Leadership course for new lieutenants nixed

[unhappycamper]

Leadership course for new lieutenants nixed
By Gina Cavallaro - Staff writer
Posted : Monday Dec 14, 2009 7:59:07 EST

A program designed to immerse new lieutenants in basic soldiering skills has come to an end less than four years after it began.

Basic Officer Leadership Course II, known as BOLC II, began in June 2006 as a sort of basic training for lieutenants before they were shipped to their officer basic courses.

The shortages of captains and majors that have kept units from manning their officer billets at 100 percent forced the Army to look at how it was moving lieutenants through the pipeline.

BOLC II kept as many as 8,000 second lieutenants in some sort of basic officer training at any given time. The six-week course was creating a bottleneck and keeping the Army’s youngest officers from getting to their branch training and first units of assignment without long delays.

Instead of BOLC II — now given only at Fort Benning, Ga., and Fort Sill, Okla. — the lieutenants will move straight from their commissioning source to their branch training, at the end of which they will receive about three weeks of training in basic soldiering skills.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/12/army_leadership_training_121409w/