It seems that LAR officers are picked out of volunteers now. During my day, you had very little say in the matter and Lts found out who was going to LAR after they started IOC. I think picking from volunteers is good. The job is a difficult one, and it used to grate on my nerves to hear junior Lts complain that they wished they were a straight-leg.
Upon completion of IOC, one of two things has been happening lately. The first route is that you will check into your LAR Bn and then push on to the schoolhouse for 6 weeks of instruction in the LAV Ldr's Crse. A decent synopsis is found here:
http://www.cpp.usmc.mil/schools/soi/new/lav/lavhistory.htm
The second path is that a Lt will check in to his Bn, and spend some time getting snapped in while he waits to go to the 6-week course. He may not be assigned as a platoon commander, but put in the S-3 shop so he doesn't muck up the Bn XO's slate.
Regardless of the route to the schoolhouse, you are always under observation. Ours in a very small community, and the Director of the school will be more than happy to brief your Bn XO that you are a dip****. That will impact heavily on your first posting.
The greatest challenge to serving as an LAR officer is establishing a balance between attending to the training of your scouts, as well the training needs of the crewmen who operate the vehicles. On top of that, you need to know enough to be dangerous in the area of maintenance, as your platoon will have maintenance representatives who need to interface with the company maintenance section to keep your four vehicles running. You are responsible for supervising their work, especially on the admin side to enure the rigth parts are on order and the services are being conducted.
You'll be responsible for four LAV-25 variants and crews, for a total of 10x 0313s and 1x 0369 if the platoon is at full strength. A scout team is generally accepted as somewhere between 2-3 scouts for each vehicle, as I have never seen a full complement of four 0311s per vehicle. That's just as well, because you also need to make a boatspace for at least one 8404 corpsman and one 2147 maintainer. Nowadays there are the contract linguists, forward observers, radio operators, etc. that find themselves attached to the platoon, so it gets tight pretty quick. At any given time, several of the Marines in the platoon will be away at a school, which is a reality. Support every effort to get your guys to the appropriate school or additional training.
I can only speak for 3d LAR, but the care and feeding of the scouts was a strange beast. Not only do you have 0311 standards to train to, you also need to ensure they are strong in 0351, 0321, and some 8541 tasks. 3d LAR operates from a strictly conventional mindset, because it only sends platoons to the 31st MEU, not West Coast MEU(SOCs). Each company also has a standing weapons platoon, which differed from 1st and 2nd LAR (at least as of 2003), which aggregate anti-tank and mortar variants in a weapons company. 3d LAR trains to fight as a battalion (and has the space to do it often at 29 Palms), and typically runs several Bn-level exercises annually. OIF rotations have impacted that, but for two years running, it has participated as a BLUFOR unit at NTC, and not in the Mojave Viper program. Some companies a had heavy focus on offensive vehicle employment with scouts in a local security role. Others worked scouts more in the fashion that the Army does with its RSTA squadrons. In fact, a considerable amount of LAR doctrine and TTPs comes pretty much right out of Army FMs for Cav and Recce troops/squadrons.
Company commanders will typically set the tone for all things training, to include whether the scouts will train en masse under a single head scout/instructor, or train at the smaller unit level within the platoon. Optempo has lately driven most of the training, so as much as you want to spend time with your scouts perfecting call-for-fire, there may not be white space on the training schedule to do so. You will work from a METL, and from that the supporting tasks and standards should be laid out as your roadmap.
The weekly routine will typically consist of PT at least three times a week when in garrison, to include humps if that falls within your company or Bn cmdr's concept of fitness. Don't expect to hike your platoon on your own. Mondays on the 3d LAR ramp typically consisted of vehicle maintenance for all hands, and prep for the field. Tuesday-Friday were field training days, and were often a mix of maneuver and live-fire training. Due to the nature of the 25mm chaingun, there is a discreet gunnery program that is run annually, with the final result desired that all LAV-25 crews are qualified on Table XII. Gunnery does take its toll, and most Marines from the company are employed as road guards and other support elements. It is possible to conduct training for other MOS's during gunnery, but it typically requires support from Bn because the company's officers and SNCOs will be going through the qualification gauntlet.
The only reason to be in garrison was usually because of a need for classroom instruction, mandatory training, or because there were too many vehicles on the deadline report and the companies simply couldn't lift themselves to the field. Lean on the ISMT and AGTS training systems if you can schedule them. They have their uses when employed properly.
Two personalities will factor into your success as a platoon commander, and they are the Bn Weapons Officer and Co Master Gunner. The Weapons Officer is a "Gunner", and the guru for all things grunt. Pick his brain, but don't be a nuisance. You may have to deal with him directly because your scouts get sucked into a Bn-level training package that the Gunner runs. The Co Master Gunner is typically a Sgt or SSgt, and is responsible to the Co cmdr for running the gunnery program and qualifying all crews. Depending on his worth, he'll interface with plt cmdrs and plt sgts to ensure crews are ready to run through live-fire training. Suck the knowledge from his brain and learn how to operate, troubleshoot, and maintain the chaingun like it was your personal weapon. A sharp and respected Lt is the guy who takes the time to read the doctrinal pubs, but also understands the TMs and smaller turret handbooks like the back of his hand. If you simply to sit back and react to the training, you'll struggle through gunnery and never be able to really understand the strengths and weaknesses of your crews. The same thing goes for being ****-hot with communications. You may have independent access to HF, VHF (PRC-148), and UHF (PSC-5 "satcom")radio sets, and you have to be a duty expert in the gear, not just sound smooth on the net. It is also good to make sure that (if training time is constrained) you have a handful of scouts who know the comm gear as well as you do. if not better.
You'll be coming into a command full of combat veterans, and the IOC instructors will give you plenty of guidance on how to reconcile what you learned in the course against the unit SOPs and combat experiences. The basics that applied when I checked in to 1/5 still hold true today though. Ensure that your junior leaders are properly trained and allow them to conduct training while you monitor and provide rudder steer as appropriate. Evaluate your unit training constantly, and if you're proficient in a task, move on to the more important, or more challenging, ones. The best thing you can do for yourself in this endeavour is understanding the Systems Approach to Training within the larger concept of Unit Training Management. If you get to the home stretch of OC and still don't know what this is all about, you need to raise your hand.
As for ground intel guys getting platoon commander time, the 0203s who were assigned to 3d LAR during my tour were given the opportunity to serve as a Plt cmdr as well as either the S-2 or S-2A. Note that they may not get the benefit of the LAV Ldr's Crse though, because they come to the battalion from a different pipeline. In fact, our new S-2A went into Iraq planning on doing strictly 02 work, and after a couple of months on the ground, found himself serving as a line platoon commander due to an unforeseeable shift in personnel. It happens, so if you are a ground intel guy and get posted to an LAR Bn, do the extra work and bone up on what your 03 brothers are doing.
More will probably come to me later, but hopefully this is a basic start for those of you contemplating the 0303 billet.
EDITED TO ADD: The capability of the LAV platform to move fast on good roads comes at a cost. You're not moving at a 3.5 mph movement to contact rate of march, and it is difficult to recover from mistakes made when you're hauling ass. As a case in point, navigation errors could result in a missed turn that isn't noticed until the unit is several klicks down the road, and turning a platoon around can be difficult.
You also have to really understand terrain association, on top of having really good basic land nav skills. The LAR community deals with map sheets by the dozen, as well as JOG-AIR maps usually used by aviators. I noticed a trend among LAR Lts who could navigate and those who couldn't. Those who had difficulty had to use a GPS as a crutch, and they spent too much time with their face in the display. They then have to deal with the sensory input from the GPS, the input from what they see on the map, and what they see with their eyeballs. Too much stuff going on when you're moving at 80 kph. The guys who trusted their skills were able to maintain an outward focus and resolve friction quicker.
