The US Army is planning to extend its 14-week infantry One Station Unit Training (OSUT) by two months to better prepare soldiers in skills such as land navigation, marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, fire and maneuver and first aid training.
According to military.com, trainers at Fort Benning, Georgia, will test the plan during a pilot program this summer that will extend infantry OSUT from 14 weeks to 22 weeks. Soldiers currently undergo nine weeks of Basic Combat Training and 4.5 weeks of infantry advanced individual training with the same unit, hence the name OSUT.
“It's more reps and sets; we are trying to make sure that infantry soldiers coming out of infantry OSUT are more than just familiar [with ground combat skills],” Col. Townley Hedrick, commandant of the Infantry School of Benning, told Military.com in a June 21 interview.
“You are going to shoot more bullets; you are going to come out more proficient and more expert than just familiar,” he added.
“In 14 weeks, what we really do is produce a baseline infantry soldier,” Col. Kelly Kendrick, the outgoing commander of the 198th Infantry Brigade at Benning, who helped develop the pilot program with former infantry commandant, Brig. Gen. Christopher Donahue, told military.com.
The new pilot will train two companies from July 13 to mid-December. Once the new program is finalized, trainers will put the program into action across infantry OSUT starting in October 2019, Kendrick explained.
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