The Army’s new chief of staff is tearing a page from the Marine Corps playbook and insisting that every soldier consider himself “a rifleman first.”

“Everybody in the United States Army’s gotta be a soldier first,” Gen. Peter Schoomaker told reporters during an Oct. 7 roundtable meeting with reporters in Washington.

The specialization of jobs in the Army pulled the service away from the notion that every soldier must be grounded in basic combat skills, he said. But Iraq has demonstrated that no matter what a soldier’s military occupational specialty is, he must be able to conduct basic combat tasks in order to defend himself and his unit.

“We’ve dismounted artillerymen in Iraq, and we’ve got them performing ground functions — infantry functions, MP functions,” Schoomaker said. “Everybody’s got to be able to do that … Everybody’s a rifleman first.”

That phrase echoes a Marine motto that has been around since at least World War I — “Every Marine a rifleman.”

Schoomaker’s emphasis on individual combat skills is part of a larger program to infuse the entire Army with a “warrior ethos.” Senior Army leaders are convinced that the focus on technical skills, particularly in the noncombat arms branches, has resulted in a neglect of basic combat skills.

“In our well-intentioned direction of trying to develop very technically competent soldiers in branches of the service, perhaps we lost some of the edge associated with being a soldier,” Lt. Gen. William Wallace, commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., told reporters Oct. 6.

Service leaders are looking to change the Army’s training and education systems, which have “reinforced the culture where you’re a technician first and a soldier second,” Gen. Kevin Byrnes, head of Army Training and Doctrine Command, told an audience at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting in Washington on Oct. 7.

“We’re removing those impediments,” in order to reverse that mindset, he added.

“To be a warrior,” Wallace said, “you’ve got to be able to use your individual weapon. You’ve got to be able to operate in small, lethal teams if called upon to do so. You’ve got to have that mental and physical capability to deal with the enemy regardless of whether you’re a frontline soldier or you’re someone fixing helicopters for a living, because you are a soldier first and a mechanic second.”

Back to basic soldier skills

Leaders are pushing forward with combat-skills training that will be mandatory for all officers and enlisted troops:

*Every soldier will be required to qualify on his or her individual weapon twice a year, Byrnes said. The current Army standard requires soldiers to qualify only once a year, although some commanders have their troops qualify more frequently.

*New recruits will qualify on their individual weapons in basic training and then again in advanced individual training, Byrnes added. Until now, qualification in basic training only was the standard.

*Every soldier, regardless of MOS and unit, will conduct at least one live-fire combat drill a year. For higher headquarters rear-echelon units, it might include reacting to an ambush, Byrnes said.

Top gear, real-world training

The Army embarked on the “warrior ethos” program shortly before Schoomaker became chief Aug. 1, but he has folded it into a larger effort aimed at ensuring “the soldier” takes priority over any other program in the Army. “Humans are more important than hardware,” he said in his Oct. 7 keynote speech at the AUSA meeting.

“The Soldier” is the name given to what Schoomaker said is the most important of the 15 “focus areas” within the Army that he has targeted for immediate action. Putting the soldier first also means making sure no soldier deploys to a combat zone with anything less than the best gear available.

Schoomaker is determined to do away with the practice that sees later-deploying units into a combat theater fielded with gear that’s different — and usually less modern — than what’s issued to the Army’s “first-to-fight” combat units.

Another “focus area” aimed in part at getting all personnel to think of themselves as warriors deals with the Army’s combat training center program.

The service’s so-called “dirt” combat training centers include the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, Calif., the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, La., and the Combat Maneuver Training Center, Hohenfels, Germany. The CTC program also includes the Battle Command Training Program, which puts division and corps headquarters through rigorous simulation exercises called “Warfighters.”

The CTC program has received much of the credit for the Army’s successful performances in the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003 and Afghanistan in 2002. But it originally was designed to train units how to fight the Soviet-style armies. Now, Schoomaker and other senior leaders say, the CTCs must change faster than usual to prepare soldiers for the operations they likely are to face in the near future.

“These combat training centers are the main cultural drivers in the Army,” Schoomaker told the AUSA audience. “How we train there dictates how people think when they get on the real battlefield,” he later told reporters.

Schoomaker noted that at the NTC in particular, the Opposing Force was designed to replicate a regimented, easy-to-predict Soviet-style threat. “Today, we are fighting a different kind of enemy, and we’ve got to be prepared to fight and win in different kind of terrain, under different conditions than we have in the past,” he said.

Units now arrive at the training centers under relatively benign conditions and are given time to prepare for their “battles” against the opposing force before moving into the maneuver “box” where the real force-on-force fighting occurs.

“We now have to look at perhaps having to fight our way into the training centers and fight our way out,” Schoomaker told the reporters.

Schoomaker and other senior Army leaders also are keen to increase the participation of the other services at the combat training centers. “They must be more joint,” the chief said.

Mix-’n’-match units

The new chief also wants an Army that is more “modular,” meaning one composed of units that can be mixed and matched without tearing apart other units, as occurs now. He explained the concept using an analogy.

“If you only got paid in $100 bills, and you want to go buy a can of snuff down at the Quik-Stop, and it costs you $3.75 … what do you get back? A big old pocketful of change.

“Then you go to the supermarket and now you’re going to buy your groceries.” But the groceries cost more than the change you have in your pocket. “So what do you do? You spend another $100 bill. And what do you get back? More change.

“And you do this until you spend all your hundreds, and then you’ve got a bunch of change. And now you try to aggregate this change into something that’s meaningful, and it doesn’t work. And that’s quite frankly a little bit of the condition that we’re in.”

The point Schoomaker was making is that every time the Army deploys a brigade combat team of armor or infantry, it must augment it with pieces of other units — MPs, aviation and artillery, for instance. Eventually, the service finds it has deployed all of its brigades, but still has lots of pieces of units left over, sitting all but useless at home station.

Schoomaker thinks the Army can get more out of its current force by redesigning it. Most divisions have three ground maneuver brigades. But Schoomaker wants to create five maneuver brigades within each division, without increasing the number of soldiers in the division. The first two divisions to return from Iraq, 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) and the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), will be the guinea pigs in this experiment, with their division commanders leading the redesign.

“I asked them, ‘Could you make yourself into five maneuver brigades, out of the three that you’ve got, and could you make each of those five at least as capable as each of the original three?’” Schoomaker told reporters.

“ ‘And if we gave you the right technologies, could you become one-and-a-half times more capable?’”

The chief said that the Army is not prejudging the issues. “These are just questions,” he said. But, “I believe in my heart that each of those five brigades can be as effective as the current one,” if equipped with the right technologies.

Staying together in the fight

Schoomaker also said he was trying to change the Army’s policy relating to battalion and brigade-level changes of command in combat theaters. Until now, the Army has insisted on enforcing the two-year command tours, with no accommodation made for the fact that a unit might be in combat. Thus, a battalion commander might leave his unit halfway through its one-year tour in Iraq because his two-year command is up and the Army wants him to attend the War College in Carlisle, Pa.

This policy has infuriated many in the Army, especially the outgoing commanders, who feel it forces them to abandon their troops just when their soldiers need them most.

Schoomaker is sympathetic to those who feel the policy should be changed, and has told the units preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan that he does not want midtour changes of command. Staying with a unit until it redeploys is “a fundamental role of leadership,” he told reporters.

Staff writer Matthew Cox contributed to this report.