Activity – k.piercy – The Center for Junior Officers

k.piercy replied to the topic objt, objective-T, objective task in the forum Junior Officer 7 years, 11 months ago

 Brock,
A little background…I work in the S3 for 325 BSB (3IBCT/25ID) and we have been doing mock reporting for OBJ-T for three months now and I’ve also spent many hours discussing OBJ-T and attending different LPDs.
 
How we prepared for it: We didn’t. Being chosen for OBJ-T mock reporting was unexpected and caused us a few late nights figuring out how to executing the reporting. Before I get too much into reporting I’ll discuss what we’ve figured out as the “answer” to OBJ-T.
 
Implementation: Start off on ATN and find your unit METL. Pull the T&EOs for each of your METs. The T&EOs are your answer to the test. The trick for us was to determine which METs we were training during which event (which was already done anyways) and then incorporate the evaluated tasks into each of the training events. Build your training event around the T&EO that you want or need to evaluate. Make sure you look at the evaluation criteria matrix as well because this is the second major part to the evaluation. 
Understand the difference between dynamic and complex, dynamic, and static OE. For us this involved a conventional threat, uniformed unconventional threat, and terrorist organizations within our enemy situation. Additionally, we were in the field just shy of two weeks that included night operations, a BSA dislocation, and a living, breathing, OPFOR provided by one of the infantry battalions. Our focus during this event was 2/6 METs…expeditionary deployment and base defense.

Reporting: To be clear, when we began executing mock OBJ-T reporting, we were going through the T&EOs for training events that occurred in the past that we had also lost the evaluations for. These METs were already evaluated in DTMS (extremely important and required) but we needed to build the T&EO to know how to fill out the TRUPR.
Problem 1 — since we didn’t have the evaluated T&EOs we had to build them from memory. We selected go/no-go based upon what we actually planned and executed as described in each of the performance measures. This led to problem 2…
Problem 2 — what constitutes and go/no-go. We wrestled with this because one our tasks was to conduct MDMP. Well if we did MDMP then we pass or did it need to be an effective MDMP that provided valuable information? Who was the one who decided if it was a good MDMP? A good two months after we were doing reporting a group from DA and CAC came down and gave us the answer…go/no-go is outcome based and determined by the commander. If the commander thinks we did a good MDMP then it’s a go; same for the other tasks.
Problem 3 — what performance measures count? Do all the numbered and sub-tasks count into the total performance measures? According to the same crew from DA/CAC, the only performance measures that matter are the numbered ones. The sub-tasks do not matter EXCEPT if it is a leader or critical step. For example…all of our numbered tasks for Sustainment Support in an Attack are leader and critical steps except step 4e which is a leader task. Therefore we had a total of 8 (7 numbered + step 4e) total performance measures with 8 leaders tasks and 7 critical tasks.
Problem 4 — what defines a dynamic and complex, dynamic, and static OE? Good news is there are definitions below the task eval criteria matrix that tell you. So based on what I talked about earlier our last main FTX hit dynamic and complex variables…barely. Since we didn’t build the FTX around the T&EO we almost missed the mark and could have very easily only hit dynamic threat and been capped at a max of a P rating.
Problem 5 — Leader and Soldiers present at training. Well…this is the one that everyone will always struggle with and we were no exception. Since our last FTX the S1 OIC and NCOIC and main planner were all gone so no one had the historical data on % of Leaders and Soldiers present. Honestly…we guessed based upon some of our experiences out there. The answer I got from DA/CAC was that this again is a commander’s assessment, did the Soldiers that were out there achieve the training goal? If the answer is yes, then count them even if they weren’t out there the entire time.

Good news is that this was pretty straight forward once we did it the first time. Ironically, despite only focusing on expeditionary deployment and base defense for 6 months all of our METs came out to a T- once we did the T&EOs. This was because most of our tasks were plan and not execute so even though we didn’t execute sustainment operations we managed to achieve a T- in the BN METs for sustainment. DA/CAC did state that commanders can upgrade a unit’s evaluation 1 level but downgrade as far as they would like. Our BC wanted to downgrade the sustainment METs because we never executed them.
Bad news is that this is only 1 of the 4 parts of OBJ-T. The other three parts are weapons qualification, collective live fire, and training days.

Weapons Qualification: pull it straight from DTMS. Very straight forward. The TRUPR is the sheet that you report OBJ-T on for USR and has some issues with calculations but doesn’t really pertain here.
Collective Live Fire: There are a bunch of charts on ATN that tell you what level of collective live fire proficiency is required based upon the unit you’re in. Execute that level and raise your live fire metric. On a side note…they keep changing the IBCT BSB live fire requirements…
Training Days: Training days are the number of days, unencumbered by any resourcing requirements, needed to achieve a T1 in all ratings (weapons, collective live fire, and METL). For us it was based upon the number of days we needed to complete sustainment vehicle gunnery.

I would like to point out that there is a great resource on this on ATN.
https://atn.army.mil/dsp_template.aspx?dpID=376
Read and understand the Leader’s Guide to Objective Assessment of Training Proficiency. DA/CAC told all of us that this supersedes all contradictory regulations, TCs, etc. One of the biggest changes…individual weapons qualification is only required once a year but STRAC will not change. This means units have more time and more ammo to dedicate to real marksmanship proficiency. Also, under additional training resources is where you can find the collective live fire tasks. References also has the FORSCOM UTPR/TRUPR User Guide.

Hopefully this helps your some and is clear. Feel free to hit me up with whatever questions you may think of. I know a lot of the discussion so far has not provided leaders with the real answer (as I see it) on how to really implement and prepare for OBJ-T.

Misc Notes: 
The external evaluators just need to be external to the unit being evaluated. A.k.a. if your CO is being evaluated, the evaluators can come from another CO within the same BN. Our problem being the BSB within the IBCT was we wanted logistics evaluators so we had to go to the SUST BDE for evaluators which obviously took more coordination.
Classification: Data for OBJ-T is SECRET once you associate aggregate data with the T1-T4 rating. Feel free to fill out the TRUPR with your qual data and METL rating (U, P, T).
Leaders: Unless specifically defined in the T&EO, leaders are only the OIC/NCOIC of the level being evaluated and 1 level down. For a CO that would be the CO CDR, 1SG, PLs, and PSGs.