The Army is overhauling how it schedules training and hands out first assignments, trying to end waits that can leave new recruits idle for months between enlistment, basic training and their first jobs, Business Insider reported.
Leaders from Army Human Resources Command laid out the changes at the Association of the United States Army conference in Washington earlier this month. The service’s plan, which it calls People Supply Chain Management, would treat enlistment, basic training and advanced instruction as one connected pipeline rather than three separate events, so soldiers coming out of basic get routed to the class that fits their schedule and empty seats get refilled when someone drops out.
The Army announced the effort last year. It recruits, trains and assigns tens of thousands of people a year across more than 200 specialties, and technical fields like military intelligence and air defense, with their narrower recruiting pools and longer courses, are where the bottlenecks bite hardest, leaving some recruits waiting months and overstuffing other job fields.
A large part of the work is plumbing. Lt. Gen. Charles Lombardo, who is overseeing the push, said the Army must get “hundreds of disparate systems” to talk to one another. That fits a broader technology overhaul meant to replace fragmented, paper-based personnel processes with a single data environment that the service says will improve forecasting and give soldiers real-time services.
The changes reach families, too. The Army wants to identify soldiers whose children or spouses need specialized medical care or particular child care, and steer them to bases that have the needed providers before an assignment is made, not scramble to fix a mismatch afterward.
The program is new, and the Army has offered no figures on how much waiting time it expects to save. Whether it will fill more classrooms and move qualified soldiers into their units faster is an open question.