- Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, Training and Doctrine Command Deputy Commanding General – Initial Military Training
During an Army Bloggers Roundtable on Feb. 24, Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, deputy commanding general for Initial Military Training, discussed how it will standardize, reinvigorate and evolve training for initial entry soldiers and recently commissioned junior officers in order to support a more efficient and effective Army Forces Generation.
Initial Military Training was stood up in September 2009 as a means to evaluate the current training, assess it and re-design it as necessary to adapt to an era of new Soldiers.
During the roundtable, Hertling talked about a few of the top tasks he wants to address in the military training.
“One category is the skills, and we can tinker around the edges determining what skills we teach and how we teach them… . Given the kind of environment we’re in, the training to prepare the soldier for that environment is very different. But those are relatively easy things to do — changing the things we do in terms of skills training.”
“The second piece, the second “block,” if you will, is physical training. What we’re seeing that we’re getting from the civilian environment are civilians from our society who are increasingly obese… So we’re really succinctly looking at how we physically improve capabilities, while at the same time not breaking soldiers…”
Another area of great interest discussed was the possibility of some form of social media training being implemented in the IMT process.
“It is something that we need to train, not so much our Soldiers about, but our leaders about, because there are some, as you know, pratfalls, and some things that can get soldiers in trouble, but it’s also an excellent way to communicate,” Hertling said.
To listen to the audio, click here.
To read the transcript, click here.
