Talk:Kevin P. Byrnes

Based on General Kevin P. Byrnes being relieved of duty, and the significance of his position as head of TRADOC, am temporarily parking the following quotes here as they could quite possibly disappear from TRADOC website.

Somehow, somewhere Byrnes stepped out of line ... and perhaps the clue is contained within his recent quotes:


 * The following is still [August 9, 2005] posted on the TRADOC home page:


 * “This year we committed to three major movements in the Army. We’re creating a modular force, we’re going to stabilize the force, and we’ve got about 100K of internal change between the Active and the Reserve Components. How some of that translates into the training base is about 90,000 training seat changes – 90,000 additional training seats we have to put into place this year to account for the major changes occurring in the Army. The conversion to a modular force will not occur over a three- or four-year period; this is [happening] in 2005. This year alone we’ll train almost 450,000 Soldiers across the Training and Doctrine Command school system ... 450,000. That’s a pretty high number that includes other services, other nations and non-military governmental agencies, but it is predominately an Army figure.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general

"Archive: Quotable quotes":


 * Current focus: expand the training base. Aug. 3-4, 2005


 * "The most extraordinary revolution we’ve had is in the area of training and leader development. Soldiers are leaving the training base competent, confident and combat-ready. This is an expanding training base, a training base in which we’re focusing a lot on cultural awareness, mental agility of leaders, as well as on the combat tasks. We’ve clearly identified 39 individual tasks. … Combat veterans participated in a major study focused on identifying what particular individual tasks and collective drills are essential for Soldiers graduating from the training base. We came up with 39 individual tasks and nine collective drills. We’re training on those today. Prior to this revolution in training, we were training on about 13 of the individual tasks and four of the drills that had been defined as necessary in combat.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: expand the training base. Aug. 1-2, 2005


 * "The lessons-learned and doctrine-development processes have to change. Lessons-learned have to be captured immediately, shared with other deployed units and deploying units, put into the schoolhouse and combat training centers, institutionalized and shared with our allies so we’re all benefiting from the hard lessons-learned in combat by Soldiers on the ground.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: expand the training base. July 29-31, 2005


 * "In a time of peace, the institutional Army drives change. … We take time to develop the concepts, study them, test them and integrate them into experiments and wargames. Then we put them into some draft-type doctrine, send it out, and have the field chew on it for a while. Over time, it’s developed, approved and put in the schoolhouse. The Army accepts that doctrine after a considerable digestive period – five years, perhaps. In a time of war, there’s an interesting dynamic – the operational force drives change. The operational force sees the need firsthand. It’s up to the institutional Army to capture it, make sense of it and integrate it across the domains of doctrine, organizational design, materiel, etc. We put it into place in the schoolhouse and combat training centers, while the operational units are putting it into place in combat under fire.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: expand the training base, July 27-28, 2005

"A major effort that has been underway since Day 1 of this conflict is the gathering of lessons-learned and bringing them rapidly back into our schoolhouses and our combat training centers. If we learn a particular lesson – a new tactic, technique or procedure in Iraq – within days, it will be in the schoolhouses and in place in our combat training centers. ... We gather [the lesson-learned], turn it into a new tactic, technique or procedure, and put it in the schoolhouse. It happens in days. We can do it in hours if it’s significant.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: increase rigor in training, July 25-26, 2005


 * “What’s happening in basic combat training today is unlike anything we’ve done since, perhaps, preparing Soldiers for Korea and World War II. We’ve gone from three days in the field to 14 days in the field. We’ve gone to this practice of weapons immersion. We’re doing live-fire convoy training. They’re going to go through a convoy, an unblocked ambush and fight through it. They’re going to have a blocked ambush, dismount and defeat the threat. In basic training, they will have been in the Army about five weeks. They’re going to go through a dry-fire rehearsal under the direction of a drill sergeant. They’re going to go through it with blanks and then go through it live. … We’re doing it in basic training. We’re also going to do it in our AIT and NCOES sites for the combat-service-support MOSs. Our transporters, quartermaster and ordnance Soldiers will go through live-fire combat training and do it again in AIT. Their NCOs will go through it in their ANCOC and BNCOC. Their officer basic courses will go through it also because they need it more than our infantrymen, artillerymen and armor Soldiers.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: increase rigor in training, July 22-24, 2005


 * "We’re making progress every day for the world’s oppressed, but the battlefields right now are very complex. … There’s no front line, where the enemy is somewhere beyond that front line. … Combat operations occur everywhere. Regardless of branch, every Soldier is subject to getting into a conflict on any given day, at any point in time when they’re outside their base camps.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: implement change and maintain balance between the current and future force, July 20-21, 2005


 * "TRADOC is a foundational organization. … We are foundational to the Army. We recruit, train and educate its leaders. We think about and work the designs, etc., for the Army of the future. We are not working our own lane; we don’t have a lane. Our lane is the Army lane, and that’s how we think about what we do. We’re not wedded to old practices, and we’re not wedded to processes.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: implement change and maintain balance between the current and future force, July 16-19, 2005


 * "We can no longer afford to have four separate services, each with complete capabilities to solve problems in our own domains. So … [we’re looking at] the capabilities we have in the Army we may not need. … It’s about interdependence, that purposeful reliance on a sister service to provide capabilities; it’s not about stovepipes. It’s about how you apply force as a Joint force on the battlefield.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: implement change and maintain balance between the current and future force, July 13-15, 2005


 * "People ask, ‘How can you possibly [transform the Army to a modular force] in a time of war?’ I can’t see how we can afford not to change. We’re expanding the Army by 30,000 people and adding 10 additional combat brigades to provide our Soldiers a rotational tempo that makes sense for an all-volunteer force in a time of protracted conflict. … To make that force more relevant, we looked at the designs and found we have some flaws in supporting a protracted campaign. … In 14 months – from when we briefed our concept to the [Army] chief of staff until 3rd Infantry Division deployed – we had redesigned the tactical level of the Army. … We’ve made major inroads in transforming the current force brigades and their divisional headquarters. The Army modular force [design] … was not an over-the-weekend drill, where we locked everybody in, fed them pizza and Coke, and told them to come up with something. We cast a very wide net out to get the best thinkers on Army organizational designs and warfighting.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: implement change and maintain balance between the current and future force, July 9-12, 2005


 * "We’re arming Soldiers with the latest technologies to empower and enable them to do the job in combat better than ever before. In fact, in 2004 we put $2.4 billion into things Soldiers need to fight the last 400 meters such as uniforms, kneepads, optics sites, small-arms weapons and ammunition. We committed $2.4 billion out of our Army budget for things Soldiers need.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: implement change and maintain balance between the current and future force, July 6-8, 2005


 * "We’re moving to a structure that has two echelons of command above the brigade. Right now we’re calling them units of employment X and Y because we’re still … working the design and implementation. ... At the higher level is UEy, which will be somewhat of a merger between the corps and the Army. It will be [Joint task force]-capable. Joint Forces Command established a standing Joint force headquarters. That’s a 58-person plug that can join an operational command [at] three-star level and make it Joint on very short notice. We know exactly where those 58 billets fit into this new [UEy] headquarters. … Over the last year, … we’ve redesigned an entire division, we’ve redesigned all the command-and-control headquarters above the brigade, and we’ve developed plans for the establishment of new commands subordinate to those upper echelons and how forces should be apportioned at the echelons above the brigade. No small task.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: Independence Day (freedom isn't free), July 2-5, 2005


 * "The threats to our nation will not go away. They despise the American way of life. They despise everything we hold dear. They don’t value what we value. We go to war with rules of engagement, with rules of land warfare and with the Geneva Convention. They go to war against our civilians and against our children to destroy our way of life. Killing an American is what they value, not combat. It’s a different type of enemy. Some call them asymmetric, but they are asymmetric not just in weaponry and their approach to combat; they are asymmetric in their morals and what they hold dear. We’re committed, and we’re going to defeat this opponent.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: return agile leaders (self-aware and adaptive) to the operational force, June 29-July 1, 2005


 * "We’ve got some great [cultural awareness] programs underway at [Fort] Leavenworth [Kan.] and the Army War College to broaden the understanding of the Army senior leaders, but what I’ve got to do today is focus our junior leaders on cultural awareness. The culture we’re going to focus them on is the fight we’re in now. I’m preparing those junior leaders for the operational environment they’re going into at the present time and not operations five to 10 years from now. Later, at the captain and major level, we can get a little bit broader, but junior leaders in pre-commissioning and in officer basic course right now are going to focus on this particular theater.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: return agile leaders (self-aware and adaptive) to the operational force, June 25-28, 2005


 * "We’ve done a couple of major studies on mental agility. I think we’ve got to move past this business of training doctrine and a rigid, prescriptive-type adherence to doctrine. This environment demands mental agility. It demands a reference to doctrine that is suggestive, where you can use it to give you the fundamentals and the conceptual understanding. Once they roll out the gate, our leaders in combat are hit with about 12 different complexities they might not have anticipated. They’ve got to be able to take a vast amount of information, work through it quickly and, without consultation, come up with ways to employ their force under fire. I don’t think the way we were training at our combat training centers gave leaders a good look at what options might be available to them under fire. … We are fighting a small-unit war, led every day by platoon sergeants, squad leaders and lieutenants. That’s the area we’ve got to focus on first. We’ve got to focus on using doctrine as some fundamental backdrop and look at what options might have been available to that young officer. And then focus on what the second- and third-order effects might have been had they applied that particular course of action. Cause them to broadly think through possibilities instead of thinking in a very narrow, stovepipe sense on what doctrine might have provided in that particular situation because doctrine is not going to give it to you.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: return agile leaders (self-aware and adaptive) to the operational force, June 22-24, 2005


 * "We’ve got to develop a leader who can think. … We’ve got to take them through the training and apply the unexpected, the uncertainties and the wild-card types of events that will occur to the leader on any given day. … We want them to develop solutions, strategies or options, as opposed to giving a particular answer. We want to follow a more Socratic method of determining solutions, as opposed to being brow-beaten by an observer/controller or instructor for not properly applying an applicable doctrinal tenant. Doctrinal tenants don’t always apply. The fundamentals will always apply, but so much happens to a young leader. This is a small-unit war.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: return agile leaders (self-aware and adaptive) to the operational force, June 18-21, 2005


 * "Our junior officers are visible examples of our nation’s commitment to war, and that example is represented in the diversity of the force. In Bosnia, where we had three former warring factions, they killed a quarter-million people and forced two million people from their homes. The killing didn’t stop until the Americans got there. There are three factions: the Bosnians/Muslims, Serbs and Croatians. They look alike, talk alike, grew up alike, but they’ve got a history of hundreds of years of fighting and killing one another. It goes back to 1389. When they see an American patrol go by with an African-American in one turret, an Asian-Pacific Soldier in another and a Caucasian in another, they kind of scratch their heads. They don’t understand the miracle of what we’ve accomplished in this country over the last 230 years. Truly, one of our strengths when we deploy the Army overseas is that kind of diversity; that visible display is an example to people who have a problem getting along with one another.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: return agile leaders (self-aware and adaptive) to the operational force, June 15-17, 2005


 * “We are in an environment where combatants are mixed with noncombatants, where there’s a clash of cultures, religions and varied political systems. … I predict that within the next five years, you will see the Army mandate language skills in our officer pre-commissioning programs. We will expect every officer to graduate proficient in a language. We won’t prescribe the languages, although I think eventually we’ll have to do something like that. Given that we’re being applied around the world, we need to become a much more culturally aware force. We are very deficient in the awareness of the Arab/Islamic cultures and religions. We have to get better at that. If we’re going to perform wearing this uniform with an American flag on the right shoulder every day, we’ve got to show we’re aware and we respect the culture, we respect the religion, we respect the people, and we understand it.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: return agile leaders (self-aware and adaptive) to the operational force, June 11-14, 2005


 * "We want our training to be more Socratic. We want more group think, we want more discussion, and we want more interaction between peers. At the lower level, you need more contact hours with our instructors, but at the higher level, you need less. I want [the Army’s young leaders] to learn from one another like they’re doing in combat and in communities of practice right now. It’s about how you think, and not what you think. We’ll give them fundamentals. Doctrine will become more and more suggestive and less prescriptive. We want to evaluate our officers on how they think and execute in very complex situations.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general


 * Current focus: return agile leaders (self-aware and adaptive) to the operational force, June 1-3, 2005


 * "One of the key efforts underway in our [Officer Education System] is the study we’re calling Agile Leader. It’s pretty obvious to us that when a lieutenant leads a patrol out the gate or a captain is working his company in Iraq, things change from when they assess the mission to when they complete the mission. We’re looking at the skills they need to perform in that type of environment, and we’re looking at the missions they’re assigned. How do you introduce into their training the unexpected elements that every day can confound and confuse or challenge our leaders in combat? Incomplete information, different perspectives, new players, changing missions, constraints, rules of engagement, media – [these are] not something senior-level commanders worry about; our lieutenants are faced with that every day. … When we look at officer training in particular, the question is, ‘Are we preparing our officers for operations in this extremely complex environment we’re engaged in now and will continue to be engaged in the future?’ And we’re looking not only at lieutenant training, but we’re also looking at how we’re training our captains, majors and colonels for that type of environment. At those different levels are working different pieces of the equation: from close combat through planning for future operations, employment of large forces and links to political and other interagency activities.” – Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, Training and Doctrine Command commanding general