20 July 2010

More of a reminder

This is more a reminder to myself, and not really a proper post.  Lots of ideas and fragments; can't guarantee all of them will see fruition as fully-developed posts...

Global Assessment Tool and the Soldier Fitness Test: the U.S. Army's online mental health survey -- quantify your psychic well-being with a number between 1 and 10...your answers will determine how fucked up you are (based on some kind of algorithm), and you will be required to view some online PowerPoints and videos.  Upon completion, you will be all better.


Fort Sill historian attempts to teach us how to think by telling us what to think: when academia violently collides with a room full of reality.


FACCC Chaplain: PTSD; moral and ethical decision-making; how do leaders give their soldiers the context they need within which to frame the death of a comrade?


Mission first, people always: hard rights, easy wrongs and the Twilight Zone in between.


Taking on the Ivy League: an intellectual joust and why I hate answering the same damned questions every time I meet people at a party


U.S. Army officer/leader development: why is the system broken and WTF do we do about it?  Also: the coming leadership gap -- today's company-grade officer exodus is fucking over tomorrow's field grade leaders.


Semi-fiction: fucked up dream (9 bullets)


Book Review: The Strongest Tribe by Bing West.


New York Times: rise of the warrior class? (and hazing in today's military)


Full Spectrum Operations, Stability, Counterinsurgency and Core Competencies: when Redlegs turn blue


Killing the Myth: recent Army doctrinal/training reform did not arise from 9/11.  As evidenced by a question posed to my FACCC class, "Did 9/11 change the Army for better or for worse?"  I was shocked at how many hands went up in an attempt to link the Army's adoption of counterinsurgency as a strategy in Iraq to the events of September 11, 2001.  Same for the sudden push for the development of smart, agile and adaptive leaders at the company level.  I was shocked because the premise that these changes or reforms arose directly out of 9/11 or even the beginning of the GWOT is wrong.  The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was strictly a conventional affair.  By the fall of 2001, the Army was already in the midst of "Transformation," a key Defense buzzword.  Starting with Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki in the 1990s, the Army was moving towards a more rapidly-deployable, expeditionary force: away from the gargantuan, monolithic Army that enabled us to win the Gulf War back in 1991.  The division-centric Army trained to fight AirLand Battle (fight the Soviets at the Fulda Gap!) was transforming into the modular brigade-centric Army trained to fight across the full spectrum of operations...

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