US Army’s New Chief Sets Three Goals
The week before Gen. Mark Milley became the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, he spent a few days at the National Training Center, a sprawling complex in the California desert where brigades and divisions practice complicated wartime scenarios — the kind of expensive training that soldiers get all too rarely these days.
Through night-vision goggles, Milley — then the head of Army Forces Command — watched as Special Forces and conventional soldiers fast-roped out of Air Force CV-22 Ospreys. Others stormed out the back of MC-130 airlifters. And more than 500 parachuted in from C-17s. It was a complicated mission, designed to replicate a scenario soldiers might face in Eastern Europe, Syria, Iran, North Korea or even China.
Later, in a white tent just off the mock battlefield, the witty, Ivy-League educated Milley talked about how soldiers haven’t received this type of training regularly in the decade-plus it has been fighting counterinsurgency battles in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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