JOINT BASE LEWIS MCCHORD, Wash. - Senior leaders from the I Corps staff, their tenant units and aligned partners gathered at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, Feb. 25-26, for the I Corps quarterly senior leader development training. They discussed the Army and I Corps priorities in a setting conducive to dialogue, focusing on building and sustaining readiness with regionally aligned forces.
During the two-day training, leaders also discussed other trending topics such as Joint Readiness Training Center and National Training Center best practices, trends and observations, campaign plans, lines of effort, Pacific Pathways, communication strategy, and other key tasks.
"There are three lines of effort that we really focus on: readiness flow, which is maximizing unit readiness and enabling strategic readiness, pacific engagement and global response," said Maj. Austin Cruz, campaign planner with I Corps. "Everything that we do as a corps fits in one of these three categories."
One of the guest speakers, Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, commanding general of U.S. Army Pacific, emphasized the importance of both leaders and Soldiers in the effort to move forward to improve training standards, be it at JRTC, NTC or even Pacific Pathways. He let the leaders know how pleased he was with how they were performing.
"One of the things I always highlight is, as you're out there doing all these complex missions, it's an incredible mission load," Brooks said. "The success of our efforts is delivered by our Soldiers. That's where the success or failure occurs."
He stated the responsibility for success and credit belongs to Soldiers, and the responsibility for failure belongs to leaders.
"The fact that the Soldiers have delivered successfully over and over and over again, against all kinds of overwhelming odds, in very challenging circumstances, and physical environments ..." Brooks said. "All those things we've asked you to do says so much about what kinds of Soldiers that are out there, and it says an awful lot about you as leaders."
Lt. Gen. Stephen R. Lanza, commanding general of I Corps, echoed Brooks' comments to the leaders.
"Gen. Brooks laid out three key points for us," he said. "He talked about readiness, he talked about innovation to find ways to train Soldiers and of course to care for Soldiers and their families."
He added that in order to balance the requirements of USARPAC and of U.S. Army Forces Command, I Corps has to develop a way forward.
"We have to build a campaign plan in order to see ourselves in terms of taking the myriad requirements that are global and regional and how we will put those in a campaign plan, so we can project out where we need to go," Lanza added.
Leaders had the opportunity to share their experiences, learn from each other, develop new strategic plans and give feedback to make the necessary changes to improve and strengthen I Corps readiness.
"This training was a good opportunity for internal leader development, increasing our ability to go after readiness across the Corps and share lessons learned best practices," said Cruz. "It is also good for camaraderie to bring the leaders together from across the corps footprint in Hawaii, Alaska, Japan and JBLM."
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