Between September 13 and 18, 2026, the 138th Regiment, Regional Training Institute ran the seventh iteration of its Adaptive Leader Development Program at Camp Atterbury, Indiana.
Twenty-six participants, ranging from team leaders to battalion commanders, trained without a script and without rank on their uniforms. Col. Nick Roukas, the founder of the program, stated in an Oct. 20 report from the National Guard Bureau that the sweet spot between chaos and order is where people learn.
The program treats ambiguity as the curriculum. Participants run through five days of outcomes-based events, ranging from foundational Soldier tasks to situational training exercises.
Roukas created the course because he was tired of seeing leadership training designed for robots rather than critical thinkers. The design relies heavily on mission command principles.
There’s no portion of a five-paragraph operations order more important than commander’s intent. — Col. Nick Roukas
The primary aim is to build formations and leaders who can find work, anticipate requirements, and operate simply off a commander’s intent and a concept sketch. The training framework manages what facilitators call the training threshold, maintaining enough friction to force learning without causing participants to shut down entirely.
Rank is stripped away during the exercises to alter team dynamics. Col. Ben Ramos, who commands the 38th Combat Aviation Brigade and took the course himself, noted that it was beneficial to see officers take a step back and let junior Soldiers lead and become the subject matter experts.
The debrief session is where the lessons ultimately take hold. Staff Sgt. Josh Ross spent four days skeptical of the methods before experiencing an epiphany two hours into the final after-action review when facilitators laid out the underlying rationale.
The program has sustained itself through a steady pipeline of returning participants who volunteer as facilitators. Command Sgt. Maj. Alex Nobbe noted that the program never skipped a year because facilitators kept showing up as volunteers out of a belief in the framework.
Meanwhile, the Nevada Army National Guard has approached readiness through large-scale operational exercises. Brig. Gen. Randy Lau, Land Component Commander of the Nevada Army National Guard, shares the foundational premise that readiness is built by introducing friction and learning from the results.
Public reporting highlighted Desert Forge 2026 as the largest and most complex Army-led exercise in Nevada in more than 25 years. The scenario involved a notional cyberattack, telecommunications outages, and an assault on a power-distribution station near Hawthorne, serving as a vehicle to test command, coordination, sustainment, and decision-making capabilities.
Lau emphasizes progress over perfection, a philosophy tested when a medical detachment of clinicians who had never performed the task relocated a battalion aid station under a simulated drone threat and conducted night triage in the field.
Both the Indiana training model and Nevada’s large-scale exercises confront the reality that homeland defense operates as a condition of continuous disruption rather than a crisis with a definitive end. While Indiana focuses on individual and small-team cognitive resilience, Nevada tests whole commands against complex, multi-domain failures.
Questions remain regarding how to scale these programs given constrained seating and resourcing. The framework outlined in Robbin F. Laird’s work suggests that short, frequent micro-drills and collaborative sensemaking across civilian and military agencies can extend these lessons beyond specialized courses.
