- The Army's inefficient, wasting people's time and taxpayers' money.
- (1) In/out processing takes too long.
- (2) Multiple daily formations that waste time.
- (4) The PCS-ing-in-2-months guy who won't do anything
- (5) The 18-year-man who won't do anything
- (6) Warrant officers who don't do anything
- (7) Department of Defense civilians who don't do anything
- (10) Unapologetic, late leaders
- (11) PowerPoint communication -- the way form trumps function for even trivial decisions
- (12) Officers as mere office administrators, not leaders
- (13) Equal opportunity classes as mere CYA for higher-ups
- (19) Mandatory online training without enough computers to do it
- (20) Lack of "high density" training. Army time is not like the commercials -- 95% is completely un-fun.
- (21) The 4 mile run in 36 minutes requirement -- is exercise really about physical fitness, Esprit de corps, or leaders' ego trips?
- (23) USR and other digital systems. They're meant to gain visibility on subordinate units' deployment capabilities, but seem to be huge wastes of time and aren't used during deployments
- (25) UCMJ sucks up so much time. Let civilian law enforcement deal with problems.
- (27) Meetings, meetings, meetings (and the need to be 15 minutes early while the leader is 15 minutes late)
- (28) Cutthroat officer competition rather than cooperation
- (31) Safety stand downs that brief well but affect nothing
- (32) The 24/7 mentality
- (33) Basic issue items and the need for accountability, despite their general uselessness
- (37) Lack of time to become professional. "The Army is all about preaching the term professional soldier. But if on average you never do a job for more than two years how professional can you ever be?"
- (40) Crazy OPSEC is systems. You've got a bunch of different systems to communicate with different nations and players, but it leads to more time needed just to communicate. (Meanwhile, soldiers know more than officers because they're are posting convoy movements on Facebook.) Plus, monthly USR reports are classified, but getting access to a classified system is ridiculous.
- (41) Encouraged financial irresponsibility (the perennial government budget issues)
- (42) Camouflage. Despite millions spent for the designs, "I seriously doubt whether many casualties have been inflicted or prevented recently due to lack in camouflage design."
- (43) Dog and pony shows. When generals plan visits, people have to "work late for weeks beforehand to make a huge fake impression" on the VIP and his whole entourage.
- (48) 250 mile paperwork. If you want to travel outside the 250 mile radius around your post, you have to do obscene amounts of paperwork. Some commands required this on 4-day weekends even if you didn't leave your home.
- The Army has wrong ideas of fairness
- (14) Unequal pay for single people
- (15) Appointment malingerers
- (16) Equal Opportunity - the Army observes gender privacy, but not sexuality privacy
- (17) Equal Opportunity - the Army should not have different performance standards based on gender
- (22) APFT inequality. There are different standards for different demographics. And despite all the gazillions spent to develop a new APFT, in the end it was scrapped and we kept the old one
- (26) Running fall-outs. The Army values cohesiveness, but can't enforce standards
- Arbitrary or ineffective management/human resource practices
- (3) Mass punishment. The idea is to force units to exercise peer discipline, but just pisses everyone off.
- (30) Dealing with FG officers being out of touch with reality. They lack basic management concepts of responsibility and scope of authority. ("I don't care who's responsible for it! I just want it done!")
- (35) Evaluation reports are pointless. If you're in a staff job with earlier year group peers, no matter what you do, they will get the better evaluation (being closer to their promotion board)
- (38) The fortune cookie career. Roy had an engineering degree, experience, and a letter from the Corps of Engineers saying they wanted him. Nevertheless, he was branched Transportation.
- (45) Awards inconsistency. One gets three awards just for joining these days (GWOT, ASR, & NDSM), and four for deploying to Afghanistan (OSR, ACM, NATO, and ARCOM). Deployment awards are written at the six month mark to accommodate all the revisions that are necessary. Plus, all awards require a perfect write up, but each echelon has a different writing style, and it seems no one ever publishes an SOP about what they want.
- (49) Complicated quitting. It takes a lot of time and paperwork to quit the Army. Currently, the Army says you should plan things out about two years before you would actually leave, but officers who are selected for separation or resign their commissions have only six months before they're out.
- The Army lifestyle
- (39) Living out of a suitcase. You don't have much of a social life working 60 hours a week, not including field exercises and staff duty.
- (50) Two deal breakers (Time and Duty station location). Time in the sense that the Army has no compunctions about using up your time, and frequently requires 12 hours or more of your day. Location in the sense that you have just about no choice where you will go.
- The Army has wrong priorities
- (18) SHARP. The battalion commander on his deployment stated his "CCIR" wake up criteria -- if there's indirect fire don't wake me, but wake me if there's a sexual assault allegation
- (24) Personnel quality vs. quantity. Low quality personnel became "force detractors" from the mission
- (34) inherited messes -- no one has any incentive to clean things up during their time in a position.
- (44) Army medical. You can't just take a sick day, even if your hacking cough causes you to vomit. You have to see a doctor, and specifically get a quarters profile. But doctors will more often than not give you a minor medication and tell you to check back in a week. (Motrin is a popular prescription.)
- (47) War on Terror. You can't fight an insurgency with conventional forces. (Interestingly, the Army's current presence in Afghanistan seems to be taking his advice.)
- The Army's hierarchy facilitates abuse and toxicity
- (8) Napoleon complexes
- (9) All the various leaders who can make your life miserable
- (29) Superiors undermining second lieutenants, treating it as a rite of passage rather than valuing them as future leaders.
- (36) The way seniors get moved up for messing up. Getting moved out of a job promotes career diversity and gets someone an easier job. Generals get "forced to retire."
- (46) Investigations. He did four. JAG always says, "this is your primary duty," but it never is. His worst experience involved a policy (forbidding warning shots) that was changed, but not communicated. A soldier then unknowingly violated the new policy, and was brought up on charges. Roy recommended against punitive action, which seems like a proper action, but got reprimanded by the battalion XO for not taking a harsher line. The easy criticism (from someone who doesn't leave the base) rankled him.
Monday, September 09, 2019
Review: Garrison PTSD
In this book, author Marshall Roy details 50 reasons why he left the Army. At only $2.99, the Kindle version voices all the ways the Army drives people crazy (at least at the company level), and is fun for sharing in a circle of peers.
Roy was an engineering major in an ROTC program who was branched Transportation by the "needs of the service." He had one deployment to Afghanistan, and seems to have left as a captain soon after his deployment and four-year service obligation were complete.
From the way he describes his experience, I can't say I blame him. The Army's not for everyone, especially those who strive to make things efficient, professional, and rational. Here's a summary of his points, which I've grouped into six types:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment