SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii (Nov. 19, 2015) -- Chaplains from all units of the 25th Infantry Division met at the Mission Training Center, or MTC, here, Nov. 12, to partake in a new training program designed to improve their key leader engagement skills.
One of an Army chaplain's core duties is to advise their commander during deployment on the local population's spiritual and basic living needs through key leader engagements. A first of its kind, this training program hones a chaplain's key leader engagement skills through realistic scenarios.
Maj. David R. Schlichter, a native of Circleville, Ohio, and the brigade chaplain for the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, developed this new variation of key leader engagement training.
"This training came out of the recognition that chaplains are the lead advisers to commanders on religious affairs, and we as chaplains are lacking," Schlichter said. "We do well at providing advisement of our own Soldiers, but are not as strong when dealing with foreign leaders and advisement to commanders. Seeing this, I began to devise a program to fix this shortcoming."
After coordinating with the MTC and the 500th Military Intelligence Brigade, Schlichter was able to formulate training capable of giving chaplains and chaplain's assistants the experience needed to interact with foreign community leaders.
"The base of this training was originally designed to train human intelligence collectors to interact with foreign nationals. After seeing this training, I thought to myself, 'This wouldn't take much adjusting to re-focus this training towards chaplains.'"
The training consists of a computer simulation, organization of foreign community needs and realistic role playing with two linguists. With this variation of training having never been done before, it was a new experience for many chaplains and their assistants.
Capt. Jeff Herder, the chaplain for 225th Aviation Regiment, Combat Aviation Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, had never been exposed to training with either of the simulations.
"This kind of training is all new to me," Herder said. "I did not realize the kind of technology we had could produce these kind of scenarios. I think in the future, this training will help chaplains become more confident with theirs skills and raising the issues that we should be concerned about when advising our commanders."
For the Chaplain Corps, this is invaluable training that can continue to be implemented to raise its experience with key leader engagements so that, when the time comes during a deployment, they execute it with precision.
"We, as an Army, may not be deploying to war right now, but we will always be going somewhere within the world, and it is only a matter of when we will be in war next," Schlichter said. "So will chaplains always have the skill set of real-life key leader engagement? With this training they will."
After the success of this new variation of training, Schlichter is hoping the program will reach chaplains across the Army resulting in an overall better trained Chaplain Corps.
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