Jun, 2003
Defense Science Board Task Force: Training for Future Conflicts
United States. Defense Science Board
The report has a training goal: instruct and convince the acquisition and personnel communities to recognize instinctively that military proficiency is as dependent on the warriors who operate weapon systems as it is on the weapon system technology, and a superb way to waste personnel or system acquisition money is to ignore training, or to tacitly allow training to pay the bills for acquisition or personnel system flaws in those more measurable arenas. The task force work described in this report is aimed at determining how our forces must prepare for conflicts in the future, 10 to 20 years from now. The task force examined what a future conflict might be. Then the task force considered what future training for future wars might require. The special forces units employed were superbly trained for the Afghan campaign. However, the integration of all of our forces into that war leaves us with training lessons, especially for preparation for "no-plan" contingencies. The rest of our forces need to train in the continuous ways that our special units often can. In this report we suggest some technological and bureaucratic changes that might lead in that direction. Nevertheless, the unimplemented structural changes to the defense and intelligence systems that we recommended in our previous report are still needed if our forces are to be given a chance to learn before they get to the war how to fight, jointly, in the new combinations that will be required to succeed in planned or unexpected future conflicts.

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