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For those who don’t know the acronym, BLC is the Basic Leader’s Course, a three week course to make sure young leaders have the basic skills to be good entry level NCOs. Over time, sometimes it was optional for promotion, sometimes not depending on class availability etc. As an SP4 in Germany back when it was a Platoon Leadership Course (PLC, later PLDC), in some units promotion could be stalled while awaiting a precious slot at the school\u00a0 which could delay promotion a year or more.\u00a0 Once there, basic knowledge of keeping your appearance STRAC (who even knows where THAT once-ubiquitous term came from? without looking it up?), drill and ceremony to make sure you knew how to march troops, land navigation…\u00a0 all the good stuff buck sergeant E-5s needed to know.<\/p>\n
Flash forward to 2020 – here is a course description from Military Times:<\/p>\n
The school is supposed to teach young noncommissioned officers about the service’s policies, including legal authorities, processing paperwork for awards, and sexual assault and prevention efforts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Forgive me – I don’t know the current leadership course syllabus, granted, but there seems to be a lack of, well, leadership skills. My first thought was that it sounded like a politically correct clerk-typists’ course.<\/p>\n
Land navigation was brought back after a roughly four-year hiatus.<\/p>\n
Service leaders have been aiming to add fieldcraft and combat tactics to the training, part of a larger effort to get non-combat arms troops up to snuff on basic soldiering skills. At the center of that push is land navigation, which tasks soldiers with plotting points on a map with a protractor and finding spots in the woods using a compass during both day and night. No GPS<\/a>, which has become ubiquitous in combat with an approximation on just about every smartphone, is allowed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Okay, that’s a little more like it. One would hope.<\/p>\n
But of the 914 soldiers who have been through the training, half have failed that portion of BLC, according to Command Sgt. Maj. Daniel Hendrex, the top enlisted leader for the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, or TRADOC.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Half? Seriously?<\/p>\n
As of now, passing isn’t required to graduate. But the high failure rate is a troubling sign… with future conflicts expected to see the wide use of \u00a0 of cyber weapons, which can knock out the GPS tools soldiers relied on during the Global War on Terror era.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The article goes on to say that much of the training is expected to take place at the unit level, and that support troops have more problems fitting it into their schedules (presumably than in combat arms, as they say the fail rate at Ranger School is only about 6%, implying better unit-level prep.)<\/p>\n