Officer Candidate School (U.S. Army) - Overview

Overview

OCS is a rigorous 12-week course designed to train, assess, evaluate, and develop second lieutenants for the U.S. Army's sixteen basic branches. It is the only commissioning source that can be responsive to the U.S. Army's changing personnel requirements due to its short length, compared to other commissioning programs and their requirements. Completing OCS is one of several ways of becoming a U.S. Army commissioned officer. The other methods are:

• Graduation from United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point
• Completing Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC)
• State-level Officer Candidate Schools programmed by the Army National Guard at Regional Training Institutes (RTI), with curriculum identical to the federal OCS program.
• Direct Commissioning normally is used for accessions of chaplains, medical professionals, and Judge Advocate General (JAG) lawyers. Currently, the U.S. Army Reserve is using this method in limited numbers for the basic branches as well.
• Interservice transfer as a commissioned officer of another United States military branch.
• Battlefield commissions, or meritorious commissions, though technically still provided for, have not been used by the US Army since the Vietnam War.

The U.S. Army Officer Candidate School is organizationally designated as 3rd Battalion, 11th Infantry Regiment, 199th Infantry Brigade. It was redesignated from the 3rd Battalion, 11th Infantry Regiment in June 2007. It is a subordinate unit of the Maneuver Center of Excellence (MCoE) also headquartered at Ft. Benning. As of July 2012 the battalion has four training companies and a Headquarters Company in operation, designated HHC, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Echo—each of which can conduct one class at a time, with a maximum of 160 candidates being trained in each class.

The commander of the 3rd Battalion, 11th Infantry Regiment (OCS), 199th Infantry Brigade is Lieutenant Colonel John A. Best and the Command Sergeant Major is Brian Severino.