The maintenance and repair of equipment and materiel is vitally important to the success of the Army. Almost every company-sized element has a maintenance platoon charged with the upkeep of that company’s equipment. ‘Maintenance Monday’, or another template day, is set aside for the entire unit to descend upon the motor pool to perform maintenance on vehicles, weapons, and other large end items. The battalion executive officer, often a very senior major, has as a principle task the monitoring of the equipment status within the battalion. He/she receives daily reports on broken equipment, how long it has been broken, and estimates on when it will be fixed. All of these actions have been honed over years of command emphasis on equipment readiness. The Army, however, has failed to perform quality maintenance on its most valuable asset- personnel. I see two major causes of this failure: the fact that dealing with people, their emotions, and their well-being is extremely difficult and the Army leadership isn’t properly trained to deal with these issues.
A person, unlike a piece of machinery, is very complex. Machines are black and white in that they perform set tasks repetitively. Weapons fire projectiles, vehicles more from point A to point B, and computers accept inputs and process data; but a person is more complex. A person is capable of free will which, coupled with emotions, makes the person highly unpredictable. It’s this unpredictability that makes a person more valuable than a piece of equipment because they can far exceed expectations during a mission. This unpredictability, however, makes dealing with ‘maintenance’ of personnel hard. Manuals with step-by-step maintenance guidelines and checklists don’t exist for the maintenance of personnel. What motivates, depresses, and improves one person might completely fail for another.
This difficulty in identifying problems and correcting the m leads to the second major cause- Army leadership. The Army, like the other branches of the US Armed Forces, is extremely good at training its personnel to accomplish common core, job-specific, and specialized tasks. Military education courses are established for new recruits in the form of basic training and advanced individual training. Junior non-commissioned officers (NCOs) attend a leadership course and, in the Army, attend up to four senior leadership courses as they progress in the ranks to command sergeant major. In addition, there are opportunities to attend specialized courses such as battle staff and airborne school to further refine the skills of the individual. The officer and warrant officer corps also attend numerous military courses to develop their common core and specialized skills. The officer and NCO courses teach several classes in leadership and communication with a focus on mission planning and execution. Classes are also given on maintenance activities for equipment. In all of these courses the maintenance of personnel is barely addressed.
These failings have prevented the Army from seriously addressing the sharp increase in suicides in the Army seen over the past few years. The Army did update its suicide awareness/prevention program and directed a 100% stand-down day for its force to receive this new training. The training video sent out by the Army showed two scenarios identifying the symptoms of suicide. The video was followed up by a brief discussion led by the unit commander to drive home the importance of suicide prevention and the erosion it causes on the unit family. But that is where this new training ended. There wasn’t a follow-on course for leaders to teach them how to identify potential suicidal people even though there are several training programs out there for this purpose. I took a week-long ASIST course which taught me vital steps in recognizing suicidal people and how to sit down with them to help them develop a plan to overcome those feelings. In my opinion, this training, like so many other sessions dealing with personal issues, fell short. The Army is faced with a serious degradation of its most vital resource through suicide and it missed the mark in seizing the opportunity to make significant changes in how it identifies and prevent suicide.
The Army has bolstered the tools that leaders can use to help identify personal problems and mitigate those problems. The chaplains have become the Army’s higher level maintenance activity when it comes to personnel and their issues. Psychologists and mental health professionals are available at clinics and hospitals. Army Community Services and various hotlines are established for use by leaders and personnel. Leaders are encouraged to use these tools instead of working through the problem at their level, which, in my opinion, alienates the leader from his/her subordinate and keeps them out of touch with the issue. These tools, although extremely useful, don’t alleviate the need for that first-level maintenance conducted by first-line leaders.
So what does the Army need to do to correct this continuing trend? I think the Army needs to place emphasis on the leadership to identify personal issues. The Army says that a leader should know his/her Soldiers so that they can build the team and identify issues but it does a poor job of training that leader on how to do that. As a junior leader, team building is a primary mission. A leader given the skills in team building and the time to get to know his/her subordinates will go a long way to closing the maintenance gap. I am not advocating sitting around a campfire and telling stories or a touchy-feely process but I am advocating leaders that get out amongst their personnel to see how the y act, what motivates and drives them, and how they interact with other people at work and off duty. This will help in team building but, more importantly, this will help that leader recognize when his/her subordinate has altered behavior which can b e a sign of trouble. This of this as a form of personnel PMSC conduct more than once a week on ‘Maintenance Mondays’. This process is important for all levels of the Army where senior leaders need to conduct personnel PMCO on their subordinates.
Dealing with people and their issues is extremely difficult and the dangerous missions performed by our military service members, couple with frequent deployments, can increase the frequency and severity of those issues. Because of this, and the need to maintain the Army’s number one asset, the Army needs to overhaul its personal maintenance program. I have suggested that the leadership in the Army needs to be better trained in recognized and combating those negative issues that their subordinates have. I feel that the leader on the ground can better set hose issues, track the treatment, and help mitigate them through personal interaction before they become a combat detractor. Those first-line leaders, like the vehicle operators who conduct maintenance checks on their vehicle each week, are better able to recognize issues through preventative maintenance. The Army owes an improvement in personnel maintenance to its most valuable assets- its people.
The idea of "personnel" PMCS is one that is long overdue. Due to the high number of deployments military members have had to deal with over the last decade the suicide rate has sky rocketed. July 2010 saw thirty-two Soldiers take their own life. This was the most over a one month period since the Vietnam era. It hits particularly close to home for me since finding out a friend from a previous Army course had taken his own life shortly after we graduated. The incredible amounts of stress that continue to be placed on the men and women that wear the sacred cloth of our nation continues to grow - something must be done. At least once a year the Army rolls out a new version of suicide prevention. For the younger Soldiers many would like to be doing other things and for some older Soldiers they think "this again". Until you are faced with the fact a friend is no longer their with you might not ever appreciate the importance of personnel PMCS. Leaders must do a better job of combating this enemy that is eroding our most important resource - people.
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