ARLINGTON, Va. – Developing subordinates professionally is the hallmark of a good command leadership program, as is building esprit de corps and unit cohesion.
A staff ride is one of the tools for senior leaders to develop all three.
“The purpose of a staff ride is [for] professional development, in every sense of the word, and it’s meant to build unit cohesion, esprit de corps, and tie the past to the present,” said Army Lt. Col. Stephen Holdeman Jr., an historian with the National Guard Bureau. “Those are the three functions of the program.”
The concept of staff rides has been around for a long, long time, Holdeman said.
“Historians have had a predominant role in staff rides since the creation of the historian,” he said. “More importantly, the historian role is to guide, be a subject matter expert, and lead staff rides when needed. Our job is to be that conduit with the organization [attending] the staff ride, as well as the National Park Service, and ensure … that things are ready to go, and fill in any blanks where needed.”
Holdeman added that not every staff ride needs to follow the status quo.
“Today, a staff ride can consist of anything from a battlefield tour to that of a trip to the local library and taking a look at materials relevant to the discussion at hand – it doesn’t just have to be looking at cannons at a battlefield,” he said.
As a non-enforceable regulatory requirement for historians to conduct, Holdeman hopes to revitalize the staff ride program among staffs at the National Guard Bureau.
“We haven’t had a program up and running,” he said, “but it is a necessary tool for commanders to build cohesion and esprit de corps within their divisions or units.”
Cohesion and building esprit de corps was exactly what Army Col. Shawn Edwards, chief, Soldier and Family Support Division, had in mind when she chose Antietam National Battlefield as the site for her division’s staff ride.
“I picked Antietam for a reason, because I know that it was one of the bloodiest battles [of the Civil War],” Edwards said.
“What my Soldiers and I do is very physically and mentally draining,” she said. “We work with sexual assault, with suicides, and [this] was a method to reenergize my Soldiers and help them better understand the services we provide to the Soldiers that are out there on the battlefield or at the state, and appreciate what we do for them.”
Army Capt. Ronald Jones, program manager for the Army National Guard Yellow Ribbon Program, agreed.
“You think about this battle and how more than 22,000 Soldiers were lost that day, just imagine the [post-traumatic stress] survivors of that battle had to overcome,” Jones said.
“They didn’t have the support for [PTS] back then or the support to prevent suicides, whereas today we have those programs in place to support Soldiers,” he said, adding that he feels Soldiers are better taken care of today than in 1862.
Holdeman said it is that understanding of, and progression from, the past that helps ensure the success of the military in the future.
“Part of fighting America’s wars is to understand America’s wars,” he said. “By understanding the past, how wars were fought in the past, developing a course of action for the future, and in turn the lessons learned from military campaigns of the past, it is what is crucial to keeping the military current now.”