Senior enlisted advisors from various Indo-Asia-Pacific region militaries participated in the second annual senior enlisted leaders forum here May 24 in conjunction with the fourth annual Land Power in the Pacific Symposium, known as LANPAC.
LANPAC is a three-day professional development forum sponsored by the Association of the U.S. Army’s Institute of Land Warfare.
The senior enlisted leaders forum, hosted by Command Sgt. Maj. Bryant Lambert, U.S. Army Pacific’s senior enlisted advisor, was a day of panel discussions. Nearly 300 noncommissioned officers ranging from junior sergeants to a special attendee, retired Sgt. Maj. of the Army Kenneth O. Preston, filled the room.
Professional Development
“At the heart of the LANPAC symposium, and specifically the senior enlisted leaders’ forum, you see it’s all about professional development,” said Preston, director of noncommissioned officers and soldier programs for AUSA. “We have experience coming in from all around the Pacific Rim. This combined environment creates a sharing of knowledge. It helps us to become better overall. It creates new ideas and fosters innovation. It allows us to improve on where we are now and where we think we want to go in the future.”
The experienced senior noncommissioned officers on the panel, who provide advice to general officers throughout the United States and the Indo-Asia-Pacific region, brought their unique combined country perspective and a joint aspect to topics from the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines. The panelists covered partnership and working relationships between multinational forces, gender integration and women in the armed forces, and the institutional concept of change.
The forum presented an opportunity for NCOs to come together and learn from one another, as well as learn from the most successful senior NCOs across the region.
“In this type of combined environment, we’re learning from each other,” Lambert said. “We’re building relationships before anything escalates so that we already have an understanding of each other’s capabilities, limitations and strengths.”
Empowering NCOs
Lambert noted that some of the nations in the region have a small number of officers, so it is essential that they empower their NCOs to take the lead as they were trained to do.
“We are assisting in developing our partner nations’ armies’ NCO corps in their professionalization, accommodating and utilizing their noncommissioned officers,” he said. “We all are here to learn from one another and learn from each other’s best practices. The senior enlisted leaders forum is a great opportunity to develop our noncommissioned officers in a capacity to help them learn to flourish in austere environments, deal with uncertainty, and adapt to change or complexity based on the decades of experiences of our panel members.”
Lambert added that although the forum lasts only one day, the effects of strong NCOs can last for generations.