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.

Continue reading at http://www.defenseone.com/management/2015/10/us-armys-new-chief-sets-three-goals/122683/?oref=defenseone_today_nl.