I was browsing through the 255N Facebook group when someone posted this comment that got a good discussion going. There were several great points that were brought up in the conversation and I posted a short answer myself but I thought that the topic deserved a little bit more discussion.
So this morning I was checking my email at work and discovered a message announcing the official publication of TC 6-02.1 (The United States Army Signal Corps Training Strategy). According to it’s preface this TC “provides training guidelines and strategies to develop and certify the proficiency of signal collective tasks in support of maneuver operations.”
Back in November I had the chance to attend the Splunk .conf conference here in DC. One of the big after hours events of the conference is the Boss of the SOC (BOTS) competition that puts teams against each other to try and analyze a set of data to identify a variety of indicators of compromise from an incident. After a little bit of talking, Splunk decided to release the BOTS app as an open-source project.
Many of us remember playing capture the flag (CTF) back when we were kids. The idea was to divide into teams, try to sneak to the other teams side and capture their flag. Years later, this idea was expanded on when Playstation and XBox started putting together multiplayer games that had the same general idea. More recently, the idea has morphed once again with hacking and computer security related CTF competitions. Perhaps the most famous CTF is the annual Defcon CTF where participants from around the world work to qualify to take part in the event at the conference itself, but this is just one of countless CTF competitions that take place on nearly a daily basis.
The quality of our training will determine our mission success. Shortcuts during training can have negative long-term effects on our mission readiness. This article is intended to pick up where The Lost Art of Training left off. If you haven’t read it yet, I would suggest you start there.
On this day in 2008, I learned the very hard lesson that how well we prepare our Soldiers to do their jobs in combat can mean the difference between the life and death of others.
The training of our Soldiers has long been the cornerstone of providing our country the fighting force that we do today. Once upon a time training was the primary focus of the Army but that has changed over the last 13 years and we have moved away from the basics.
Installing, operating, and maintaining a modern tactical signal network is not an easy task and yet we expect our operators to be proficient at it. While this is by no means an unrealistic goal, it is one that requires work and training at home station before going to the field. This is part three of a series of posts concerning the network trends that I regularly see here at the National Training Center as units pass through on rotation.