ARMY PEOPLE FIRST

Army senior leaders stood up the People First Task Force to aggressively address the results of the FHIRC report and drive transformational change to ensure an Army-wide culture of dignity and respect. The task force has developed multiple plans to combat sexual harassment, sexual assault, violent crimes and other harmful behaviors that exist in our ranks across the Army.

As part of our redesign of the SHARP program the Army launched the fusion directorate pilots this past April at Fort Riley, Kansas; Fort Sill, Oklahoma; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Irwin, California; Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland; Schofield Barracks, Hawaii; and a virtual pilot established with the 99th Readiness Division at Fort Dix, New Jersey. These multi-disciplinary sexual harassment and assault fusion directorates offer an alternate reporting capability and coordinated medical, investigative, legal and support services that remain independent of the immediate command while increasing accountability, transparency and efficiency to maximize efforts and ensure timely, comprehensive, compassionate response to victims.

III Corps at Fort Hood established the People First Center as a centralized training facility to train our units to be cohesive teams and provide resources and information for sexual assault and harassment prevention and response, family advocacy, equal opportunity, resilience training, substance abuse, suicide awareness and spiritual readiness.

The Army is reforming military justice through structural changes which include establishment of an independent Office of Special Trial Counsel which reports directly to the Secretary of the Army. The Army published an execution order to facilitate the standup of the OSTC which details a phased approach to staff, train and equip the office across the enterprise.

We restructured Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) separating it from the Office of the Provost Marshal General and appointing a new civilian director for the organization that reports directly to the Secretary of the Army. We increased the number of civilians across the Army by over 600 to better balance our force and increase tenured civilian investigative leadership, continuity and experience.

The Army recognized a need to update the response to a Soldier reported as missing. As a result, the Army established protocols for Soldiers who fail to report to their appointed place of duty, specifically highlighting the critical first 24 hours and ensuring robust response at the unit and military police levels. The directive increases the sense of urgency of these cases by establishing a strict set of timelines and actions assigned to stakeholders including leadership, law enforcement and public affairs.

The Army is employing teams of experienced leaders and subject matter experts to conduct organizational climate assessments and provide commanders at brigade and below an assessment of their unit’s trust and cohesion. To date, we have deployed eight Cohesion Assessment Teams (CATs) to eight different installations and they have identified issues for our units to address from culture and climate, how to build better teams and how to address processes like training schedules or providing more predictability for Soldiers.