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From: Army Junior Officer X
Date: 06 Jun 2001
Time: 14:12:07
I see a lot of blame for the current woes in the Army being blamed on “senior leadership”. Frankly, the longer I am in the Army, the more I see that in many cases this blame is wrongly placed. The single biggest problem with the Army today is that we don’t follow the orders of our superiors. It sounds crazy, but let me give you a few examples.
CSA Shinseki has mandated that every soldier (100% of your unit) WILL attend Sergeant’s time one day a week for five continuous hours. Yet, this simply does not occur in units. Staff officers complain loudly about taking away their soldiers and leaving them without anyone to assist them in completing complex powerpoint presentations. Other, non-METL training is allowed to occur to satisfy a myriad of requirements that have nothing to do with the unit’s wartime mission.
CSA Shinseki said as recently as May 28th of this year that commanders need to cut back and even eliminate weekend training to avoid “burning our youngsters at both ends”. My unit just spent a weekend in the field and we have another weekend in the field scheduled. We have been to NTC once already this year and we are going again in the near future.
Our Corps commander has directed that every non-essential person (i.e. everyone but staff duty) will be released at 1500 on Thursdays to spend time with family. I routinely see our soldiers working into family time to support requirements that arise largely due to lack of planning on the behalf of battalion and below leadership. An example would be an S-3 realizing at 1430 on Thursday that the quarterly training brief to the Brigade Commander was going to occur the next day and that he had not taken any steps to prepare the briefing room. So, the S-3 disobeys the directive of the Corps Commander and has his soldiers working into family time. That Officer should have come in at 4:00am and prepared the room himself, or stood in front of the Brigade Commander and said “Sorry the room isn’t prepared, but I failed to plan and I wasn’t going to intrude on my soldier’s family time to cover my lack of preparedness.”
We have a standing policy that training schedules will be locked in three weeks out. Yet we routinely accept no-notice taskings and no-notice missions, training, meetings, etc. that undermine the predictability of our soldiers’ lives. Furthermore, the negative training that this gives our soldiers is cause for great concern. We have a new generation of soldiers that have never properly planned or executed a training event. They have become so proficient at executing at the last minute that they don’t even bother to plan. They know that planning is not worth the effort because whatever they plan will be inevitably changed at the last minute by micro-managing leadership.
We continually justify blatant disregard for the orders of our superiors under the guise that the tasks we are performing are critical and necessary “just this once.” Well, in my experience “just this once” has turned into the status quo. My soldiers call the orderly room EVERY NIGHT wanting to know what time formation is tomorrow, even though the training schedule is clearly posted in all their areas. I am afraid to tell them to look on the training schedule for fear of reinforcing their perception that leadership is out of touch with the common soldier’s reality.
I could go on and on, but I think you can see the point. Despite the constant assaults on our “senior leadership”, I think they have some pretty good ideas. I am not suggesting that they are without fault, but to place all the blame on them when leaders at the battalion and below are failing to comply with orders intended to improve the moral and training of our troops. The senior leadership needs to follow through with “zero tolerance” policies. Subordinate units commanders need to have the confidence that the chain of command will back them up when they question taskings and missions that violate established policies. Imagine the improvements in training, readiness and morale that would accompany such a change.