The Army is cutting hours worth of training that were previously mandatory for soldiers, including the basics of combat medicine and a primer on the laws of war. The new approach to so-called “mandatory training tasks,” officials say, will make a long list of courses and training events optional, with commanders allowed to pick and choose which training their troops are likely to need.
Command Sgt. Maj. Chris Mullinax, the top enlisted soldier for the Army’s operations, planning and training department, said reducing hours spent on mandatory online training will allow soldiers to focus on building “warrior ethos” through “tough, realistic training.”
“What our Army senior leaders are trying to do is make sure that they have as much time available so that they can focus on those things. There’s no distractions, there’s no burdens and our war fighters are focused on war fighting and that is absolutely tough, realistic training in the field,” Mullinax told reporters.
Resiliency training, which taught soldiers and commanders coping mechanisms for stress and adversity — whether it was how families can handle the stress of deployments or how soldiers can maintain healthy relationships — was completely removed from the Army’s training and leadership development regulation.
Commanders will now decide whether the following training courses are necessary for their units:
- Individual and unit chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear (CBRN) training.
- Combat Lifesaver Training and certification, a 40-hour course with both hands-on and academic classes that teach the basics of battlefield first aid. The course includes training on action under fire; tourniquet use; bleeding control methods for gunshot wounds, explosions or other trauma; airway management; wound care; splinting; and emergency evacuation procedures.
- Safety and occupational health training which includes basic risk management, traffic safety for drivers under 26 and blast overpressure for traumatic brain injury mitigation.
- Law of war training for operational units, which covers rules of engagement and prohibited behavior for soldiers facing combat and how to handle detainee operations.
- Code of conduct training, which provides an ethical and moral guide for soldiers who are captured during war.
- Online training courses on Personnel Recovery and Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) which covers avoiding capture, resisting enemy influence if captured, and escape.
Training for certain job fields will remain unchanged. For example, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear training for CBRN specialists will still be required, as will medical training for combat medics. Under the new regulation, soldiers in other fields may participate in that, or similar training, if their commanders deem it necessary.
“Not every organization needs to do those tasks at any given time,” Mullinax said.
Soldiers will now have to take 16 mandatory training courses each year, down from 27 that soldiers were required to complete online and in person annually. The changes were directed by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George “to reduce administrative burdens” on unit leaders, according to a fact sheet provided to Task & Purpose by the Army.
The changes mean more flexibility for commanders who will decide which types of training are needed for their soldiers or their unit’s mission. For example, a sustainment brigade may have different courses than an infantry unit, based on their specific mission.
“Part of the message is saying to our commanders that, ‘hey, we we trust you, and we’re giving this back to you so that you can assess your organization and manage that risk appropriately and focus on the things that you need to focus on and build readiness in a way that’s important for your organization,’” Mullinax said.
The Army does not have a specific office or unit dedicated to tracking the effects of softening the requirements for these types of training courses, but Mullinax said they will manage it “the same way we manage everything else, which is commanders having conversations.”
Criticisms of online training
Soldiers have long griped about the slew of mandatory training that all ranks are expected to complete. Criticisms have centered around squeezing the required courses into already full schedules of field training, pre-deployment workups, actual deployments, and other administrative tasks. Many soldiers say they end up completing their training after work hours. The issue even caught the attention of Elon Musk, who responded to a soldier’s video posted to X sarcastically asking for the Department of Government Efficiency not to eliminate the “very important online training we do in the military every year.”
The Army previously announced cuts to 346 hours worth of Professional Military Education, or PME, that the service deemed redundant and overwhelming. The courses, which soldiers needed to complete in order to be promoted, included topics like squad drills, Army doctrine, land operations, leadership, problem-solving, the law of armed conflict, reducing stress, public speaking, transition to civilian life, grammar and writing skills.
Mullinax said there was no expectation that soldiers had to complete mandatory training on their own time but “the reality of it is, is they probably were.”
“Some of these training modules are 40 hours, 80 hours, and just imagine every soldier being required to do those things over an entire formation over time. It adds up to a lot of time back to the organization and to the soldiers,” he said. “Not every formation all the time needs to do all these things.”
Resilience training
The Army has now removed resiliency training from the regulation completely. The service previously used its Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program to teach soldiers about personality and character traits that make them to be more “resilient” against obstacles in life and with their jobs. The program regulation defines resilience as the “mental, physical, emotional, and behavioral ability to face and cope with adversity, adapt to change, recover, learn, and grow from setbacks.”
The previous version of the Army’s training regulation said its resilience program had “positive” impacts on the psychological health of soldiers, especially among 18 to 24 year olds or those who are considered “high-risk” for mental health concerns. In the Pentagon’s latest annual suicide report, troops 17 to 24 years old accounted for almost half of the suicides across the active duty force in 2023. In the Army, that age group made up more than 40% of suicides that year.
“Each Soldier becomes a sensor to behavioral indicators that can inform the command or encourage individuals to seek help. Positive outcomes have resulted from leaders talking
about resilience skills during formations, and by integrating resilience and performance enhancement skills into physical training,” the old training regulation stated.
But under the new shift, the service now sees this training as “outdated,” according to a fact sheet about the changes.
Mullinax said informal resiliency training will still exist in other parts of the Army and that it is built through a culture “focused on a strong warrior ethos, tough, realistic training” that happens when soldiers are physically present “so that you can actually strengthen that team and build a resilient team and build resilient soldiers.”
“Our resiliency training is happening every day, all the time, in good formations,” he added.
Retired Army Reserve Maj. Gen. Tammy Smith, who last served as special assistant to the assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and Reserve affairs said she worries that removing it is short sighted and that the Army benefited from it over the years. With the training, soldiers and leaders were given more tools to talk about value systems, how to develop good character and what it means to be resilient — something she doesn’t remember having as a lieutenant or captain.
“Of course, we all learned resiliency by falling off the obstacle course and getting back up and that sort of thing so we learned it from other things but I didn’t have a language for it,” she said, adding that without resiliency training, “I could perhaps tell them, well stop crying. Buck up.”
An Army “resilience” website described the concept as part of personal readiness through five main focuses such as physical, emotional, social, spiritual and family — a majority of factors that pertain to soldiers’ well-being outside of their immediate Army job and ones that can impact their stress levels at work.
Beyond younger enlisted soldiers, the Army’s resilience training also included topics for commanders on leadership behaviors that promote a positive culture, a lesson that Smith taught herself. And in the Army, where leaders are not only the equivalent of civilian work managers but are also heavily involved in soldiers’ personal lives, Smith said that resiliency training gave them tools to counsel soldiers dealing with hard times or recovering from catastrophic life events.
“Where do I as a leader get my language now to talk to them about their own resiliency without at least some of this particular training? I don’t think that we can assume that people are just going to get it by taking it completely away and by removing it from the curriculum,” Smith said.
Before the changes, the Army regulation required ongoing resiliency training, taught by a master resilience trainer in a classroom or through more informal activities like discussions led by chaplains or having the themes incorporated into a unit’s weekly meetings like morning PT or during a safety brief.
Smith said resiliency training focused a lot on “self awareness of where you are,” adding that when she worked on personnel readiness policies, Defense Secretary Mark Esper combined the resiliency division with sexual harassment and assault response prevention, or SHARP, efforts under the idea that “a lot of the things that are being taught in each of those come down to how we form character and how we teach values across our different systems.”
Smith acknowledged that soldiers have a lot of mandatory training with a finite amount of time, meaning priorities are going to change, but said that in the long-term, it’ll change the Army’s culture.
“If they take it out of the regulation, and they remove all requirements from it, it will be something that eventually people don’t know about, incorporate or take into account, because all of the folks who had previously been given a language for resiliency they’re going to retire,” she said. “We’ll come to a place where we don’t know how to talk about it.”
The latest on Task & Purpose
- Those ‘Hegseth bodyguards’ are actually there for the Air Force’s ‘Doomsday’ plane
- Army wants junior officers to fix quality-of-life issues that drive soldiers out
- ‘100% OPSEC’ apparently means texting military plans to a reporter
- Ranger School’s new fitness test is tougher than ever, but nixes sit-ups
- This photo of Air Force special ops pool training is chaos. There’s a reason for that.