Photo By Scott Sturkol | Soldiers with the 649th Regional Support Group, an Army Reserve unit in Cedar Rapids,...... read more read more
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Dozens of noncommissioned officers (NCOs) gathered at Fort McCoy in mid-October to take part in Defender University training with the 649th Regional Support Group.
The group, headquartered in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is a group that consists of two movement control battalions with a host of 20 units underneath of them, consisting of transportation companies, movement control teams, quartermasters, and maintenance,” said Command Sgt. Maj. David Sayers, command sergeant major with the 649th.
“We have units all the way from Fort Sheridan, Ill., down to Mount Vernon, as well as we have units in Waterloo, Iowa, with detachments spread out across northern Iowa,” Sayers said. “It consists of about 1,183 soldiers and 20 units.”
With the Defender University training, Sayers said they came to Fort McCoy to get a variety of training accomplished.
“We came up to Fort McCoy to train on skill level 2 and skill level 3 progression in order to develop our Soldiers, specialists, and sergeants for promotion under Army Regulation 600-8-19, Paragraph 3-6, that states all Soldiers must have skill level 2 and skill level 3 proficiency in their digital job book in order to qualify for promotion.”
And that was the basis for Defender University.
“We developed an NCO professional development program called Defender University where we invite our Soldiers to come up and attend and conduct training in four areas, utilizing a round-robin format, as well as build the capability of our NCOs to teach, train, mentor, and instruct from a cadre perspective,” Sayers said.
The NCOs completing the training were from multiple units within the 649th.
“We had representation across all the 649th minus a few units that are currently deployed, but everybody sent representatives to include participants and cadre,” Sayers said. “We had 34 candidates or participants going through the training, and 22 cadre members who serve as primary instructors, support, as well as mentors.
“Our first sergeants are paired with respective platoons to provide senior NCO guidance and mentoring during any white noise training,” Sayers said.
Sayers added that this is “critical training” for NCOs in the Army Reserve to complete.
“This is something that we need to focus on because skill level one, that lower level, that’s great. Everybody should be able to do that. But to be able to teach and develop skill level two, skill level three — that's that next level. That’s where that NCO learns how to be an NCO, how to run a team, how to manage a squad, how to incorporate those skill level one tasks and build upon them. And these are vital tasks. These are everything from running a casualty collection point to medevac requests to how to teach your unit to put on mop gear properly, how to conduct riot control, and entry control.
“These skills are vital not only for your development, but also for the safety and survivability of your unit,” Sayers said.
The command sergeant major also said the training went very well.
“It's been going great,” Sayers said during the third day of training. “Fort McCoy has offered us fantastic facilities up here to train on. … Our Soldiers are just absolutely enjoying themselves. They get to go out and do authentic, real training, hands-on, some classroom environment, not much PowerPoint, you know, so they get to focus on these tasks. Most importantly, they get to do it as a noncommissioned officer, as a team leader. This is not an individual task. It's a team task.”
Sayers said for the newer NCOs to interact with senior NCOs from other units has also been great for everyone in the training. He also said it prepares them for future operations.
“The mentorship that we’re able to provide them, especially from a senior NCO perspective, is going to help guide them in their careers,” Sayers said. “This supports pretty much any operation … by teaching them how to do these tasks in an austere environment and gives them a baseline. All these tasks are utilized daily by any organization, so it gives them great familiarity so that when the time of need comes, whether that be control and entry control point overseas, they have familiarity with it.
“They have that proficiency to say, I have done this before as a member of a team, and I can do it now,” Sayers said. “Now, the Defender University is completely separate from something like the NCO Academy. However, it's built on the same principles of NCO excellence.”
Sayers said the Defender University is being completed out of a need right now to adjust to the fact that the NCO Corps has not had the ability to train at echelon a lot recently.
“So, this program is designed to take our NCOs, teach them that they can train on these tasks, that a class can be as simple as throwing down some lines on a map and doing it, and to train it. … So it’s vital that we are able to get back to training as an NCO Corps. And the intent is that eventually Defender University goes away because at echelon, at that team, squad, platoon, and company level, we’ve now built that capability and that capacity of our NCO Corps to take it on themselves.
“And at the root of it, that is the goal of Defender University — to build our NCO Corps’ ability to train and develop junior Soldiers,” Sayers said.
Sayers added the training with Defender University also builds on how America’s armed forces work to train the best NCOs anywhere.
“That’s things we’ve been talking about throughout this course is that the NCO Corps in the United States Army, and in all the Department of Defense, it’s mission command. It’s our enabler,” Sayers said. “It’s what makes us better. We talk about the role of the NCO. We talk about what it means to be an NCO, how NCOs fix today so officers can focus on tomorrow.
“We explain the role of mission command in operations to meet commanders’ intent and that when you build that trust, it’s the NCO who says, hey, sir, hey, ma’am, I know what you want to get done. Don't tell me how to do it. I'll figure it out. And that's what makes us lethal. That’s what we bring to bear that no other country can replicate, and that’s what makes us lethal.”
Fort McCoy’s motto is to be the “Total Force Training Center.” Located in the heart of the upper Midwest, Fort McCoy is the only U.S. Army installation in Wisconsin.
The installation has provided support and facilities for the field and classroom training of more than 100,000 military personnel from all services nearly every year since 1984.
Learn more about Fort McCoy online at https://home.army.mil/mccoy, on Facebook by searching “ftmccoy,” on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/fortmccoywi, and on X (formerly Twitter) by searching “usagmccoy.”
Also try downloading the My Army Post app to your smartphone and set “Fort McCoy” or another installation as your preferred base. Fort McCoy is also part of Army’s Installation Management Command where “We Are The Army’s Home.”
| Date Taken: | 11.05.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 11.05.2024 12:49 |
| Story ID: | 484676 |
| Location: | FORT MCCOY, WISCONSIN, US |
| Hometown: | FORT MCCOY, WISCONSIN, US |
| Web Views: | 615 |
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