A simulation to determine the effect that the Army Basic Officer Leadership Course will have on accession training

Abstract

The United States Army is currently considering a significant change in the way they train newly commissioned officers. The Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) plans to add a course to accession training called the Basic Officer Leadership Course (BOLC), which would teach officers of all Army Competitive Category (ACC) branches core leadership and common skills requirements at three Army installations in the United States. This thesis develops a simulation that explores the length of time newly commissioned officers spend training once TRADOC implements BOLC and establishes training policies for the new course. The model is implemented in the Java programming language, with Simkit as the simulation package. The simulation output is a list of 225,000 simulated officers with their training time recorded, which I aggregate into mean and variance measurements for each design point. Upon this aggregated data I execute a regression analysis, which feeds into a loss function that penalizes excess time spent in accession training. Minimizing the loss function returns optimal policy settings for BOLC's implementation. This analysis shows that the most significant policies in the accession training system are the maximum and minimum class size for a BOLC class and the ratio of ROTC officers who receive immediate active duty status upon commissioning. My analysis also shows that placing BOLC into the simulated accession training system caused an increase of approximately 23 days in training time.