The art of making better drill sergeants

[Woodmonkey]

FORT JACKSON, S.C. — So you’ve been selected for drill sergeant duty.

Here’s the skinny: you can put aside everything you’ve heard about Drill Sergeant School — candidates no longer are put through a repeat of basic training. Instead of barracks, you will be living in a hotel, and by the time you graduate from the nine-week course, you’ll be certified in level one combatives.

Weapons training has tripled, drill and ceremony has been sliced by more than half, and leadership training has moved from memorizing “dos and don’ts” to understanding the minds of basic trainees.

“Our primary focus now is leadership and marksmanship,” said Drill Sergeant School commandant Command Sgt. Maj. Gary Newsome, of the changes that started at the school three years ago.

The atmosphere is different, too, Newsome and others said, because many trainers and trainees have served repeat combat deployments Drill Sergeant School has become more of a peer-to-peer environment.

“Most soldiers come here with the anxiety that they’re going to get crushed, that they’re going to get hammered like they did in basic combat training,” said Sgt. 1st Class Michael Howard, a Drill Sergeant School senior drill sergeant leader.

He went through the training in early 2005 before the school began going through its transformation.

But, he said, “after a week they realize they’re being treated like a professional and not going to become a super private.”

Gone are the days of churning out fire-breathing drill sergeants who barked and intimidated soldiers with rules they weren’t even encouraged to understand. There is a new emphasis on professionalism and leadership, some of it taken from U.S. Military Academy materials.

The days are harder and longer — school is six days a week with days of up to 14 hours, compared with the five-day, 10-hour-a-day curriculum that ended three years ago.

Students stay two to a room at Fort Jackson’s Magruder Inn with private bathrooms, maids, refrigerators and televisions.

The on-post hotel, Newsome said, “has a more relaxed atmosphere” than traditional barracks.

Feedback from the students is gathered after every event and time is taken to ensure that everyone’s getting it.

The Drill Sergeant School has adopted the “outcome-based training” model that is being instilled at training schools and centers across the Army.

Drill Sergeant School, “was hard core before, but I don’t think students were learning,” Newsome said. “I just think they were going through a process similar to basic training and processing out to basic combat training units as a drill sergeant. I don’t think they were any smarter other than [in] drill and ceremony. That was the only hard thing about Drill Sergeant School, but now it’s more about making sure they understand and know how to teach every task that’s taught in BCT,” he said.

The school’s transformation, he said, was “not just because of the war, it was also because we were doing things three years ago that we were doing 30 years ago.”

But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have had a profound effect on the way basic training is carried out and on the Drill Sergeant School’s curriculum, with the addition not only of expanded weapons instruction, but also with requirements that each graduate receive combat lifesaver certification and level one combatives certification.

It is also evident in the fact that in October the school was authorized a billet for a captain with a specialty in psychology to screen drill sergeant candidates for the invisible wounds of war such as post traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury and other issues associated with combat.

Today, more than 80 percent of Drill Sergeant School students wear combat patches and more than 90 percent of the school’s cadre of drill sergeant leaders are combat vets.

Consolidation completed
With the graduation of the last class of students at the Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., Drill Sergeant School on May 23, and the closing last year of the school at Fort Benning, Ga., the Army’s plan to consolidate drill sergeant training at Fort Jackson was complete under the Base Closure and Realignment Commission’s plan.

In addition to the consolidation of drill sergeant training, drill sergeants are no longer a fixture at the Army’s Advanced Individual Training centers and schools. Since Jan. 1, drill sergeant positions at AIT have been filled by platoon sergeants in an effort to replicate more quickly for new soldiers the structure of the operational Army.

At the end of 2007, there were about 2,800 drill sergeants working in basic training and AIT. Today, there are around 2,250 drill sergeants working only in basic training.

The Drill Sergeant School trains about 1,800 students a year in 19 classes, with a load of as many as 120 students per class, although Newsome said the optimum number is 96.

The classes are scheduled six months out and about 45 percent of soldiers who become drill sergeants volunteer for the job, according to HRC. The rest are assigned.

The organization at the consolidated school consists of four platoons of five squads each with three drill sergeant leaders per squad for a total of 15 drill sergeant leaders per platoon.

When there were three schools, each had two platoons that had 12 drill sergeant leaders per squad, so the concentration of trainers has gone up.

The recent consolidation of three drill sergeant schools into one reflects three years of ongoing changes to how the Army builds the soldiers who wear the campaign hats and will train new generations of soldiers. Here are the key areas of change:

• Leadership. The current leadership module at the Drill Sergeant School will soon be replaced by one based on a leadership curriculum from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point that teaches students to understand themselves, their trainees and the Army’s basic training environment.

A pilot of the new program begins in July and will be part of the curriculum in the first half of next year. The new, 30-hour, three-phase training course will teach the students how to understand themselves and what type of leaders they are; how to transform others by adapting techniques to their leadership styles; and how to understand the initial entry training environment and organization, “which is very different than a regular unit,” said former drill sergeant Gerald Simpson, a training specialist at the drill sergeant proponency.

“The training now is only about their responsibilities as a drill sergeant, it talks about Army values, it doesn’t get into the details of the human aspect of being a new soldier and how to resolve the situations that can arise among that group of people,” Newsome said.

“Leadership training has never had anything that really taught the NCOs how to deal with individuals. This is going to help them tremendously,” he said.

• Marksmanship. One of the most significant changes at the Drill Sergeant School is a new marksmanship training program introduced in January. Called the Combat Assault Rifle Training Course, it has increased marksmanship training from four days to 11 days.

The course was developed by drill sergeant leaders Sgt. 1st Class Lester Case and Staff Sgt. Clay Bowen and is modeled on the Combat Application Training Course designed by the Asymmetric Warfare Group.

Marksmanship training, Case said, “used to be the exact training that soldiers in basic training would get. The drill sergeant candidate after being in the Army for 12 or 14 years would come to the school and get the exact same thing. It didn’t make any sense.”

In phase one of the new course, students learn their rifles from the ground up, so it becomes a learning experience rather than a memorization exercise.

In phase two, students go the range and apply what they’ve learned with live-fire shooting.

In the third phase, the students apply those fundamentals to shoot, move and communicate combat scenarios. Some of those exercises are timed to add stress.

The new training takes the emphasis off weapons qualification, Case said, and focuses on building, “drill sergeants who are confident and competent in their ability to teach these new soldiers in how to handle themselves in a combat situation.”

• Combatives. Training on hand-to-hand combat was added to the curriculum in 2005 and is one of the most popular — and intimidating — pieces of the drill sergeant course.

“In the combatives training, NCOs were learning about themselves, they were pushing themselves farther than they had before and they realized they were able to do things they didn’t believe, possibly, they were able to do,” said Sgt. 1st Class Leonard Hutton, a former drill sergeant who was in charge of combatives training at the Fort Benning Drill Sergeant School.

The one-week combatives course for level one certification includes a drill on day four called “achieve the clinch,” in which a drill sergeant leader in boxing gloves punches students in the face, which forces the student to use newly learned skills to avoid the hits.

“A lot of people, for whatever reason, have never been in a situation where they’ve had to be, you know, punched and punched in the face. It can be daunting,” said Hutton, the NCO in charge of training development for the drill sergeant proponency. “You learn a lot about yourself when you’re put in that position. It helps instill that warrior ethos, that warrior spirit,” he said

• Embedment training. Another aspect of the school’s transformation, and a favorite with drill sergeant leaders and candidates, is the opportunity the students have during their nine weeks in training to shadow a current drill sergeant on the job. Embedment is not written in to the school’s program of instruction, but it’s a de facto part of the curriculum that takes place when time and schedules allow.

Drill sergeant candidates, for example, spend three days in the field during a basic training company’s culmination event, Victory Forge, a week-long field training exercise. During those days, they get to interact with the basic trainees and get a feel for what it’s like to be a drill sergeant.

Before the curriculum overhaul, graduates of drill sergeant school generally were assigned straight into sole command of a platoon without someone to break them in.

“Embedment training is probably the best thing we could give drill sergeant candidates,” said Howard, who recalled that when he was a drill sergeant in training the only exposure they had to basic trainees was from afar when they were allowed to observe, but not interact.

The embedment training started in March 2006.

• Drill and ceremony instruction and testing. This section was reduced from 72 hours to 27 hours in April 2007. The reduction reflects a corresponding increase in a focus on combat skills in basic training to better prepare recruits for duty in the war zone.

• Combat lifesaver certification. This was added to Drill Sergeant School in June 2007 around the same time it became standard training in basic.

Other courses that have been added to the curriculum at Drill Sergeant School over the past year are:

• Range certification. Students are certified to be in charge of the range and all the responsibilities that go with that duty.

• Nutrition and physiology.

• Financial management.

• Sexual assault response and prevention training.

• Mental health training.

The influence of the Military Academy is further weaving its way into the school through West Point’s Center for Enhanced Performance.

A West Point training team, using a course based in sports psychology and taught at the academy since 1993, discusses with drill sergeant candidates techniques for peak performance used by athletes that can also be applied to what soldiers do.

“We focus on education and development of peak performance strategies, confidence, goal setting, attention control, energy management as it relates to stress and resilience,” said Ryan McCausland, who is head of the team at Fort Jackson.

“The intent is that when a drill sergeant leaves they can weave it into their personal and professional leadership style to have greater impact on training soldiers.”

Who qualifies
Drill sergeant duty is a two-year assignment with the option, in certain cases, of extending up to 42 months. Drill sergeants get special-duty pay of $375 a month to train new soldiers at one of five basic training posts. Here are the criteria to be eligible for the active-duty job:

• Minimum 4 years in the Army

• Ranked between sergeant and sergeant first class

• Warrior Leader Course completion for E-5; Basic Noncommissioned Officer Course for E-7

• High school graduate or general equivalency diploma

• Passing score on the Army Physical Fitness Test

• Minimum general-technical score of 100

• Qualification with an M16A2 rifle within last six months

• Meet height and weight standards according to the Army Weight Control Program

• Age 40 or under

• Have no speech impediment and display good military bearing

• Have no current court-martial convictions and clean record of disciplinary actions

• Have a proven record of emotional stability

• Have a commander’s evaluation by O-5 or higher

Source: Training and Doctrine Command

The Source

[mark5138]

As a former Drill Sergeant, I will tell you that the course needed to be re-vamped. Many of the training techniques that were present were in place since the 40s or even earlier. The Embedment would have been very useful for me after graduation from the course, as it will be for the new graduates.