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Staff sections of the 21st Theater Sustainment Command participated in a weeklong staff exercise designed to assess and improve staff proficiencies on select training tasks March 23 to 27 on Panzer Kaserne.
The staff exercise, or STAFFEX, was the first of three exercises that will prepare the command to participate in Exercise Trident Juncture later this year.
While the 21st TSC staff performs staff functions on a daily basis, it was important for the staff to utilize the STAFFEX to train collectively and assess how to improve their functions, said William Grossman, the deputy chief of the 21st TSC’s training section and one of the key planners of the exercise.
As a result of the first exercise, the staff made improvements on how they conduct operations daily.
“This being the initial staff exercise, we had some very technical communications goals that we had set,” said Col. Matthew Redding, the 21st TSC’s chief of staff. “We set some product outputs and some process output goals, and we’ve met those for what is primarily going to be our battle staff members.”
Initial planning for the exercise began more than two months prior to the STAFFEX, when key planners first briefed the chief of staff and began coordinating multiple internal progress reviews.
Additionally, the team received support from a mission command systems integration team from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which assisted in the improvement of mission command systems within the organization.
The staff was able to “improve some of the briefing products we produced as a result of this STAFFEX,” Grossman said. “We’ve tweaked and improved our unit battle rhythm and identified some processes that may allow us to reduce some meetings and give more time back to staff sections.”
During the STAFFEX, the 21st TSC staff utilized current operations taking place throughout Europe, such as Dragoon Ride, to formulate the backdrop for the scenario-based staff estimates and updates.
“The neat thing is that the work we’ve accomplished for this STAFFEX is going to carry on to the following week since we still have ongoing operations,” Redding said. “At the end of the day, all of the hard work that the staff has done is going to be played out every single day because we are using live systems to track units and sustainment across the theater.”
While this was just the crawl phase of the three-phase exercise, the 21st TSC plans to use what they have learned to better prepare themselves for upcoming exercises and real world missions.
“We plan to build on the things we’ve learned from this STAFFEX to improve our daily operations and to help set the conditions for the two future STAFFEXs we plan on conducting later this year,” Grossman said.
“The staff has done a fantastic job,” Redding said. “We’re really looking forward to the next exercise.”
