There are about seventy-five “additional” duties required of all US Army companies. Company commanders must assign two or more junior leaders to each duty, requiring each assigned individual to attend schools, conduct online training, receive regular inspections, and create and maintain continuity binders and knowledge management systems. Each additional duty pulls squad leaders away from their squads and platoon leaders away from their platoons. Key leaders at the company level are stuck behind computers for most of their workdays and on many of their off days just trying to keep up. Unsurprisingly, companies struggle to find the time and personnel resources to shoulder this administrative and clerical burden while also accomplishing their top priority: warfighting.
Unit armorer, master driver, equal opportunity leader, and sexual harassment and assault victim advocate—these are a few of the commonly known duties required of all companies across the Army. On top of these, there is an array of others— like communications security custodian, government purchase card holder, unit movement officer, and hazardous material endorsement officer—that require extended specialized training, often held at the corps or installation levels. It is not uncommon for the process to train and certify a government purchase card holder or communications security custodian to last anywhere from six to twelve months, which can put companies and even battalions in an operational bind, forcing them to rely on adjacent units or find ways to make do until they have their own personnel trained and certified in these critical roles.
But additional duties are just one piece of a broader problem that Army companies face. From frequent reporting requirements to maintaining policies to managing a range of certification programs, leaders at this level are challenged to devote the time and resources necessary to training and preparing their units for the challenges of the modern battlefield.
Reporting Requirements
Apart from additional duties, companies across the Army are commonly required to submit anywhere from three dozen to four dozen monthly reports, each requiring information gathering, preparation, review, validation, processing, storage, and submission. The process of completing and submitting reports can tie up the equivalent of one week every month for company command teams. The burden is amplified by redundancies across reports—there is scope for consolidation, for example, among the unit commander’s financial report, the BAH (basic allowance for housing) validation report, and the basic needs analysis report. Other reports that could be consolidated include the unit manning report with the rating scheme, alert roster, readiness roster, and soldier and family readiness group roster. Burdensome reports like the troops-to-task report rarely feed actual decisions, processes, or systems, but instead pull platoon sergeants and operations sergeants away from warfighting operations and missions, on top of requiring many hours to complete every week. If leaders, and specifically commanders at echelon, do not understand all that is being asked of their reporting subordinates, it is easy to double down and require yet another report, PowerPoint slide, or meeting.
Policies and Operating Procedures
A quick scan of the Army Publishing Directorate’s website shows that there are roughly fifteen thousand active Army regulations, Army directives, general orders, ALARACT (all Army activities) messages, technical manuals and bulletins, Army doctrine publications, field manuals, and training circulars, many of which individual Army leaders are expected to reference, understand, and enforce. At the unit level, commanders are expected to publish and display their own policy letters and the policy letters of higher echelons. Regardless of how easy it might be to copy and modify one or two dozen policy letters from the higher echelon, it requires a lot of time to find, reference, update, understand, disseminate, display, and apply the abundance of policy letters and the periodic updates from the company, battalion, brigade, division, corps, command, and Department of the Army.
Like unit commander policy letters, standard operating procedures (SOPs) specify how the unit will operate in its current structure under the current command. SOPs are meant to increase unit effectiveness by standardizing and streamlining operations. US Army companies normally have anywhere from twelve to twenty of these, with the tactical SOP, plans SOP, command post SOP, and maintenance SOP at the forefront. Others might include the arms rooms, safety, supply, communications, medical, barracks, and motor pool SOPs. Unit SOPs are inspected at least annually, with some, like a maintenance SOP, reaching hundreds of pages in length. The unrealistic volume of documents to update, inspect, and reference quickly inundates and overwhelms company leaders and simply dilutes the effectiveness that SOPs are supposed to provide.
Annual Training and Leader Certification Programs
The current suite of annual training requirements fosters an ethically ambiguous environment where people are tempted to forge certificates of completion or skip through online training on mute. The value of various required trainings is debatable, but few directly contribute to more ready formations or better warfighting. That does not mean there is no place for them; but it does mean that they are in competition for time with activities that do directly improve warfighting. Recurrent training and certification programs include the Threat Awareness and Reporting Program; antiterrorism courses; survival, evasion resistance, and escape education; ISOPREP (isolated personnel report) training; courses on cyber awareness and network acceptable use policy; training on how to safeguard personally identifiable information; leaders safety courses; classes on the Family Advocacy Program; the Azimuth Check (formerly the Global Assessment Tool); Digital Training Management System leader certification; personnel readiness training; installation People First programs; MEDPROS (Medical Protection System) courses for leaders; equal opportunity training; and courses on SHARP (sexual harassment/assault response and prevention programs. That is not an exhaustive list.
In-house leader academy and certification programs are prevalent across the Army at the battalion and brigade echelons, usually in the form of squad leader, platoon sergeant, platoon leader, executive officer, and command team certifications. Army installations host consolidated courses for company and battalion executive officers with an even bigger emphasis placed on the pre-command course for incoming company commanders and first sergeants. There is laudable intent behind internal leader certification programs to prepare incoming leaders for their positions through information dissemination and program familiarization. The return on in-house leader academies and certification programs can be high, especially when there are high levels of chain of command engagement and group reviews of current events and Army initiatives. Regardless, these events still fill slots on training calendars, pull company leaders away from their companies, and may not always lead to better warfighting.
Other Required Administrative Actions
On top of these additional duties, reports, policies, procedures, training requirements, and certification programs, there are the many daily company administrative functions and responsibilities. These range from adjudicating personnel actions like awards to completing evaluations, and from counseling and leave processing to conducting professional development events, physical fitness testing, and height and weight measurement. Company leaders must initiate bars to reenlistment, manage UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) actions, update signature cards, and ensure medical readiness compliance. They must help soldiers access and navigate career skills and transition assistance programs, Substance Use Disorder Clinical Care programs, and family care plans. They are responsible for personnel flags, high-risk reviews, and health and welfare inspections. They play a role in awarding Army good conduct medals as well as promotions and reenlistments, and they facilitate motorcycle counseling and privately owned weapon validation and approvals. Additional commander responsibilities include reviewing training plans, creating and briefing operations orders, conducting commander’s inquiries, adjudicating legal action, attending higher-echelon events like professional development sessions and hail and farewell gatherings, maintaining property accountability through cyclic inventories and reconciliation, and making slide updates for company, battalion, and brigade meetings. Little wonder, then, that company commanders might end up primarily concerned with garrison administrative operations over warfighting.
The Source of So Many Administrative Requirements
The sheer number of additional duties, reporting requirements, policies, and administrative procedures comes as the result of fragmenting and bureaucratizing company functions in an effort to reduce risk and institutionalize consistency and redundancy at echelon. Individual staff sections and Army-wide installation and program managers likely have little awareness of the other company priorities, lines of effort, and training requirements, and may be quick to add more requirements and inspections. Many required additional duties—like master fitness trainer, master driver, master resiliency trainer, master marksmanship trainer, retention officer, dispatching delegate, fuel handler, and unit movement officer—are, in reality, components of organic duties already held by company junior leaders. Other duties seek to assign personnel to absorb the administrative burden of Army-wide systems of record, like Digital Training Management System operator, Defense Travel System operator, Global Combat Support System–Army operator, Army Records Information Management System manager, and publications officer. By formally institutionalizing these lines of effort, it builds consistency across the Army’s vast formation, but at the expense of adding inspections, creating continuity binders, and sometimes even hiring and maintaining installation civilian program managers. Of course, we need to understand the potential repercussions of cutting additional duties—what happen, for instance, if each company did not have a voting assistance officer, a repair and utilities representative, a motorcycle mentor, a morale, welfare, and recreation coordinator, a fire marshal, a container control officer, or a credentialing assistance officer. But the reality is that if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.
Who Cares
During a recent leader professional development event for company commanders in my brigade, we reviewed an executive summary of the April 2024 Joint General Officer Forum. During the event, General Randy George, the Army chief of staff, reiterated the Army’s number one priority of warfighting, stating that retaining this focus would require a shift away from a culture of bureaucracy and toward a culture of continuous innovation. He stated that there is interplay between leadership and risk-taking. Each additional duty, policy, report, and SOP is a response to a previously identified issue, so it is going to require strong leaders who are willing to take risk to reduce the redundant and unnecessary requirements currently distracting companies from warfighting. As General George stated at the forum, “We won’t change things without being very knowledgeable about them.” Leaders at echelon will need to understand the full volume of what is being asked of companies before they can direct change, and not just what is listed in a battalion weekly tasking order, but everything demanded from the Army, installation programs, and other external entities.
Current Efforts
Lieutenant General Sean Bernabe, the commanding general of III Armored Corps, has taken note of the expectations being placed on company leaders and has looked at ways to revamp the Fort Cavazos company commander and first sergeant course to realign company priorities and reduce administrative requirements. Reducing required duties and requirements is difficult, as it increases risk. You cannot simply stop performing certain tasks, especially if they are tied to other unit lines of effort, if they are bureaucratically convoluted, or if they are connected to unit or leader metrics of success and performance. The chief of staff of the Army could tell a company commander to stop inputting data into the Army’s Digital Training Management System if it doesn’t help the company improve warfighting, but if that commander’s battalion and brigade uses it to track training completion and assess training schedule compliance, it’s going to stay.
In September 2023, inspectors from the US Army Forces Command Inspector General conducted a follow-up inspection of companies and battalions within the command. Their investigation spanned nine installations, including more than one hundred companies from forty-six battalions across twenty-six brigades. The objective of the inspection was to identify primary sources of schedule disruption and inefficiency and to assess leader engagement at echelon to implement directives and initiatives from their higher headquarters. Among its top findings, the inspection concluded that poor staff work and lacking communication between echelons caused commanders to fail to provide the predictable training environments outlined in Army Regulation 350-1, Army Training and Leader Development and Field Manual 7.0, Training. They found that company leaders stayed at work hours after releasing soldiers to complete administrative tasks, and that the unpredictability at battalion and below echelons was regularly the result of taskings being published well inside the doctrinal timelines. Even small tasks can tie up key leaders and equipment. The inspection found that companies sometimes receive taskings within an hour of execution, and even after directed suspense timelines. It recommended additional inspections, but what it did not do was identify programs and lines of effort that distract units from their priority warfighting missions and pull them away from complying with their training plans and calendars, nor did it identify redundant Army programs to cut or offer recommendations to reduce or eliminate any Army directives or initiatives.
Bottom Line
If the Army wants to modernize and focus on improving our warfighting capabilities, the bureaucracy must be reduced in the form of cutbacks on administrative and clerical requirements and responsibilities at the company level. The service must also seek to reduce Army-wide directives, initiatives, and programs. We cannot ignore the time and material resources that excessive administrative requirements impose, but we can reduce their impact through changing requirements at higher echelons and through selective focus and leader and manager competencies at lower echelons. Ultimately, since information requirements are directed from the higher headquarters, any course corrections or systemic changes realistically can only occur from the top down.
Time is a limited resource, and warfighting has been placed on the backburner behind the deluge of required company administrative actions, trainings, and programs. The Army as a whole would benefit if senior leaders recognized the breadth of company functions and scope of required tasks being demanded of company leaders and decided when, where, and how to reduce them. The Army is right to place warfighting back at the forefront of its priorities. But this can only be achieved by meaningfully cutting back on current administrative priorities from all Army entities.
Captain Brent Stout recently completed his assignment as the commander of the 104th Engineer Construction Company at Fort Cavazos, Texas. He earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the US Military Academy at West Point and a master’s degree in engineering management from Missouri University of Science and Technology. Captain Stout is currently enrolled in advanced civil studies at Texas A&M for nuclear engineering followed by an assignment teaching in the Department of Physics and Nuclear Engineering at West Point beginning in the fall of 2026.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Capt. Tobias Cukale, US Army
Great article. Some things have not really changed from when I was a Battery Cdr–a long time ago. We had the same set of questions and feedback to FORSCOM, III Corps etc. Even with improvements in information/knowledge management we are still printing off documents and creating the standard, ubiquitous white binder. Yet, for a Company Commander/1SG in the peacetime Army- the administrative carries more risk than anything else you do. How can we better use the tools we have to eliminate redundancy in our administrative matters? How much really needs to be done by Company level leaders? How much can ONLY be done my Company level leaders?
Proverbial problem, has always existed. And will do so to the extent commanding officers at all levels let it be so.
Staffs exist to shield the operators. Perhaps they need to do staff work and let commanders command.