Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 124

Platoon LiveFire Exercise

Squad Live-Fire Exercise
Unstable Gunnery XI

Unstable Gunnery VI
Team Live-Fire Exercise

Unstable Gunnery V

Buddy Team LiveFire Exercise
Leader Certification
M4/Crew-Served Qualification
(Graphic courtesy of Lt. Col. Chad R. Foster, U.S. Army)

Figure 3. Host-Nation and U.S. Training in Parallel
RAF deployment must manage for both the mission
at hand and the unit’s sustainable readiness.
Figure 2 (page 120) shows a way of looking at the
problem from the squadron/battalion perspective. This
chart defines the qualification and certification levels
that a commander could designate as the minimum
necessary for various corresponding levels of partnership with host-nation forces. These minimum training-readiness levels are the product of different factors,
to include analysis of the mission and the commander’s
assessment of both his own formation’s capabilities and
those of the host-nation partner. This sliding scale fits
the intent of the Army’s Sustainable Readiness Model
by establishing a flexible framework that allows commanders room to maneuver in managing the specific
challenges of their deployment mission.
122

At the strategic level, RAF deployments seek to
“build trust and confidence between the United States
and the host nation through understanding facilitated
by enduring engagements.”11 At the tactical level, this
translates to U.S. forces training with counterparts to
build capacity and interoperability based on guidance
from the country team and the specifics of the agreement between the two governments. In these cases, interoperability training can serve as an effective vehicle
to both enhance partner capacity and increase a unit’s
sustainable readiness.
An example of this technique would be a U.S.
company integrating squads into a host-nation platoon
situational-training exercise supervised overall by U.S.
trainers. In this way, the U.S. company commander is
able achieve his own training objectives at the squad
July-August 2016  MILITARY REVIEW