Adapting to new battlefields may mean that the US military needs to clear its training calendar to make way for new priorities, a top admiral said.
“Some things that we used to do, we’re going to have to stop doing,” Adm. Frank Bradley, who leads the military’s Special Operations Command, said last week at the annual SOF Week event in Tampa, Florida.
Bradley recalled how, as a junior sailor, he and his teammates measured the depth of water using a line weighted with a lead block, writing their measurements on shards of plexiglass with grease pencils, but as methods and tech evolved, the Navy began adopting other tools for training.
“There are only so many hours in the day and so many days in the week, and some of those hours you have to sleep to be ready and to be sharp,” Bradley said. “And so you have a limited amount of time to prepare and train, and so we aren’t going to just add new things onto the calendar for our SOF formations or any of our formations. We have to creatively destroy parts of that calendar to make room for the new things we have to do.”
As the Pentagon tries to transform the training, tech, and acquisitions processes that calcified during the 20-year Global War on Terror, letting go of irrelevant training could be tough.
Training requirements are not always flexible, some training requires high-level approval for program modifications, and some seemingly outdated practices can still be valuable for troops, meaning cuts have to be made judiciously.
There is a push within the military to experiment with new technologies, such as drones, counter-drone technology, and electronic warfare, and absorb modern warfare lessons from conflicts like the war in Ukraine.
Many methods of warfare and planning assumptions the US relied on in Iraq and Afghanistan already don’t apply anymore, said Gen. Frank Donovan, the head of US Southern Command, at last week’s event.
“What we had in Iraq and Afghanistan was more — more vehicles, more [forward operating bases], more [dining facilities], more logistics, more unlimited comms, relatively good weather, you know, clear skies, no trees, all those things,” Donovan said. “We have none of that in SOUTHCOM.”
“We haven’t fought really under the gun in a long time,” he added, speaking broadly of large-scale conflict. Grit, and the human ability to endure harsh conditions, will remain essential, he added.
For special operators, that means somehow balancing training on emerging tech with things like swimming through high surfs to take an adversary by surprise, Bradley said.
“Our leadership teams on a daily basis have to go through that prioritization drill of how they prioritize the most important commodity, the most important capital they have — intellectual capital. Where are people spending their time and their focus to develop and prepare for the next mission,” he said.
