In this January 2013 interview, CPT Gates Brown, US Army, Armor discusses his deployment to Iraq as a platoon leader for the 5th Squadron, 573d Calvary Regiment in 2006 through 2007 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). CPT Brown talks about his missions of establishing a combat outpost in a small village to provide security and stability and then providing security for a provincial reconstruction team. He describes how they rented a home and built their outpost and talks about some of the larger cultural and societal issues he faced. He discusses some challenges he faced and shares the circumstance of being wounded. He shares a specific memory of making a connection with a little girl at the government center. CPT Brown closes his interview by stating, "Flexible, adaptable, that's the 21st Century, yeah, that's the Army doctrine publication, 3.0, that they are trying to do now. The problem though, I think, is there is still a push in the Army to make sure you correlate training with some type of future conflict and you need to go more abstract. The importance of training, at some point you need to do core competencies, yes. But, if you are going for flexible, adaptable leaders, then you need to go for abstract training ideas and not necessarily things that correlate well with things you think you're going to find in a conflict. I don't think the Army has reached that point where they are okay with an abstract training idea. If you came to someone and said, "Hey, I've got these Army folks and what I want to do is take them into a corporate headquarters and put them there for a month and let them figure out what do to." "Well, why? That has no correlation with what they are doing." "Yeah, but it would be an unfamiliar situation that they would have to adapt to." I don't think you would find buy in to that. "How does it mesh?" I still think there are folks trying to draw lines."

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