ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

Retired Gen. William Hartzog, whose 35 years in the Army included command of the 1st Infantry Division, Army South and Army Training and Doctrine Command, died Oct. 15 at the age of 79.

The Wilmington, North Carolina, native and lifetime member of the Association of the U.S. Army was commissioned in 1963 after graduating from The Citadel, and he retired in 1998.

Army divisions should start rotating through the combat training centers as the service continues to train to fight a near-peer adversary, the commanding general of Army Training and Doctrine Command said.

“I think we ought to have one a year, just to learn,” said Gen. Paul Funk, who used as an example a recent rotation by the 1st Infantry Division to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California.

A policy that would require every soldier to see a mental health professional once a year is under development at Army Training and Doctrine Command, whose commander suggested it would “take the stigma away” of asking for help.

In remarks at the Fires Conference hosted virtually by the Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Gen. Paul Funk, who has been the TRADOC commander since June 2019, said he is “working my way through” the idea, which is not yet policy.

Operating in an urban environment is one of the most difficult challenges facing the Army as it prepares for the next war, according to a new pamphlet from Army Training and Doctrine Command.

From recent large-scale operations in Baghdad and Mosul in Iraq and counterinsurgency missions in Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan, to counterterrorism operations in Paris and Mumbai, India, and humanitarian assistance missions in Asia, urban areas pose a unique challenge to ground troops, according to the pamphlet.

The commanding general of Army Training and Doctrine Command will be the guest speaker on the June 30 edition of The AUSA Noon Report.

Gen. Paul Funk, who has led Training and Doctrine Command since June 2019, is responsible for 32 Army schools that recruit, train and educate more than 750,000 soldiers and service members annually.

The livestream program starts at noon Eastern and is hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army. Retired Gen. Carter Ham, AUSA president and CEO, will provide opening remarks.

The block-by-block 10-month Battle of Mosul in 2016 and 2017 was won through steel, sweat and blood but not from any new doctrinal concepts, says a new Land Warfare Paper published by the Association of the U.S. Army.

Written by Maj. Amos Fox, a squadron executive officer with the 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade at Fort Carson, Colorado, the paper says a study group report issued two months after the July 2017 conclusion of the Battle of Mosul “reinforces existing doctrinal predilections at the expense of challenging and assessing doctrinal utility.”

The U.S. military could have a new, joint operating concept within a year, loosely based on the Army’s Multi-Domain Operations proposal, the commander of the U.S. Army Futures Command said.

Speaking Feb. 10 at the Atlantic Council, Gen. Mike Murray said the services have similar concepts but haven’t been able to agree on details. That could soon change, he said.

The Army has been working for about four years on the notion that a broad-capability force that could find itself challenged in the air, land, sea, space or cyberspace domains should exploit a gap in another domain. 

China is investing in artificial intelligence at a “much, much faster pace” than the U.S. government, though It is not yet ahead, a prominent AI expert recently told Army intelligence planners.

Tuomas Sandholm, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a renowned expert on artificial intelligence, made his remarks at a lecture sponsored by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s intelligence division and the Association of the U.S. Army’s Virginia Colonial chapter.

Senior U.S. Army enlisted members caution that increasing reliance on technology may be eroding essential soldiering skills.

At the Association of the U.S. Army-sponsored LANPAC Symposium and Exposition in Honolulu, U.S. command sergeants major warned that the advantages technology is bringing to battlefields in targeting, navigation, automation and communications take time to master, and may leave less time for training on basic soldier tasks.

Mission Command is the “only way to lead a winning Army,” according to Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, who said he is “troubled” by the number of soldiers who have said the Army doesn’t follow its own leadership doctrine.