The Marine Corps will make changes to its training and education in 2024, potentially establishing more training teams over the next few years, building out career paths for instructors, adding advanced technology and changing how it assigns new officers to duties.
The Marine Corps' first annual training and education report for the force was released Wednesday. The 14-page document outlines and sets deadlines for moves made in areas across the service to modernize how Marines learn.
Lt. Gen. Kevin Iams, commander of Training and Education Command, said in a press release that the document is the command's “strategic vision” for modernizing force structure and aligning training with new equipment and technologies being introduced to the force.
“These efforts collectively aim to equip the Marine Corps with the most modern, lethal and capable Marines possible,” Iams said. “Our efforts have been and continue to be centered around two core pillars: force design and modernization. By driving innovation along these lines, (Training and Education Command) is ensuring the development of a Marine force that is ready not only to compete but to excel in any theater of operations.”
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The “Training and Education 2030” planning document released in January 2023 under then-commandant Gen. David Berger identified doctrinal gaps on skills such as drones and cyber operations and emphasized modernizing training simulators and other instructional technology.
The training changes could have an early and direct impact on Marines and new officers working in fires and communications.
The Training Command conducted a two-phase study, combat development and integration, to investigate the “diffusion of quality” policy used in basic schools when assigning military jobs to new officers.
Quality distribution is used to avoid concentration of low performers in one job category and to ensure that high and low performing graduates are evenly distributed across different job categories.
The first phase of the investigation assessed whether there was evidence to support whether the policy should continue, and its findings are due to be published by the end of June.
If flaws are found, alternative allocation models will be built in the second phase of the study, which is expected to be completed by October.
The Marine Corps plans to use a series of recent studies to determine whether measures that test individual resilience can help “screen out those who may be susceptible to stress and harmful behaviors” and reduce attrition rates.
The Marine Corps began a pilot program in April to offer courses for field artillery officers, target acquisition officers and chief field artillery reconnaissance observers at Marine Detachment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
The course is designed to provide advanced training to Marines from the Fires and Effects Coordination Center or Fleet Maritime Operations Center.
Training Command's Signal Training Battalion is looking at how to combine key skillsets from three communications occupations: 062X, 063X and 067X. Integrating these skills will create more well-rounded communications Marines as multi-disciplinary “independent communications and intelligence operators.”
As the Marine Corps adopted a new approach to training and education, it was evaluating how instructors teach students and how the instructors themselves are selected and retained.
The three-year evaluation led to an “outcomes-based learning” approach, common in other educational circles but less prevalent in military education, in which instructors guide students, focusing on individual and group learning to complete assignments and solve problems.
This is a departure from the lecture model, in which an expert presents information in front of a classroom and then repeats it with tests and quizzes before students move on to the next assignment.
The Marine Corps has updated its formal school policy directive to incorporate these methods, so the outcomes-based learning model will spread across the Corps.
“We're not telling them what to think, we're teaching them how to think,” Col. Carl Arbogast, chief of the policy and standards division at Training and Education Command, told Marine Corps Times in a previous interview.
But teaching in this way also requires instructor training.
The result is two new exceptional military occupational specialty codes, 0951 and 0952, which give Marines an opportunity to learn how to lead in addition to their primary job.
The Basic Instructor Course will be available to Marines by the end of fiscal year 2024, with the Intermediate and Masters courses expected to be ready by fiscal year 2026, according to a report this week.
According to the report, Training Command is evaluating both the selection and retention of such qualified instructors and is analyzing current and future incentive options to retain high-caliber instructors.
On the technology side, the Marine Corps has transitioned from its legacy information management system to a hybrid cloud system, and the Corps expects to be fully operational with the new cloud-based version of the system by fiscal year 2028.
Advances in technology are expanding access to wargaming through cloud services, with the hope of wargaming being embraced in all formal schools and primary military education by fiscal year 2025 and fleet-wide by fiscal year 2026.
Also on the technology front, the Marines plan to deploy live virtual construction training simulators by October at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, California, Camp Pendleton, California, and Marine Corps bases in Hawaii and Okinawa, Japan.
At the same time, each Marine Expeditionary Unit and Marine Corps Air-Ground Task Force Training Command will receive one battalion's worth of Marine Corps Tactical Instrumentation Systems by summer.
Training Command is preparing to deploy an electromagnetic spectrum simulator in Twentynine Palms, California, that can replicate enemy electronic warfare capabilities during training.
The Marines also plan to use simulators to reduce injuries.
They are moving forward with a project to identify ground training events that have a high incidence of injuries, accidents and casualties, and will incorporate simulator training before conducting those types of training events live, starting with vehicle transport tasks by October.
Finally, to reduce the number of Marines waiting to train at school, the new policy will identify Marines prior to graduating boot camp who will wait more than 10 days between Marine Combat Training and their next school and assign them to the Authorized Recruiter Assistance Program.
Additionally, Marines on extended training standby periods will be offered voluntary reclassification to positions experiencing shortages and an immediate training ship embarkation date.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War.
