Executive officer class offered at Fort Leonard Wood

By Amy Newcomb (Fort Leonard Wood)May 23, 2012

FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. -- The Maneuver Support Center of Excellence and Fort Leonard Wood will hold the first quarterly Executive Officer Course June 5-6 for Soldiers holding junior and senior executive officer positions.

Col. Scott Spellmon, chief of staff, said the intent of this training is to provide executive officers from different units around the installation with standards and procedures associated with Fort Leonard Wood.

"(Executive Officers) are coming from units that have deployed -- (U.S. Army Forces Command) units that are stationed here, (U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command) units that do initial military training, and they all have a slightly different perspective from their backgrounds on how maintenance is done, how command supply discipline is done, how sponsorship in the units is done," Spellmon said. "What we wanted to do was get the class together to get everyone on the same sheet of music … so that everyone understands the systems that we use here for maintaining and sustaining equipment and command supply discipline."

During the first day of the course, attendees will gain valuable information from how to properly account for property, issue and turn-in of ammunition, training management and more.

For example, Soldiers attending the course will learn how to accomplish maintenance tasks above their battalion and brigade's level of responsibility by working with organizations such as TACOM and Directorate of Logistics, Spellmon said.

The final day of the course, attendees learn about troop lifts, personal property moves, food service requirements, Central Issue Facility issues and turn-ins, laundry turn-ins, how to prepare a unit finance report, inspections and more. Attendees also are taken for a facility tour of TACOM, DOL-Maintenance and the Ammunition Supply Point.

Lt. Col Larry Glasscock, MSCoE G-33 chief, said the executive officer course is important because normal training management functions have been lost in the cycles of prepping for deployment, deployment, redeployment and reset.

"Everything has been very lock-step and managed in terms of these are the things you have to do to get ready to deploy," Glasscock said.

"A lot of those skills where an officer has been required to use some adaptability, some flexibility to figure out how to execute training and how to resource it properly -- those managerial type skills have atrophied over the past few years in the junior officer corps," Glasscock said.

"We are incorporating this course here to try and close some gaps in training (and) it's going to be a forum for all the executive officers from the brigade level all the way down to the company level to learn some unique things about training management at Fort Leonard Wood, such as how do you resource ranges; how do you resource ammunition; how you conduct business as a chief of staff," Glasscock added.

For information on how to sign up, access MSCoE OPORD 12-48, FLW Executive Officer Course, at https://flw-intranet.wood.army.mil /cop/documents/OPORDS/

OPORDsFY12 from your military computer on the Fort Leonard^Wood network, or contact Lt. Col. Dale Riden at 563.6161.