The U.K. military services must rely less on technology and training by rote and more on good and current doctrine that teaches flexible thinking, the new British Army commander of training told attendees at the ITEC 2010 conference in London in May.

Lt. Gen. Paul Newton, who assumed command of the Army’s Force Development and Training Command in April, delivered a strong keynote address, in which he said much of the training in the military over the years was “a waste of time” and there was a disconnect between trainers and trainees.

“You see people stripping their rifles because they know how to do that,” Newton said. “You have people pretending to train and people pretending to be trained.”

Newton also told the audience that his son had recently graduated from Sandhurst, the British Army’s officer war college, and it had been “an unimaginative experience.”

Newton’s assessment of Army training was not all bad. He said some “gentle adaptation” was occurring that meant, for example, soldiers were learning in U.K. field exercises how to translate U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s guidance for “courageous restraint” on the irregular warfare fronts in Afghanistan. “That’s training excellence,” Newton said.

But much more needs to be done to ensure that soldiers are taught flexibility and agility of mind so they can adapt to any situation, he added.

“The Afghan conflict is not how this Army sees the future of conflict. We are not single-issue functions in our Army, and we will not follow a rigorous Afghan template,” he said. “But the picture of future conflict out to 2030 has clear characteristics, and there are trends out there that we have to take into account.”

Newton listed such issues as climate change, the emergence of a multipolar world with countries such as Brazil, China and India growing in influence, state failures and exhaustion of Middle East oil resources as potential flashpoints.

These issues will force Western nations to abandon their preferred way of war that hinges on a technological advantage, Newton said. “We will have to make a conscious effort to make our people the leading edge, and training will be part of that,” he said.

Newton cited U.S. Army thought leaders such as Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster and retired Lt. Col. John Nagl, now head of a prominent Washington, D.C., think tank. He called for the British Army to learn from its allied partners and not to treat doctrine as a dirty word, but rather as a body of science for learning. He also called for a system that allows lessons from the battlefield to be incorporated more rapidly into the preparation training for those about to be deployed.

“We must contemporize what we teach,” he said.

— Karen Walker