Army to add 8 weeks to infantry training

Military.com reports that infantry training for new soldiers in that specialty will be extended by two months from the current four-and-a-half weeks to more than 12 weeks;

Currently soldiers in infantry OSUT go through nine weeks of Basic Combat Training and about 4.5 weeks of infantry advanced individual training. This would add an additional 8 weeks of advanced individual training, tripling the length of the instruction soldiers receive in that phase.

“It’s more reps and sets; we are trying to make sure that infantry soldiers coming out of infantry OSUT are more than just familiar [with ground combat skills],” Col. Townley Hedrick, commandant of the Infantry School at Benning, told Military.com in a June 21 interview. “You are going to shoot more bullets; you are going to come out more proficient and more expert than just familiar.”

I’m an advocate for more training – more training means less bleeding. The extra training time means that soldiers arriving at their units will be better prepared for deployments sooner.

With 22 weeks of infantry OSUT, “you can see right off that bat, we are going to have a hell of a lot better soldier,” [Col. Kelly Kendrick, the outgoing commander of 198th Infantry Brigade at Benning] said. “I will tell you, we will produce infantry soldiers with unmatched lethality compared to what we have had in the past.”

The new pilot will start training two companies from July 13 to mid-December, Kendrick said. Once the new program of instruction is finalized, trainers will start implementing the 22-week cycle across infantry OSUT in October 2019.

I don’t know when infantry training went to 4 1/2 weeks, it was 8 weeks for me back in the Jurassic Epoch.

Category: Army News