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Sgts. Major want mandatory corporals course

Commandant Gen. James Conway is considering a proposal that would make a three-week resident leadership course for corporals mandatory, affecting the training schedule for every battalion and squadron, Marine officials said.

The proposal was developed in July during the 2009 Sergeants Major Symposium and briefed to Conway in August by Sgt. Maj. Carlton Kent, the Corps’ top enlisted advisor. While the Corps has continually increased the responsibilities the average corporal has in recent years, only 2,091 of 20,167 Marines promoted to corporal in fiscal 2008 — 9.6 percent — have taken the course, surprising senior enlisted leaders and prompting concerns about whether the Corps is preparing them sufficiently to lead.

“We never knew that the numbers were like this,” Kent said in a Sept. 21 interview. “Education is a very important piece of the Marine Corps, especially for our young corporals because we’re pushing all this leadership down to them. We feel it should be mandatory for every corporal in the Marine Corps to go through the Corporals Leadership Course once they pick up corporal.”

The course, redesigned this year, focuses largely on developing the “strategic corporal,” who must lead small units in battle and use critical-thinking skills to quickly make decisions in combat. It is conducted by battalions and squadrons and in larger settings, where several units send Marines to take the “consolidated” course. Sergeants and staff noncommissioned officers overseeing training that culminates in a three-day field exercise in which students assume leadership roles within a small unit as it faces realistic combat situations.

While Conway must ultimately make the decision about whether the corporals course is to become mandatory, precedent shows that recommendations the senior enlisted community makes following the symposium frequently become policy. In the last three years, enlisted leaders said they wanted the Corps to crack down on body-fat standards, shorten unaccompanied tours to Japan and bar forearm tattoo art. All three recommendations have been adopted.

Asked to help

The mandatory corporals course recommendation raises questions about what Marine leadership should require for professional military education for its NCO corps. In the last year, NCOs have been charged to help prevent suicides, traffic fatalities and other incidents that occur not only in battle, but on leave and at stateside military installations.

In one plan launched initially last year and made permanent this fall, NCOs have been tasked with assessing whether junior Marines under their command are in the right frame of mind to go on leave and liberty.

They must perform vehicle inspections for those junior Marines, assess their leave and liberty plans and answer to commanders if anyone dies while they are away from their unit, explaining how the dead Marine was mentored before taking time off.

More recently, NCOs were assigned a key role in reducing suicide in the Corps, which, over the past two years, has risen to its highest level since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001. Beginning in late-July, NCOs across the Corps were trained to watch for suicide signs and eliminate the stigma for reporting a Marine who is considering suicide up the chain of command.

early results of efforts to have NCOs help curtail Marine deaths have been positive, but inconclusive. Suicide statistics show that the Corps recorded 33 suicides in fiscal 2009 as of July 27, when the new suicide training was launched. At least three more Marines reportedly have killed themselves since, but that marks a large drop compared with June and July, when a combined 17 Marines committed suicide.

As of Sept. 17, 41 Marines had died in traffic fatalities this fiscal year, 14 of them on motorcycles. Last year, 51 Marines died in traffic accidents, including a Corps-record 25 who died in motorcycle crashes.

Complicated logistics

One challenge in making the corporals course mandatory is that unit commanders would be required to find time for their Marines to go, Marine officials said.

That’s a tall order, considering operational tempo is expected to remain high for the foreseeable future, with anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 Marines deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 and thousands more remaining in Iraq until next spring.

Kent, who frequently calls NCOs the “backbone of the Marine Corps,” said he is aware of the complicated logistics. In fact, he doesn’t want it to be required for promotion to sergeant, saying that while senior enlisted leaders have recommended that commanders should schedule time for the corporals course, corporals should not be held back from a promotion if they are not given a chance to attend.

“We haven’t tied it in to promotion and we won’t tie it in to promotion,” he said. “We know that the operational tempo has kept some of these corporals from going, but we feel that right now, when these corporals come back from their deployment, they should get to this corporals course.”

Sgt. Maj. Richard Hawkins, the senior enlisted advisor at Quantico, Va.-based Marine Corps University and Marine Corps Education Command, said it will be “a big math problem” getting all corporals to attend. While consolidated courses with at least 80 Marines attending at a time have been held at larger installations such as Camp Pendleton, Calif., individual units can hold the course anytime it fits their schedule, so long as they use training materials that are distributed by Training and Education Command and adhere to the standardized curriculum for the course.

“Everybody has the same amount of hours each day, but each unit has different tasks and responsibilities,” said Hawkins, who attended the symposium where the recommendation was made. “There are a lot of variables that need to be considered.”

TECom is currently examining the feasibility of requiring the course, and is expected to eventually report back to Conway, Hawkins said. One possibility is that the Corps will announce a policy change, but give Marines lead time before it becomes mandatory, the same way the service did when it began requiring the Staff NCO Advance Course. In that case, the Corps announced in June 2007 that gunnery sergeants needed to attend the course by Oct. 1, 2009, in order to be promoted to first sergeant or master sergeant, providing time to plan.

James Cohn, deputy director for Enlisted Professional Military Education at Education Command, said the frequency that units would need to conduct the course would vary by unit, based on what specialties its Marines have, how high their cutting scores are and other variables that affect how quickly they may be eligible for promotion to sergeant.

“Is once a year enough at a command?” Cohn said. “Maybe not, and that’s why it’s really tough to unravel this and implement a plan effectively.”