Chapter 1: Responsibilities

This page is a section of TC 7-101 Exercise Design.

This chapter establishes the responsibilities for exercise development. The senior trainer, the exercise director and the exercise planner are the individuals primarily responsible for exercise development and execution. Table 1-1 provides an example of how a unit can determine who will be the senior trainer, exercise director, and exercise planner for various levels of organizations.

Table 1-1. Example guide to determine roles

	Training Unit	Senior Trainer	Exercise Director	Exercise Planner
Joint Training Exercise	Division	Corps Cdr	J7	J7 Ops
CTC Training Exercise	Brigade	Division Cdr	Combat Training Center CG	COG/Ops
Active Component Home Station Training Exercise	Battalion	Brigade Cdr	Division G3	G3 Training
Reserve Component Home Station Training Exercise	Battalion	Brigade Cdr	Training Support Battalion Cdr	G3 Training

The senior trainer is the commander of the parent organization of the unit being trained. This commander has two major overall training responsibilities: develop Soldiers and leaders for future responsibilities and prepare his unit to accomplish the assigned mission. In the absence of a directed mission, com- manders must prepare their unit to perform those core missions the unit was doctrinally designed to execute across the full range of military operations.

The senior trainer conducts the first, and most important, step in creating the tools necessary for exercise design. He determines the exact troop list for the training unit. When establishing the troop list, the senior trainer should—

• Identify the task organization of the unit to be trained.
  • Complete task-organizing, to include types and numbers of equipment.
  • Ideally, training level and maintenance history should be included.
• Identify key echelons to be trained.
  • Multi-echelon training leaves many out of training if not planned for early.
• Lock in troop list early.
  • Late changes may require a scenario rewrite and should not be just pasted into the original scenario.

The senior trainer determines the training objectives of the exercise. Training objectives are described in chapter 2. The senior trainer ensures the unit’s training objectives support the approved mission essential task list (METL). (See chapter 2.) After mission essential tasks are selected, the senior trainer identifies supporting training objectives for each task. According to FM 7-0, each training objective has three parts:

• Task. A clearly defined and measurable activity accomplished by individuals and organizations. Tasks are specific activities that contribute to the accomplishment of encompassing missions or other requirements.

• Condition(s). Those variables of an operational environment or situation in which a unit, system, or individual is expected to operate and may affect performance. (JP 1-02)

• Standard. A quantitative or qualitative measure and criterion for specifying the levels of performance of a task. (FM 7-0)

The senior trainer ensures the unit refers to the applicable documents to identify the conditions and standards for its essential tasks. The documents listed in figure 1-1 will assist units in developing collective and individual training objectives.

Figure 1-1. Training objective development sources

The senior trainer, in conjunction with the commander of the unit to be trained, conducts an assessment of the current training state of the unit immediately prior to the exercise. This anticipated training condition of the unit, as it enters the exercise, is expressed as trained (T), partially trained (P), or untrained (U). (See FM 7-0.)

The senior trainer, along with the commander of the training unit, must bring the following tools to the initial planning: the troop list, the proposed training objectives (METL), the proposed conditions for the training objective tasks, and the commander’s assessment. (See figure 1-2.) During the analysis of these tools, discussion and negotiations of the initial planning phase, the senior trainer will issue guidance.

Figure 1-2. Example of a brigade commander’s training objective for his METL attack task

The exercise director is an officer of at least equal but preferred to be one grade higher than the senior trainer and is not part of the tactical chain of command of the training unit. However, during single- service Army exercises conducted largely with unit internal resources and not intended to be a culminating training event, the exercise director and senior trainer may be the same officer.

The exercise director—

• Creates and enforces the essential conditions called for by the training objectives. He is ultimately responsible for approving the combination of settings for the operational variables se- lected by the exercise planner.

• Ensures an effective training environment to create the most realistic training. He emplaces a strong safety program and develops and coordinates training events that synchronize training areas and facilities, training support systems products and services, opposing force (OPFOR), observer/controllers, evaluators, and all other resources to support the required conditions. Figure 1-3 on page 1-4 shows training events the exercise director will typically develop.

• Acts as honest broker and ensures a level playing field. The exercise director enforces use of OPFOR doctrine and exercise rules of engagement (EXROE). The exercise director achieves these primarily through a well-trained and properly resourced observer/controller organization.
  

  Figure 1-3. Training events the exercise director will typically develop

The exercise planner is typically an officer tasked with the actual creation of the exercise and its conditions. He incorporates the training objectives, desired training conditions, resources available, commander’s evaluation, and guidance from the exercise director into a cohesive exercise design. The exercise planner will—

• Develop the exercise scenario. Using exercise parameters as discussed in chapter 2, and the methodologies outlined in this TC, the exercise planner develops reasonable courses of action for both the training unit and OPFOR consistent with the TC 7-100 series and the selected operational environment (OE). However, if the training event is an MRX, the OPFOR should have maximum fidelity to a known enemy force in the actual OE for which the training unit is being prepared for deployment. Regardless of the type of training event, the planner builds an exercise framework, which contains the critical facts and conditions for the exercise. The exercise planner must keep in mind that, although the sequence of events that lead to the execution of a mission during training may be scripted and controlled, once the conditions for the mission are met and the unit begins mission execution, the events should be allowed to move along their natural course. He ensures that there is the least possible restraint on exercise conditions consistent with the training objectives that will allow leaders to realize the full consequences of their decisions.
• Determine the settings for the operational variables (political, military, economic, social, information, infrastructure, physical environment and time [PMESII-PT]), establishing a framework to build a dynamic and realistic OE. (See chapters 2 and 3.)
• Develop all orders, plans and instructions associated with the exercise to include the road to war, the training unit’s orders and plans (parent unit and higher), OPFOR combat instructions (orders), and role-player instructions. During MRXs, the exercise planner may be responsible for development and coordination of controlled scripted events normally executed by OPFOR and other role-players.
• Develop concept briefings and interim progress reports and coordinate all aspects of the exercise closely with the exercise director to ensure compliance with guidance, support of the exercise training objectives and adherence to OPFOR doctrine.
• Exercise caution when using material from prior exercises. This TC was developed specifically to provide the exercise planner the outline and basic planning considerations necessary to develop coherent and meaningful training exercises based on the Contemporary Operational Environment (COE). Often, when given the assignment to design an exercise, an exercise planner will dust off a prior exercise and use it without modification. This is common practice and is common sense to use the prior work of those who came before instead of starting from nothing. If using a prior exercise, the exercise planner must view it only as an initial guide and, more importantly, still go through all the steps and use the after action review (AAR) from the prior exercise to prevent repetition of poorly planned or executed scenarios and events.