldiers can then say, "'My chief already knows this so I'll listen to him.' Not, 'my chief is asking me the same questions I was going to ask him.' That's a gap in training. My team members have had similar experiences. I suspect it could be a problem across the Army."

    One way to alleviate this, Morris said, is to insert a chief into the procurement and acquisition phases of equipment "so we can have that warrant officer making recommendations and getting their point of view."

    "Most systems look at lethality, maneuverability and protection, but maintenance is overlooked," he said. "It's an afterthought."

    Having noted where improvements can and should be made, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Fatima Nettles said warrant officers are still the best technical experts in the Army, albeit "mostly due to our own initiative and self-training."

    THE GENERAL WEIGHS IN

    Having junior Soldiers learn new equipment maintenance first is not the right way, Brown said. "It needs to be the other way around," with warrant officers leading in that effort. They shouldn't have to insert themselves into the training process on their own initiative.

    Warrant officers should be embedded in the process, he said. They will help adapt technology to people, not people to technology.

    Brown said he believes that it wasn't intentionally done that way, just overlooked. "But we can push this" change.

    The general also said he agreed that warrants should be the frontline, go-to experts when it comes to technical leadership, with less reliance on contractors.

    Brown said this is the valuable input senior leaders need, because they don't always get the ground-level view. He promised to follow up on the discussions with other senior leaders.

    (Editor's note: This is the first in a series of Warrant Officer Solarium articles.)

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    NEWS INFO

    Date Taken: 01.19.2016
    Date Posted: 01.26.2016 10:26
    Story ID: 187049
    Location: FORT LEAVENWORTH, KS, US

    Web Views: 175
    Downloads: 0

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