Professional military education

FORT BELVOIR, Va. – Army subject grade officers now have a new, shorter alternative for finishing their Command and General Staff Officer Course segment.

“We are taking a part of a path that is deliberate for eight weekends over an 8-month length, and we’re compressing it down to 4 weekends in four months,” said Lt. Col. Sean Truax, a CGSOC trainer assigned to the 10th Battalion Headquarters, 97th Training Brigade, a hundredth Training Division (Leader Development).

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Truax serves because the group chief for the CGSC phase two 4×4 class commenced this 12 months. He explained that in place of 8-weekend lessons for stage, he and his group of instructors train the identical quantity of practice in 4 four-day weekends – Friday thru Monday. Hence, the call is 4×4. Sixteen Active Duty, Army Reserve, and National Guard majors with several military occupational specialties completed the final weekend of phase training here June 7-10.

“Anytime you may get out of doors of your very own bubble and learn from other humans sporting this uniform who’ve had a completely distinctive direction to get to in which they may be of their careers is precious to appreciate overall,” stated Maj. David Swan, a National Guardsman assigned to the 301st Troop Command, Tennessee National Guard.

“We all handiest have our very own attitude to draw from,” Swan delivered. “Whenever you may get a category with 15 different people who are majors but have had a completely exclusive profession direction, there’s plenty to be learned from that.”

The CGSOC requires college students to finish three phases thru considered one of three number one approaches: the resident route at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; certainly one of 4 satellite tv for pc campuses at Fort Belvoir, Virginia; Fort Lee, Virginia; Fort Gordon, Georgia; or Redstone Arsenal, Alabama; or through distance studying.

“The three not unusual center levels may want to stretch over two years,” Truax said. “Now, with this additional choice, it’s practical to say it could be achieved in less than a yr.”

“This offers officials more options to get the path performed. That’s an advantage for them professionally,” Truax brought. “It’s additionally a benefit for their unit because they don’t lose a person on their body of workers for as long.”

Although the second phase is shorter, college students can rest confident they will receive the same training stage and education as the longer path or the gap in gaining knowledge of alternatives.

“We want modern-day and capability college students to apprehend we haven’t reduced any corners with this course,” Truax said. “When the 4×4 course changed into announced, we were instructed ‘placed your timetable collectively for a way you’re going to run it.'”

“We have been now not given any guidance that we may want to reduce something out,” he introduced. “We did some shuffling around of a number of our deliverables, like the papers and some of the lessons inside the weekends, to accommodate the distinctiveness of what we’re doing, but we didn’t drop something.”

In addition to the compressed timetable to help students complete the route faster, Truax applauds the difficult-working teachers because it is approximately every person from the students to the schoolhouse, ensuring a successful course.