FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. — Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle, commanding general of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, visited Fort Leonard Wood on Wednesday to observe training, meet with Soldiers and leaders and provide a leader professional development, or LPD, opportunity for Captains Career Course students.
This was Beagle’s first visit to Fort Leonard Wood since he took command of the CAC and Fort Leavenworth in October. Before that, he served as the commanding general of the 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) and Fort Drum, New York, and prior to that he served as the commanding general of the Army Training Center and Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
During the visit, Beagle toured many of Fort Leonard Wood’s training facilities, including the Engineer Horizontal Skills Training at Training Area 244, the Chemical Defense Training Facility and the Military Police Stem Village area.
At the LPD, which took place in Lincoln Hall Auditorium, Beagle opened the event by providing a brief explanation to about 200 first lieutenants and captains on his roles at the CAC, and how the Army’s 10 centers of excellence — which includes the Maneuver Support Center of Excellence here — produce “everything that our Army does,” which all moves from the CoEs to the CAC.
“From our doctrine and our organization and our training and our materiel solutions, leader development, personnel, facilities — all of that emanates from a CoE,” Beagle said.
Fort Leavenworth is “the intellectual center of the Army,” Beagle added.
“Any and everything that changes in our Army starts at a CoE,” he said. “We have one foot in the current — the fielded force — and one foot in the future force.”
As he said he did not want to simply “talk at” the junior officers during the one-hour LPD, Beagle, instead, took questions from the audience. As the CCC students are learning how to be competent Army leaders, many of the questions were focused on how to develop the attributes necessary to be successful in their future roles as commanders.
In line with that, Beagle discussed the relationship between hard work and talent.
“Hard work needs talent, but talent fails to work hard,” he said. “Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. You’re going to go in a whole lot of different directions, but you’re not going to go forward.”
Beagle said, “you have to do the work,” and he equated time in school with time in a gym, where an individual uses that time to prepare themselves for a task. Each student should have the goal coming out of CCC to be what he called “a tactical-technical expert.”
“You’re now at the point where someone wants to be you, and they’re watching how you operate every single day,” he said. “You have to make what you do look easy. I don’t care how hard it is. It says you’re in control; that you’re comfortable in the uniform; and you know what you need to do.”
The higher a person’s rank, “the easier you’re going to have to make it look,” he added.
“You don’t get promoted based on what you’ve done,” he said. “You get promoted based on what you have the potential to do.”
The goal, Beagle said, should be “to work yourself out of a job.”
“Give back your experience,” he said. “Whether it’s counseling, coaching, leader development — whatever it may be, that’s your goal, to work yourself out of a job. That’s leader development; that’s when you know you’ve got it right.”
When asked what advice he would tell his younger self — Capt. Milford Beagle, for example — Beagle said he would go back and tell himself, “Never be afraid to fail.”
“The things that we’ve gone through — that you will go through in your career — make you who you are,” he said. “Mistakes will be made. That’s how you grow. Never be afraid to fail.”
Beagle said people who don’t want to make mistakes tend to make bigger mistakes.
“I made a ton of mistakes, but I also learned, and I never made that mistake again,” he said. “That’s what everybody wants to see — that’s what separates you from somebody else.”
By a show of hands in the auditorium, many of the students were married and some already had children, and Beagle was asked how he balances his career with his family.
“It’s not about the quantity of time that you spend with your family,” he said. “It’s about the quality.”
Beagle said, “focus yourself on what you have to do,” as a lack of time is a lack of priorities. He added there is a difference between being “productive” and simply being “active.”
“You can be active all day, going around, doing stuff, knocking down targets — and you have no idea what you did all day,” he said. “If you are productive and you have priorities, you know exactly what you got done — you are a sniper. I’m going to focus on this target, and it’s going down.”
As the LPD neared its end, Beagle was asked if development and self-improvement gets more difficult the older and more experienced one gets.
Beagle said it should not.
“If it gets harder for you, then you stopped learning,” he said. “That’s the most dangerous person — the person who stops learning. If it’s harder for you the older you get — the further you get along in rank — that’s a cue to yourself something is wrong: You stopped learning; you stopped adjusting and adapting.”
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