Infantry Basic Officer Leadership, good prep?

Infantry Basic Officer Leadership Course (IBOLC) is over. Overall, it was a good course at giving me technical tools but it was not a good course for creating a good mindset.

The Turkish international student in our platoon, Ferhat, was named the international honor graduate and had some especially cogent criticisms. He said that the situations we face were mostly canned and did not correlate to what we will be facing when we deploy. Every time we do a mission we go in knowing the exact enemy situation. We know where he is, what he will do, and how many people he has. He behaved like a conventional opponent every time. Whenever we attacked he would stay and fight when an irregular opponent would have broken contact. Also, we initiated almost all of our engagements, whereas in reality the insurgent initiates the vast majority.

He did say our training was very good on the whole. I did learn a lot about things like how to think about security in all environments and how to employ machine guns well. I also got good feedback from the cadre on how to communicate orders better and delegate to make my life easier.

At the same time, his criticisms were definitely valid. IBOLC did not help prepare us for the ambiguity that we will face having to react to a daring an crafty enemy who hits us at our weakest points. Also, it was very process oriented. We went into a situation we knew and had faced before, and just had to follow a process to get the job done. If they had taught the classes in a way that asked more questions and put us in unfamiliar situations we would have had a different experience.