To give soldiers more time to train, do their jobs and be with their families, the Army has discontinued hundreds of hours of online courses once required for promotion.

Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Weimer, who announced the decision on May 15, said the change, which represents a time savings of 346 hours, was made to meet the intent of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George to “eliminate training which is redundant, antiquated or doesn’t support warfighting or lethality.”

“We are scrubbing everything we are asking our soldiers to study, because there is only so much time during the day to do your job, for your personal development, and for your family,” Weimer said in a statement.

Distributed Learning Course levels I through VI, formerly known as Structured Self-Development, are eliminated effective immediately for NCOs in the Regular Army, Army National Guard and Army Reserve, accounting for 253 hours, or 31 days, of required course work, Weimer said.

Virtual common core training associated with the Advanced Leader and Senior Leader courses will remain unchanged, but soldiers working now on the Distributed Learning Course do not have to complete it, and those who haven’t started the training are not required to do so.

Officer courses also were eliminated, including the Distance Learning Prerequisite for the Captains Career Course and Command and General Staff Officers Course, known as P920, accounting for a time savings of 93 hours, or 12 days, according to Weimer’s announcement.

While 164 hours of prerequisite Distance Learning Courses remain, they are being analyzed for potential future elimination, according to Weimer.

Weimer pointed out that study requirements have been piled on “to the point of creating redundancies in distance learning, online learning, brick-and-mortar learning, self-study learning, what the units are teaching, what the leadership inside units are teaching.”

“We are overwhelming people, we have to do some subtraction to make sure what we are teaching in all those areas is quality, not quantity. We have not looked at all these requirements holistically in years,” Weimer said.

Fielded in 2010, Distributed Learning Courses were part of the Army’s Select, Train, Educate and Promote policy within the NCO Professional Development System. They have been a prerequisite for attendance at resident NCO professional military education.

The Distributed Learning Course, known as DLC, has six levels. Level I was required prior to attending the Basic Leader Course, level II for the Advanced Leader Course, level III before the Senior Leader Course, level IV for the Master Leader Course and level V prior to the Sergeants Major Course. Level VI was required to attend the Nominative Leader Course, according to an Army news release. The same topics in DLC, the release said, are covered again and in more depth in the follow-on resident professional military education course.

“After careful consideration and a lot of analysis, the Army determined that there would be little to no negative impact to resident NCO [professional military education] learning outcomes if all six levels of the DLC were discontinued,” the release said.