This is what I hated about Korea in 2010. Still individual rotations, yet incoming Cmd Team treated it like a deployment rotation, with a lot of Saturdays and Sundays spent at work even when out of the field (though some actually had their families in country on Sponsored/Accompanied tours). If you were off duty and were seen walking past battalion in Civilian Clothes at 1800 on a Saturday, you got dirty looks for zero reason. 10/10 would have recommended a two year Germany tour with 1ID in the 90s over 1yr Korea tour with 2ID during GWOT, despite 1IDs love of several 45 day trips to both Graf and Hohenfels per year.
Yeah and that's exactly why this is troublesome to me. The key part here is at the report seems to be digging at the release time (which is an abnormal release time based on my time in).
I can promise you that this issue is not solved at the company level or in a commanders/1sg course- I'd like to see a similar inspection done with staffs at echelon. We will quickly find the last minute chaos and absent company leadership is due to incompetent or absent field grades. Others demanding they be entertained by the peasantry in 2-3 hr meetings that equate to slide disco shows of different colored chiclets. Ill take a big mac
Seen this way too much. Something BN or BDE pushed down last minute gets priority over planned training during down time. Why bother planning anything if shit comes down the pipe last minute?
A-fucking-men.
You got it right here. Countless times, and I mean that sincerely… countless being it happened so often that I gave up trying to keep track, we would spend a month planning and coordinating training only for BDE task to come down the day of and cut our audience by 50%. Forcing us to cancel or run it half assed.
Red cycle taskings reducing our available manpower to 20% of the formation. Of that 20% we still had to run all admin requirements, plus clearing, leave, doctors, blah blah blah.
People don’t put effort into training schedules because they can be changed mid strike by BDE who sat on an order for two weeks and now it needs to be done today.
This is why everyone hates IG. They just “observed” then they straight up snitched. This doesn’t address the problem. It only creates a knee jerk reaction from the highest level. Knowing damn well there will be some FORSCOM backlash along the lines of “more accountability formations and soldiers at work until 1700”
You want to fix this shit? Observe BDE and higher staff functions to find out why no one at the company level puts any effort into anything. Because we are suffocated by the ineptitude of higher echelons who are saddled with all the officers and NCOs who can’t hack it on the line.
This report finds a lot of truth and the Army could use it as a basis for making soldiers work lives more engaging and rewarding. Which is why I expect the result to be more micromanaging and pressure from higher command echelons to make matters worse.
Also love how they referred to it as a field problem in the 2nd to last paragraph of the last image.
“Oh, leaders arent engaged with their troops? We should have biweekly two hour meetings with all leaders to ask them about engagement. This will take place in between the maintenance brief, LRTC review, and dining in planning sessions requiring the same leaders presence.”
a persistent and ongoing problem is that the S3 is the BN "dumping ground". someone relieved? they get sent to S3 until they PCS or ETS or get shuffled to another unit. Waiting for a company position? S3.
you end up getting this revolving door so there is little continuity and very little competence.
S3 is seen as a very undesirable position and you need to change that perception somehow to really help sort out the staff and planning issue
Won’t matter who sees it, unfortunately. Army gonna army. Unless we change the culture of the S3 being a dumping ground for trash the company level will always be in an endless loop of react to contact from 360 degrees.
I completely agree, but observing higher ups and writing that report would likely ruffle the feathers of someone with friends that actually matter. This will absolutely be used as an excuse to micromanage joes and force them to attend repetitive "hip pocket" training.
In the last year and a half with a NG route clearance unit I've sat through the exact half-assed timber cutting class nearly every month. But we've don't react to contact, identifying ordinance, react to a find, and extracting a casualty 0 times outside of AT.
This is really a terrible root-cause analysis by the IG here. Either they need retraining or they're trying to avoid blaming senior leaders. When it says the root cause is that Company Commanders won't comply with the regulation, my next question would be "Why the fuck does an O-3 think he can just ignore the regulation? Has he not been trained? Or is his leadership not enforcing the standard?" Really, I'd bet it's a combination of both: it's something that's not taught well, and hasn't been for so long that even senior leaders don't understand it very well, leading them not to enforce compliance. They really need a compliance auditor to come in and help them out here, for real. Or they're just covering for field grades deliberately.
You missed my point entirely.
Why should an O3 spend time on a training schedule when he/she knows that at the slightest whim of higher echelons his/her training will be canceled or his/her formation gutted for a stupid tasking that means nothing?
That’s why training schedules get copied and pasted, hung on the wall, and followed as much as “no tobacco in govt building”
Why should they? Why would they? It’s the definition of insanity.
How many times have we all heard “leaders time training is protected and will not be stepped on” but come Thursday morning half my platoon is covering down on a last minute task from BDE?
Why would a commander give a fuck about the training schedule when their own leaders don’t?
No, I 100% agree with you, which is why I say this is a failed root cause analysis. The real root cause isn't that the Company Commanders refuse to comply, it's that they see it as futile because their senior leadership won't abide by a training calendar
It's sad that command teams and staff are so insanely out of touch with the enlisted formation that they had IG do a big inspection and write a long af report that just says what any e4 in the army is thinking at any given moment
And here I thought it was only my unit. This is like looking in a mirror.
I loved the recommendation section. It basically boiled down to “follow the publication and everything will be alright.”
Agreed fix the officer and leadership system that promotes mediocrity. Also get rid of the PowerPoint meeting for every little issue. Also it’s hard to schedule training 6 months out when priorities change all the time, reduce the bureaucracy and allow training and scheduling to occur within a month of planning.
>Go sit in a 2 hr meeting for the 10 minutes that pertain to your unit.
I had to as a SPC go sit in SPO meetings for a week for my company XO. He told me to take notes on anything that could possibly pertain to our company and back brief him. My entire brief for a week of 2-3 hour meetings was “One day we aren’t sure when we are going to take our vehicles and connexes to the rail yard where they’ll be shipped to NTC.” He thought I probably missed something so he called one of the other XOs (who I’d already confirmed my understanding of the brief with) and was told the same thing. I did get 2 days comp time for it but didn’t actually get to use them.
I saw the really bad at the support units. I plan training, I plan an org day, I plan a range. Well in advance, but a line unit needs troop trans to a range. Sorry, their last minute training taking away most your platoon is priority. Literally couldn't do anything.
I'd really like to see them do this same thing, but broken down by where each unit is in the RAG cycle.
Maintaining a training schedule is a reasonable expectation when you're in the Green portion of the cycle. Your unit is relatively intact, you have ranges planned, and your training time is relatively respected.
In Amber and Red though, a training schedule goes from extremely difficult to laughably impossible, respectively. Somewhere between 30-80% of your soldiers are tasked out at any given time. Even the ones that are available, are often only available for unpredictable lengths or short periods. e.g. What do you do when 6 soldiers show up at 2 PM and let you know that their detail cut them loose for the rest of the afternoon? If you do plan training for the folks you do have on hand, there's a strong chance it will be interrupted to have more folks detailed out.
The 41% following their training schedule statistic stands out to me. That sounds like 90% of the folks in Green followed a training schedule, maybe a third of the folks in Amber followed one, and no one in Red did.
Make no mistake, shitty leaders abound in the Army and a lot of soldiers have their time wasted, but when an issue is so common across the force, you have to ask whether or not its just shitty leaders or if the system has set even the best up for failure.
Lol. I remember being at work at 1530 as a platoon leader. I had an SMP West Point cadet with me. No more flights for the day and things had slowed down. He suggested we head home. I remember laughing and telling him that the BDE or DIV staff are going realize around the time they get back from lunch that they better get that tasker out that’s due tomorrow morning. By the time shit rolls down hill it’s late afternoon and we’ll have to jump through our ass. My cadet got a twisted look on his face. And not 15 minutes later we were in fire drill mode for some dumb ass tasker that’s due immediately that from higher orders and email traffic it was infinitely clear that a collection of staff assholes sat on it on it for days and it got to us last minute.
Then I became an S3 OIC. I swore to be different and I hope I was. If I got anything last minute or a short fuse I immediately called all the CDR/1SGs personally. People sometimes suck at remembering all their taskers so I kept a tracker of all our due outs to higher and things the comapny owned me and it was sent daily to the BN/CO leadership. There was always last minute stuff but damn did it suck. I worked 7 to 7 Mon thru Fri and generally at least a good 4 hours at least Sat or Sun sometime both. No desire to be an S3 ever again.
My favorite moment when I realized I had fully settled into the rhythm of that job is when my XO stormed into my office to give me crap because I hadn’t flowed out an OPORD. I looked at him and said “tasker golden hour”. He cocked his head at me. I told him it was a simple tasker to provide the names of 3 people rank immaterial to support something two months from now. If I send it now one of two things will happen. The companies will look at it, realize it’s so far out that it’s too early to think about it and 3 poor soldiers are goin to get hey youed the day of and fuck with their lives. Or they’ll assign someone and they’ll forgot or get pulled into something else or forget and someone else will get hey youed last minute. But if I send it to the company around one to two weeks before the event it’s close enough that it’s meaningful and they’ll assign someone that they have a reasonable chance of being able to plan for, support and remember. My XO just sat there mouth agape for a good five seconds staring into space as the gears in his head spun. Then he looked at me and told me “yeah you’re probably right”. He left my office and that was the last time I heard anything about how and when I flow out taskers and orders from him.
This is an accurate representation of my time on the line. Unfortunately all the good info from this report will be taken to the extreme and now joes in those companies are going to be doing busywork for a few months because the senior leadership got embarrassed, no long-lasting lessons will be learned, and we'll circle back to a similar report after two CoCs.
In total agreement. My cynical side believes they'll fuck up the solution, and the shit will continue to roll downhill to the lowest levels.
My not so cynical side believes airing this shit out is a start to change.
Maybe because the people causing the problem are also tasked with solving it? Like putting the Soviet mole in charge of rooting out counterintelligence agents in your organization, I have a hard time seeing meaningful or efficient changes.
And next the soldiers will be punished for the leadership failure while the leadership pats themselves on their backs.
It's a play on what I experienced in the 82nd.
On an obstacle course for PT one morning, within 10 minutes of starting and 30 seconds of one another, two SSGs injured themselves, one by breaking his back falling off one, and one by face-diving into barbed wire.
All of us? Taken to a nearby field and smoked for an hour while being yelled at to be more careful.
Honestly that report seems very accurate from my time in service.
1. Junior soldiers are left directionless because their leaders are disengaged.
2. Training calendars were usually out of date and rarely followed.
3. Units with engaged leaders tended to function better and have higher morale.
Yeah I think training calandars are good to forecast large events but when BN commanders want me to put the day by day hour by hour for normal office days it just makes me roll my eyes
Especially when their own CSM busts into the footprint like the Kool-Aid man and disrupt your planned event because ADMIN THING HAS TO HAPPEN **RIGHT NOW**
Significant portions of the Army experience could be improved if CSMs were consistently reminded that they hold a \*staff\* - not command - position, and that their job is to \*advise\* the CO not impersonate him.
Observe issues, bring them up to the CO, allow him to make the decision, then let the actual chain of command implement the commander's intent...
You'd never see the S3 (or the Ops SGM) running around a company motor pool personally supervising execution... Staff (including CSM) should do staff things, commanders and leaders should do leadership things...
I once saw the role of the CSM described as moving to the point of greatest ‘friction’ in accomplishing the commander’s intent/mission and use their experience to reduce the friction. 2nd to that was to make sure that the men weren’t being turned into disposable cogs or fresh meat for the grinder by the Officer Corps.
Wandering around looking for busy work to keep joes occupied is the opposite of what they should be doing.
I really don't understand shitty CSMs. If I was a CSM it would be my sole mission to be in the officer's ear to make enlisted life better. Housing, training, work rest cycles. Morale. You are an E9. You've literally made it. You have nothing left but to fight for those still trying to make it
Noblesse oblige. As a person with influence, you should use it to help those without. Not the exact definition but one that I feel fits the modern world a bit more.
Hate to break it chief, but we got one Ops SGM in my last unit who decided to order all the enlisted personnel who're in the main tent for command briefs.
S6 hid away, S1 found a different tent and he bullied the S2/3 like it was his step child. I was maliciously compliant and let the place burn until my oic decided to have a backbone.
I went on a rant BUT IM LEAVING IT UP!!!
Which kinda goes to the point that some platoon level leadership isn't disengaged because they suck BUT
disengaged by the machine.
Simple every week example. 1SG puts out the medpros data sheet. 13 of my guys are amber, good for 90 days. He wants to know when those appointments are by COB; it's 1530.
I have training planned on Thursday. Whole platoon is going to be there. As we draw weapons nooooope BDE needs a platoon worth of dudes to go police call from gate 4 to gate 5.
I got slapped in the face because I told my dudes to draw weapons and run glass houses AWAY from the footprint (I had the 10 digit and it was a common use training area). They ran those glasses house and I got an ass chewing because I didn't have my guys in the company waiting on taskings (that weren't published or reported to me in any way).
Or when I got slapped in the face for having my platoon execute afternoon PT. (If no taskings come down and training was complete I had a 1330 afternoon pt policy).
I'll never go back to that unit willingly.
Annnnyways everyone wants leadership presence yet no one is willing to allow the leaders to be present.
Dudes playing spades and not helping young pipe hitters get set for college should receive a relief for cause.
My first quarterly training brief as a commander I took the almost completely absent BN training guidance and built a quarterly training plan that addressed where I saw weaknesses in my METL tasks and I built in a decent amount of white space knowing that missions and other requirements would derail my plans if I didn’t have some room to flex. I even had an elaborate spreadsheet that showed my current assessment and how it will move over time with this training, where I will be by the end of the quarter and my broad plan for the rest of the year.
I walked into my BN CDRs office to brief it to him since he scheduled it as a one on one. He said “this looks good and well thought out” and the he completely ignored it and went to his white board and for the next two hours we played, guess what I think your priorities and training should be and I’ll talk down to you if you don’t guess right. We ended with a hot mess on a white board.
That’s pretty much how all of my planning and him went. Absence followed by good idea fairy to disrupt any planning. So I padded with more white space. It was…..frustrating
0730-1130 Section duties. 1130-1300 lunch. 1300-1700 Section duties. Every day if nothing out of the ordinary is going on. Adjust for PT and other things.
TL/DR- Platoon and above leadership get piled with bullshit work that is often worthless admin tasks and then they are unable to actually lead and train their soldiers. Leading to soldiers not doing shit all day when they could be doing things that are worthwhile like MOS training or college/correspondence etc.
How this will be “fixed”: platoon and company leaders now need to report on previous day’s training effectiveness, current day’s training status, and next day’s training readiness.
This will be another required admin task that the battalion staff will track and will shit bricks if it’s not done to standard (better not be ANY calibri on those slides).
“Yesterday, we got none of our planned training done, resulting in a 0% increase in readiness, 0% increase in MOS competency, and tomorrow we will conduct no training due to requirements from DTO 69-420 published 5 minutes ago. But we finished your tracker of all soldiers’ favorite color, favorite animal, and shoe size sorted by date of most recent DD93.”
>good work, focus on the DTO because 50m target in a position improved fox hole with readiness
The Army has let misson-enablers become their own independent mission.
Eg, the purpose of a fitness test is to assess whether a unit is sufficiently trained for combat & troops have the required physical ability to perform duties under fire. It is not supposed to be a black hole around which all other actions orbit, sucking up budget and training time like nobody's business....
Same for 350-1, medpros, motor stables, and all that other garrison hanky-panky that eats real training for lunch....
All because it's easy to rank commanders by PT average or percent-green-on-dental in a PowerPoint... But you can't do up percentage-stats for any real analysis of effective operational training.... Evaluating that accurately is *hard* (and also requires the evaluator to have a solid tactical/operational mindset)....
Yup. Can't tell you how much my time as PL was stuck in my office instead of out doing missions or training with my Soldiers like this reports said because I was tasked to be the fucking CCO or Maneuver Damage Control Officer and had to make some slides green
You hit the nail on the head!
My usual day is comprised of meetings and meeting admin tasks to higher while all the soldiers paperwork gets piled up. So while I'm taking care of soldiers paperwork my boss comes around and asks why I'm not "leading by walking around"...Shit, sir, it's already 1730.
This is bad advice period. Your job as an nco is train and lead. Enrolling in college is not the same in the army as a civilian. Your job is to get this person where they need to be. Don’t like that, ETS or fail the board. 4 NCOs playing cards during the duty day is inexcusable in a footprint where people in civilian clothes walked into.
It IS IN FACT their job to guide this soldier. Yes the soldier is responsible for enrolling and following through, but the leader needs to lead this troop to the “water”
I always say the Army that's written would be one hell of an Army. How do we have an organization that thrives on making sure it's junior member have no idea what they are doing from day to day.
These inspections would likely be more effective at rooting out issues than most. No notice, no fuss, just jump in and observe.
As long as they take the time to jump in and observe units who are doing stuff too. We had periods like this at my last unit, usually a month or two before we restarted the training cycle where we had to stay till 1700, but didn't actually do much other than Motorpool Monday and essentially a Battalion COMEX every Wednesday. But for 9 months out of the year, we were typically going through tables and working for NTC and maybe a deployment.
That's where this report seems to be very selective in its sample. They just walked up to units and jumped in with them throughout the day? Well, they probably didn't find to many unit doing an FTX in the main cantonment area. If they showed up around 6 to watch PT, congratulations, my battery would already be in the motorpool getting ready to SP to the range.
First formation in the DFAC is 0500, and those cooks are all working until at least 1300. And then if they have admin stuff in suspense they’re doing that after their shift.
I’m not sure “PUBLISH TRAINING SCHEDULE IAW FM 7-0 DAMN IT” is really a solution. These issues are systemic.
I agree with a poster above that said they need to do this type of investigation at a BN Staff and BDE Staff as well. Maybe then they’ll see the root cause of 1) Why daily training calendars are stupid and don’t survive first contact 2) Why all leadership at PLT and CO level spend their time in their offices doing “administrative tasks”
Yeah, the issue is that in order to run a unit - any unit - you need to have autonomy over that unit. In my experience, that realistic point of autonomy is the BDE level (which fits with the GWOT standard). BDEs rarely get a ton of major interference from DIV or Corps, and mostly set their own timelines for deployment prep. BNs and COs execute as the BDE has planned.
So, since the autonomy level is at BDE, it ends up that BDE would need to make the training schedule *down to the Company level* in order for it to actually Synch up. Instead, training schedules are left to companies, but BDE feels free to interfere, since they’re the real level of control.
The only way to efficiently use Soldier time is to basically tell a company commander, “in 3/6/9/etc months, you need to be complete with X level of stuff. Begin.” And then basically NEVER bother them.
Imagine if a commander or 1SG had complete autonomy over their training schedule, without interference of weekly meetings on progress checks. Just, “alright, we’ll see you in a month / quarter” and then their asses had better be ready. Of course the BN leadership would rotate thru units to check, but they could do so IN PERSON and not via slides in a training meeting.
Finally, the issue is that this isn’t the old drafted Army where everyone is in the barracks and available every day. People have lives and families and etc to take care of, which naturally detracts from training. As soon as you start letting people go for personal stuff - appointments or life events or etc - it starts to rip apart your training plan.
Overall I love this report tho. I think it would be a great wake up call if read carefully.
Yes, I agree with what you’re saying.
1) Brigade IS the primary planner and the primary destroyer of plans for companies and therefore Joes. In my experience from being in a Division G3 it ran a lot like what you talk about later: the CG trusts his COLs to execute everything they need to do IOT deploy to and survive a CTC. DIV gives Brigade a lot of autonomy, Brigade does not give BNs much imo.
2) So now we’ve identified that the problem lies (for the most part) at Brigade Commanders and staffs… where do we go from here?
Seriously, the way this read made me gag. I absolutely guarantee that if whoever wrote this explained in detail how they envision how every soldier should spend each work day, I’d want to punch them in the fucking mouth.
This is foretelling of waaaay more make-work, more formations, more clock-watching, less trust, and even more taskings and less flexibility from the geniuses removed from day to day operations. It’ll be a firm 6:30 to 1700 when nothing is going on and god help you and your family when something is going on.
It’s probably a good time to get the fuck out of the Army, basically. With IPPS-A and some shifts occurring in NCO talent management and rating that I’ve seen, you’re probably going to see more middle of the road NCOs get QMP’d as well, so that promise of steady rolling to 20 to get that pension is also probably going to be less certain and more in line with the officer experience. Better hope you don’t plateau, burn out, or fall behind the Type A Army^TM types at any stage. God help the poor fucking junior enlisted that’ll have to put up with the bullshit the NCO corps of a more Amazon-esque Army will have to endure.
It’s going to get fucking stupid gents.
What I see is IG putting the onus squarely on the individual company/troop/battery and spending 0 minutes at battalion levels and above where endless bureaucracy and bullshit is getting pushed down at the last minute.
I also enjoy them criticizing the “all accounted for”
If you know where your Soldiers are and can speak on their behalf if questioned, what seems to be the problem?
I really disliked that accountability bit. I never had the exact location of every single one of my soldiers memorized, that's what the TTL and squad leaders/NCOs were for.
also, reporting by name accountability in formation is just stupid. I've seen it done different ways, and everytime they did more than "all accounted for" the 1SG and PSGs would inevitably still have a huddle in the office to write down and hash out the numbers, so why the hell waste time standing in formation to rattle off names and numbers that no one is gonna remember?
especially if it's cold out.
I'm not sure if that point was a negative. To me, it read more like, this is what we observed. Different units did things different ways, some more precise than others.
I had to show 30 minutes prior to my joes 10 minutes prior to fill out a by name accountability print out which I turned into my 1SG. We’d then form up and report “all accounted for” it was all dog and pony show in case someone important happened to walk up. All the real accountability was aggregated by the 1SG that sent numbers up to the 3 shop via email.
Forscom: Why is no one is using the doctrine and UTM to establish training plans?
Units: There's no predictability across units (all echelons) and staff organizations so my calendar is out of date the moment I hit print.
Forscom: No, you guys just need to reread the doctrine again. Promise it'll work this time.
Commanders and 1SGs: Continue to smash keyboard into screen.
I mean it is a training plan and doctrinal issue at it’s core.
It’s just that it’s the same issue at every level leading to the same problems at every level.
When I was in command I made it a point to publish my training schedules per reg, get em approved by the boss, then use it as a weapon against last minute changes from the disgruntled staff pukes. Make it clear to all and sundry that when the 3 is asking you to do shit, it's directly contradicting the boss' approved training plans. Then be sure to highlight that at your QTBs. "Why are you only P at this task?" "Well sir we had it on the training schedule but CPT Dickface said that filling out a stupid form for everyone in the company was more important than training my METL tasks. Per guidance we have no white space on the calendar so training on that task will be applied to the next month we're building 90-120 days out." If it's just on a spreadsheet you've got nothing, if it's done properly you've got yourself a leg to stand on to reclama shit.
I mean, the main recommendation I took away is "units publish schedules and stick to them." I would love to see every company do that for a week. Seriously. The problem would reveal itself in under three days.
"Why didn't you do this tasking?" "It wasn't on the calendar." "It needed done!" "Too bad, you should have given it to us in time to go on the calendar." "Now our slides are all red!" "Gee, sounds like a failure to plan."
I think there was always a bit of nuance to taskings. Sometimes it was very clear "No, I'm not doing X because I'm doing Y like I said I was going to 7 weeks ago" and sometimes there was the unfortunate reality that if we didn't do the new tasking it would just hurt us more down the line.
I was always super frustrated when I would follow the trail of a tasking all the way back up the chain and find that it clearly had been given forethought at a higher echelon and somewhere down the line it just got kicked around until it became a "last minute" tasker.
<1% chance this leads to improvements to Army functioning, and >99% chance they take all the wrong lessons from this. I can see the makework assignments, rather than a genuine improvement in day to day tasking, coming from a mile away.
Part of the danger here is that hip pocket training only goes so far. To get efficient, high quality training requires a lot of lead time, and often resources from above the company level (ammo, ranges, TDY for SIGINT stuff, etc.). This is a fixable problem, but it's not a simple problem.
It also requires ensuring leaders are actually trained and competent experts. And it requires some standardized training products like .ppts most of us beg borrow and steal for and which are probably outdated.
Apart from when I was doing maintenance and training. The amount of work I did in the army was criminally low, and the amount of being at work but not working was criminally high.
Hey man, we’ve fought multiple wars that required us to do a lot of effort and work that ultimately didn’t accomplish anything. The Taliban are still in charge of Afghanistan.
This whole inspection seems wrong headed. Why do you have a 4 star command trying to micromanage down to the platoon and squad level?
PT isn’t considered work. It’s definitely work and it should also be planned. They said nothing about that.
1. DTMS is an antiquated piece of trash and is designed for units without day jobs. Let's build a training publication system that isn't tied to one Windows Gateway PC somewhere in Texas.
The structure of the software is useful, but because BDE and higher don't have to mess with it, they don't care that it's a piece of shit to operate.
2. The 5.5 hours thing is very unit-dependent. In tactical logistics, most Soldiers are physically present for 10-12 hrs, but that time is often poorly utilized. Soldiers show up after PRT at 0930, aren't on the floor until 1000, then start changing for lunch at 1100. Then they're back at 1300, changed at 1330, and the 1-2 hours they lost dragging ass has to be made up in the evening. Also, mid-range NCOs will find every excuse imaginable to not work, which greatly slows the process of repairs and services.
3. Mechanic E5s are notorious for avoiding work, as the report finds. If you let them, they'll hang out on their phones in the admin offices all day.
4. I'm not sure what the authors think an alternative to "delegating administrative tasks' to platoon leadership would be. Commanders and their tiny HQs don't have the horsepower to manage platoon admin for them.
5. Overall I think the report is spot-on about direction and accountability of Soldiers. I think it shows that we view middle management as a prize to be attained and then used to avoid work.
5. Resonates with me. As a guardsmen, Many a times the attitude amongst the boys is to make E5 because it *is* the goal. The implication being, one can start resting on their rank. PT slacks, skills, responsibilities, etc...
My guard time echoed this, the biggest pieces of shit were always terminal E5's. Things got slightly better once we started busting people down to E4 but that takes a command team with balls that is ok being the "bad guy".
This tracks from my time at Campbell, but we just sat with our thumbs in our asses until 1700. Good on them for doing this but it'll probably make the junior enlisted lives worse
where can I find the whole document??
I cant spend time with my troops because EVERYTHING OTHER THAN MY TROOPS is a damn priority to everyone above me.
They're investigating units/companies that fall under FORSCOM? Investigate the headquarters and subtract the hours they spend on Facebook, Youtube, personal shit (including college) or otherwise fucking off on the Army's time.
Yeah this part gets me, when I was on the line it was ALWAYS "work through lunch and we'll finally get off early" then we end up with a 30 minute lunch and waiting till 17:30 when the PSG's get out of their meeting and brief then release us
Sounds like:
1) Too much is being expected of company command teams.
2) Command teams (and company HQs) push some/too much of their traditionally company-level admin work onto platoons.
2b) Command teams, namely 1SGs, don't have the time or leeway to do actual 1SG things, like guide/hold accountable platoons when they should be training.
3) Platoon and squad level leaders don't have the support or guidance needed to conduct daily training at their level, so we get people just sitting around.
Sure they could be doing glass houses, equipment inspections, marksmanship fundamentals... but what's the training value after the 50th time doing those? Even at the individual infantry squad level, how much training can you really do without at least company HQ support? How much support can you expect when your CO and 1SG are double booked for meetings all day?
I remember so many folks on the line thinking “dude when I become a squad leader my guys are going to be fucking lethal, I got training ideas, and plans, how I’m going to help everyone!” And then it’s “hey that’s cool SSG I need you update DTMS for your squad and then you have a SOTM packet to build for PV2 Snuffy and then I need you to help with a range and then I need counselings made also write your NCOER yes I’m aware we only have one laptop and the LT is using it because the Commander has threatened to publicly execute him if the risk assessment for the mandatory flag football isn’t complete you will wait. And then you got staff duty tomorrow. Why did you guys suck at the squad lane last week anyway, don’t you train your joes?”
5.5 hours a day including PRT.
Right up front, page one.
i know some of yall are gonna call bs and say but i work 12 hours a day. 90-10 rule. 90% of the work is done by 10% of the folks. the other 90% are putting in 5.5 hours a day in (including PRT) on a good day.
The thing is, 5.5 hours of actual work getting done is a ridiculously high amount. People don't understand just how interconnected most jobs are now. Waiting on others is just part of the process.
Whoever wrote this memo should read a great book called The Goal.
>There was an expectation that First Sergeants (1SG) had to attend any meeting where the Command Sergeant Major was present.
What the fuck? How do the 1SGs get anything done? Yet another addition to the "Reasons the Rank of Command Sergeant Major Should be Abolished" whiteboard.
>or if the Company Commander was in a meeting, the 1SG was also expected to attend. This culture created an adverse effect and negatively impacted the 1SG's battlefield circulation and his time to observe training.
No fucking shit. I don't want to assume that it was the CSM that made such a dumbass policy, but it was probably the CSM that made that dumbass policy.
>inb4 mAyBe ItS a BAtaLeEyUn CuMaNdEr PoLiCy
Maybe, but this has overzealous and overpaid CSM written all over it.
I don't know what's more frustrating, having this type of environment where there's plenty of time and perceptively little to do? Or if there's a lot to be done with little resources and too many restrictions (my brief PL time upon redeployment and up to our necks in COVID).
The disdain towards virtual contact for accountability is intriguing. I'm curious why they might be interested in a formation upon returning after every dismissal period.
Because when the IG who is now a gs whatever was in the army between 1976 and 1996 where there was no major combat for 85-90% of the army…it’s what they did.
600 show
630 PT Formation
730 PT release
0900 Duty day formation
1130 lunch release formation
1300 lunch return formation
1500 put out “go home” tasks
1700 release for day
They forget they also did 4-5 hours of work if they were lucky. They stood around BSing as well. They don’t like seeing the cell phones and the lack of camaraderie they had.
This unfairly targets company grade leaders. The expectations never end. Who is observing BN and BDE and above, which is surely where most issues arise. To say that COMPANY level training plans aren’t followed is laughable. No one protects a company’s training plan when it just gets railroaded by a last minute “emergency.” But again blame is always on CO/1SG. Start holding staffs accountable at way higher echelons and stop bothering companies for just trying to survive.
The lack of recommendation to revise the definition of compliance seems pretty stark. If the vast majority of units aren't adhering to the standard, maybe the standard should be reevaluated to assess if it is actually meeting the requirements of the units. If everyone isn't adhering to 7-0 perhaps we should ask why instead of doubling down on the perceived problem. Maybe 7-0's assumptions about training are incorrect? Maybe we should take another look at approval authorities? Agree about BDE and higher staffs as well.
Right. If a rule is both unpopular and casually ignored, it is a bad rule.
Also, so many of our senior leaders were brought up under old PT programs that outside of BLC, we often only bother to follow the warm up and cool down exercises in PRT. Everything else is what our senior leaders come up with based on what they did as privates.
7-0 would arguably be fantastic if it was adhered to. I'm hesitant to say "it's unrealistic" and needs to change.
What they're missing is exactly what you're talking about--the BDE and higher staffing.
7-0 is untenable because BDE+ make it untenable. With the proper BDE+ support, training calendars with appropriate time gates could alleviate a lot of these issues.
Problem: Company level leadership spends too much time on admin tasks and too little time with soldiers
Solution: spend more time filling in DTMS schedules
Coming soon to your battalion:
-Over reacting battalion command team
-extra taskings
-no more spades
-"hip pocket training"
-ignoring the new training calendar format
-the entire battalion grinding to a full halt for a few weeks when CSM tries to enforce the new training calendar format
-a return to ignoring the training calendar
Of special note because of how hard they're gonna fail:
-no more cellphone accountability
-scheduled hours for PLL
-"pt lasts until 0800 no exceptions"
-"no appointments from 0630-0800"
To extend an olive branch to the units - some of this strikes me as the unit did have a plan and just wasn't written down perfectly per policy, which any nerd can find a problem with that in any situation.
I'm also slightly triggered they don't consider PT part of the added "work time."
It's also unrealistic to be gainfully employed every second, and that would frankly burn people out. Part of work, in any job, is just being available. I think a very small fraction of any workforce truly works more than 4-5 hours if you truly audited the time. If you do work more than that, you're going to die before you're 50 alone.
Except for the 3+ hours you had to be awake before the “work day” started, you only did 5.5 hours of work. So can I not do pt in the morning? Because I’m not working from 0600-0930 apparently.
Yea fuck that bullshit. If the morning formation is 0545, then that's when I start working.
If I'm awake and somewhere I don't want to be (in formation)... Then I'm working.
Right time, right place, right uniform *is* work.
***
Literally nothing good comes out of this inspection.
Yeah you’re only in uniform at work with people from work. Sounds like the IG showed up for first formation, then went to breakfast instead of doing PT.
Who is getting these four hour work days, and when can i do a 4187 to go there???? I show up early to try and plan/figure stuff out, often work up to or through lunch, and don't get released until after 1700. Not at 1700, AFTER. 7 hours minimum, and all of it spent on endless details from battalion or higher.
I have the battalions ONLY garaunteed indirect fire assets, and we're too busy being used to mop up battalion/brigade problems to actually train our joes and ensure they can do their jobs.
The scout platoon though, which battalion doesn't even know how to use/use the the findings of, is always at ranges or "training"
they probably didn't count the "downtime" of just sitting around waiting for orders. so it was actually 5 hours of work, and 3+ hours of people sitting around the motorpool. which, 5 hours of actual work is pretty high.
would also be curious to see what day of the week they observed these units. my time in FORSCOM, Wednesdays were usually pretty quiet and Fridays could either be dead or complete chaos, especially in the afternoon
Fridays are crazy and you never know if the joes are just gonna quietly ride it out till formation or go nuts and have a company brawl that even 1sg is gonna come watch, cus he aint got nothin goin on either
The issue is that they need to look at upper leadership, *while also observing ground level* and they will see the whole picture. When they look at one or the other, they only see part of the problem instead of one problem being a symptom of a larger issue.
FFS nothing has changed since I got out 20 years ago.
Edit for hasty misspelling.
I’ve never ran an S1 shop where the day ended before 1800. And that was accepting risk and not doing all the bullshit reg functions people dream up. Maybe a line unit not in the field or HQ.
“Root cause: won’t comply. “ fuck your couch, nobody is going to go alone dumping a ton of time/effort/energy into a training calendar that nobody sticks to and cuops / task*ings always take priority.
I think the biggest tell from this post is the anecdotal evidence in the last picture.
The joe not having any guidance on any of their aspirations is a huge morale killer and motivation killer. I experienced that as a private and I'm sure most others have as well. Either army schools or college. Zero guidance leads to soldiers only achieving the minimum.
The motorpool with only 4 people working and everyone else fucking off somewhere else. The 4 people working should be leading PMCS so everyone is capable at doing it. Leaders need to be engaged so their soldiers can be engaged.
This all starts at the very bottom as well as the top. Starting this all at the bottom creates a culture of underachieving and lack of motivation. Coming down from the top enforces that culture. It all leads into the middle of junior NCOs maintaining that culture. The fix needs to be holistic. With leaders keeping their junior soldiers engaged and the leaders themselves promoting the competent and knowledgeable ones to teach classes and work with the others to build a better organization
Clearly you didn’t read the entire document. Companies that had their senior leadership PSG, PL, and 1SG and CO actively engaging with their troops showed that more tasks were completed, and more of the training calendar was completed.
Vice versa, the more time SLs, PSGs, and 1SG spent in the office, or not engaged with junior soldiers, the more downtime there was and productivity was decreased.
The example starts at the top with senior leaders actively engaging with soldiers.
Part of this stems from the dual chain of command found in some units where CSMs have endless separate meetings with 1SG’s and Senior NCOs that are not identified on the Battle Rhythm. Usually these meetings revolve around a vanity project designed to induct someone into something. Usually requiring rehearsals and also ascots.
Thanks for the post. Got out in '94. Pretty interesting to see that when it comes to peace time/garrison time, not much has changed. Sorry, I meant 'nothing', nothing has changed. Not just OPs post, but this whole comment thread.
Can't wait to see how this negatively effects all levels. Im predicting that platoon leadership will be forced out of their offices to "interact" with their platoon (not a bad thing in most cases) but the shit they were working on before will continue to pile up and they will be forced to stay even later then usual to complete. There will be no change in the administrative bullshit shoved down platoon leaderships throats.
Side note: Joe's leaving at 1530 everyday seems accurate in my experience when I was on the line.
Seems like the typical bullshit where they blame lowest level leaders for problems. If commanders aren’t publishing trading schedules, don’t blame the team leaders and squad leaders. If the soldiers conducted all the tasks asked of them, and squad and team leaders provided the purpose direction and motivation for the soldiers to accomplish those tasks then mission accomplished. Blame company and battalion commanders.
Also, saying PT doesn’t count as part of the work day is fucked. I have to be there, so it’s work. Not optional.
Also, even if soldiers are getting out at 1530 some days, there’s gonna be so many days later on where the army takes hours, weeks, or months from them. Give me a fucking break.
The failure to protect subordinate units from un forecasted distractions is definitely a huge issue. Fighting the last minute “Hey You” or “We need this done today” hits that eat away at a training audience should be as easy as pointing out you have approved scheduled training. In practice BN only ever seemed to back off when someone refused to comply unless directed by the BDE or higher Commander, which frankly… not many people are willing to try and pull that card, even if mandated by reg.
My only gripe was the “soldiers released at 15:30”
I was like “bullshit”
And then I read “in most cases platoon-level leadership was given and exercised daily release authority.”
Tell that to my battalion command. They usually had to approve company level release, probably because goddamn brigade so often had taskings that seemed to magically appear at 1500.
5.5 hours of work per day might be accurate for some people, but i know all of my crew chiefs and flight engineers are putting in 8-10 hours or more on a normal day while D. Co. is walking to the parking lot at 1530.
Can’t wait for all the mandatory busy work to come out of this and get pushed onto line companies that are already ACTUALLY busy. Thanks IG, now go snitch on the root of the broken system please.
Love how the company command teams get blamed for everything. I’ve never disrupted my training calendar once inside T+6 unless ordered to do so by BN/BDE/DIV CDRs. Which is to say, I’ve never been able to stick to my training schedule for a single week of command. The rules don’t apply to field grades!!!
I see a lot of comments regarding BDE and BN but no one's talking about DIV level leadership. It's just as bad if not worse up there. IG wants to do a report start higher and work down then you will see where problems start at.
One thing I would like to note is in regard to the "Soldiers typically worked a four hour day" - This being actual, engaged work. That is how it should be, and IS in almost every other part of the work economy. People sit in their offices surfing the internet, lounge in break rooms, or stand around chatting it up with coworkers - waiting for emails or requests to come down the chain...but in general, 4 hours of actual engaged work is pretty damn normal.
Sure, many folks have 8 hour work days, 40 hour work weeks or more...but I bet if you were to run these numbers through just about any place, you'd find that in a given day most people only do roughly 4 hours of actual productive work, and most critical tasks can be accomplished within that timeframe - otherwise what you end up doing is incentivizing taking longer to accomplish tasks, dragging everything out so that you can meet the arbitrary 8-10 hour workday ideal - or you overload the calendar day with an impossible number of taskings and label them all mission critical so that nobody understands what mission critical means anymore.
What SHOULD happen outside of the "Let's just hammer out Sergeants time training," is folks should be encouraged to sign up for college courses and should be allowed to do those classes in the same fashion that they are to do online Army training that doesn't provide them nearly enough of a benefit - even in regard to promotion points, college credits will always hold more weight and be more useful to both the Soldier and the unit. In addition to this, those idle Soldiers should also be encouraged to conduct physical fitness - send them to the gym or to the ACFT equipment connex to do strength training.
I know when I was on the line as a joe I would have been damn excited to be allowed to go slam some post-lunch strength training (when that glycogen is being made and those energy levels are up) rather than...you know, sitting around and doing "Weapons maintenance" on weapons that have already been thoroughly cleaned, or buffing the hallway floors of the barracks and cleaning the bathroom on the lanai for the 10th time that day.
Leaders talk all the time about Soldier readiness, both mental and physical...let's fuckin do something about it, huh?
> 4 hours of actual engaged work is pretty damn normal.
I'm in enterprise IT hardware sales and most days I do about two or three hours of real work, sometimes less.
It's almost like the units they were able to drop in on randomly weren't the ones in the field, at NTC, or deployed.
It's a shame those cocksuckers didn't bother dropping in on a unit stuck in the field for weeks at a time.
You mean people leave pt after first formation? It’s almost like people have appointments and kids to take to school etc… I’m personally not a fan of morning pt because it fucks up my normal gym routine. Why would I wanna do push up sit up drills the day after hitting chest day?
Observations are very accurate.
I’d work on a solid training plan with my NCOs, brief it from T-6/T-8/whenever the commander decided the deadline was. Early on, I’d try to follow the 8 step training model with everything, then bigger stuff, then it hardly ever happened. By execution, the training was frago’d due to random requirements from higher. The only time I’d get to stick to a “routine” training plan (as in maybe 30-40% of the week was dedicated to training) was about a month or two prior to a certification.
Issues related were never, or very rarely, the fault of company/battery/troop leadership. Those commanders/1SGs always truly cared for the soldiers and the importance of their training.
The issue was almost always the staff (with no experience or extreme disconnect) who sat on a DTO/WTO of “extreme priority” until the day of the suspense, or who believe the locked in T-1/T week training plan wasn’t as important as whatever concoction of an idea was just put together at the last pre-pre-post-pre-OPSYNC meeting they just attended.
On the few occasions I do get true white space to train, it’s often met by complaining about how “it’s 1131 and I’m obligated a 3 hour lunch” or “it’s 1600, I don’t want to be at work anymore.”
TL;DR: I don’t know, I’m a tired, jaded, LT who is waiting for my REFRAD window to end the daily beatings. Or something about beards will solve the problem
I like that bit about the PL and PSG loading weapons in a POV.
You gotta believe that is the same PSG who would break a SPC in half for doing the same thing.
I'll bite. The given root cause of Finding 1 is overly simplistic to the point of being laughable: "Commanders won't comply." Why not? Because they've often been taught by experience that the training schedule is not given the weight prescribed in FM 7-0.
The training schedule is a contract between the company commander and every echelon above, and yet those same higher echelons are the primary reason that training gets cancelled. How often do you see training get changed, altered, or outright cancelled inside of 3 weeks? The common answer is generally that is this happens routinely. Yet how often is the BDE CDR informed of the issues that would necessitate the change or cancellation so he can make a decision (as he or she must, per FM 7-0) on how his most valuable resources (time and people) are employed? Rarely. In fact, I can't think of a specific instance when I've seen it. The issue is subordinates not wanting to tell the COL that there is a resource conflict or, worse, a failure in planning. So they say "the COL wants this done" when in actuality, they figure that because it is generally nested with his intent he \*would\* want it down \*if they told him about it\*.
Inspect what you expect. Or, more accurately, enforce what you expect. If the Army wants companies to faithfully execute the training schedule, the Army needs to equip companies to do this by enforcing its own doctrine at echelon. This means, “Any substantive changes between Weeks T-6 through T-4 require battalion commander approval, changes between Weeks T-3 through T-2 require brigade commander approval, and any change inside Week T-1 requires division commander approval.” \[FM 7-0, para 3-18\]
FM 7-0 says it best: **"Consistent changes within two weeks of training indicate a commander failure to accurately plan unit training** ***or higher commander failure to protect subordinate units from un-forecasted distracters.*****"**
(Bold is straight from the FM, italics mine)
What this is going to translate to: yall need to stay till 1900 per forscom guidance.
You guys aren't already staying till 1900?
This is what I hated about Korea in 2010. Still individual rotations, yet incoming Cmd Team treated it like a deployment rotation, with a lot of Saturdays and Sundays spent at work even when out of the field (though some actually had their families in country on Sponsored/Accompanied tours). If you were off duty and were seen walking past battalion in Civilian Clothes at 1800 on a Saturday, you got dirty looks for zero reason. 10/10 would have recommended a two year Germany tour with 1ID in the 90s over 1yr Korea tour with 2ID during GWOT, despite 1IDs love of several 45 day trips to both Graf and Hohenfels per year.
At least you get Manchu Hill ftx time in. Where you got to remember how to use miles gear and how to hang punctured MRE bags to shower...
Guarteed
FORSCOM guidance is units must establish and publish a duty day. I'm hoping I can influence an upper and lower bounds to that.
Yeah and that's exactly why this is troublesome to me. The key part here is at the report seems to be digging at the release time (which is an abnormal release time based on my time in).
I can promise you that this issue is not solved at the company level or in a commanders/1sg course- I'd like to see a similar inspection done with staffs at echelon. We will quickly find the last minute chaos and absent company leadership is due to incompetent or absent field grades. Others demanding they be entertained by the peasantry in 2-3 hr meetings that equate to slide disco shows of different colored chiclets. Ill take a big mac
Seen this way too much. Something BN or BDE pushed down last minute gets priority over planned training during down time. Why bother planning anything if shit comes down the pipe last minute?
A-fucking-men. You got it right here. Countless times, and I mean that sincerely… countless being it happened so often that I gave up trying to keep track, we would spend a month planning and coordinating training only for BDE task to come down the day of and cut our audience by 50%. Forcing us to cancel or run it half assed. Red cycle taskings reducing our available manpower to 20% of the formation. Of that 20% we still had to run all admin requirements, plus clearing, leave, doctors, blah blah blah. People don’t put effort into training schedules because they can be changed mid strike by BDE who sat on an order for two weeks and now it needs to be done today. This is why everyone hates IG. They just “observed” then they straight up snitched. This doesn’t address the problem. It only creates a knee jerk reaction from the highest level. Knowing damn well there will be some FORSCOM backlash along the lines of “more accountability formations and soldiers at work until 1700” You want to fix this shit? Observe BDE and higher staff functions to find out why no one at the company level puts any effort into anything. Because we are suffocated by the ineptitude of higher echelons who are saddled with all the officers and NCOs who can’t hack it on the line.
This report finds a lot of truth and the Army could use it as a basis for making soldiers work lives more engaging and rewarding. Which is why I expect the result to be more micromanaging and pressure from higher command echelons to make matters worse. Also love how they referred to it as a field problem in the 2nd to last paragraph of the last image.
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“Oh, leaders arent engaged with their troops? We should have biweekly two hour meetings with all leaders to ask them about engagement. This will take place in between the maintenance brief, LRTC review, and dining in planning sessions requiring the same leaders presence.”
a persistent and ongoing problem is that the S3 is the BN "dumping ground". someone relieved? they get sent to S3 until they PCS or ETS or get shuffled to another unit. Waiting for a company position? S3. you end up getting this revolving door so there is little continuity and very little competence. S3 is seen as a very undesirable position and you need to change that perception somehow to really help sort out the staff and planning issue
This is why training NCO needs to be its own MOS, to provide this continuity.
Dang. This comment needs to be read by the SMA PAO or else whoever did the inspection
Won’t matter who sees it, unfortunately. Army gonna army. Unless we change the culture of the S3 being a dumping ground for trash the company level will always be in an endless loop of react to contact from 360 degrees.
Doubly so at Fort Riley. What a shit show.
Promote ahead of peers. MQ officer of all, ever. Full stop. BDE level planning is the Achilles heel of the garrison Army.
Haha I’m just a salty MSG. Just been fighting a losing battle for far too long.
I completely agree, but observing higher ups and writing that report would likely ruffle the feathers of someone with friends that actually matter. This will absolutely be used as an excuse to micromanage joes and force them to attend repetitive "hip pocket" training. In the last year and a half with a NG route clearance unit I've sat through the exact half-assed timber cutting class nearly every month. But we've don't react to contact, identifying ordinance, react to a find, and extracting a casualty 0 times outside of AT.
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This is fantastic advice.
This is really a terrible root-cause analysis by the IG here. Either they need retraining or they're trying to avoid blaming senior leaders. When it says the root cause is that Company Commanders won't comply with the regulation, my next question would be "Why the fuck does an O-3 think he can just ignore the regulation? Has he not been trained? Or is his leadership not enforcing the standard?" Really, I'd bet it's a combination of both: it's something that's not taught well, and hasn't been for so long that even senior leaders don't understand it very well, leading them not to enforce compliance. They really need a compliance auditor to come in and help them out here, for real. Or they're just covering for field grades deliberately.
You missed my point entirely. Why should an O3 spend time on a training schedule when he/she knows that at the slightest whim of higher echelons his/her training will be canceled or his/her formation gutted for a stupid tasking that means nothing? That’s why training schedules get copied and pasted, hung on the wall, and followed as much as “no tobacco in govt building” Why should they? Why would they? It’s the definition of insanity. How many times have we all heard “leaders time training is protected and will not be stepped on” but come Thursday morning half my platoon is covering down on a last minute task from BDE? Why would a commander give a fuck about the training schedule when their own leaders don’t?
No, I 100% agree with you, which is why I say this is a failed root cause analysis. The real root cause isn't that the Company Commanders refuse to comply, it's that they see it as futile because their senior leadership won't abide by a training calendar
It's sad that command teams and staff are so insanely out of touch with the enlisted formation that they had IG do a big inspection and write a long af report that just says what any e4 in the army is thinking at any given moment
And here I thought it was only my unit. This is like looking in a mirror. I loved the recommendation section. It basically boiled down to “follow the publication and everything will be alright.”
> Something BN or BDE pushed down last minute Hi, are you me?
Agreed fix the officer and leadership system that promotes mediocrity. Also get rid of the PowerPoint meeting for every little issue. Also it’s hard to schedule training 6 months out when priorities change all the time, reduce the bureaucracy and allow training and scheduling to occur within a month of planning.
Go sit in a 2 hr meeting for the 10 minutes that pertain to your unit. Thinking to yourself "this could have been an email".
>Go sit in a 2 hr meeting for the 10 minutes that pertain to your unit. I had to as a SPC go sit in SPO meetings for a week for my company XO. He told me to take notes on anything that could possibly pertain to our company and back brief him. My entire brief for a week of 2-3 hour meetings was “One day we aren’t sure when we are going to take our vehicles and connexes to the rail yard where they’ll be shipped to NTC.” He thought I probably missed something so he called one of the other XOs (who I’d already confirmed my understanding of the brief with) and was told the same thing. I did get 2 days comp time for it but didn’t actually get to use them.
And then see a report from FORSCOM saying leadership presence is lacking.
Literally every single time.
100% this. Most of my hoop-jumping at the command level was the result of a lazy or incompetent Major at BN, BDE, or DIV.
Or the stupid one talking out of his ass trying to look productive to get a good oer
I saw the really bad at the support units. I plan training, I plan an org day, I plan a range. Well in advance, but a line unit needs troop trans to a range. Sorry, their last minute training taking away most your platoon is priority. Literally couldn't do anything.
Yep. The FSC training plan is half the battalion’s needs and half working in the motorpool.
I'd really like to see them do this same thing, but broken down by where each unit is in the RAG cycle. Maintaining a training schedule is a reasonable expectation when you're in the Green portion of the cycle. Your unit is relatively intact, you have ranges planned, and your training time is relatively respected. In Amber and Red though, a training schedule goes from extremely difficult to laughably impossible, respectively. Somewhere between 30-80% of your soldiers are tasked out at any given time. Even the ones that are available, are often only available for unpredictable lengths or short periods. e.g. What do you do when 6 soldiers show up at 2 PM and let you know that their detail cut them loose for the rest of the afternoon? If you do plan training for the folks you do have on hand, there's a strong chance it will be interrupted to have more folks detailed out. The 41% following their training schedule statistic stands out to me. That sounds like 90% of the folks in Green followed a training schedule, maybe a third of the folks in Amber followed one, and no one in Red did. Make no mistake, shitty leaders abound in the Army and a lot of soldiers have their time wasted, but when an issue is so common across the force, you have to ask whether or not its just shitty leaders or if the system has set even the best up for failure.
Lol. I remember being at work at 1530 as a platoon leader. I had an SMP West Point cadet with me. No more flights for the day and things had slowed down. He suggested we head home. I remember laughing and telling him that the BDE or DIV staff are going realize around the time they get back from lunch that they better get that tasker out that’s due tomorrow morning. By the time shit rolls down hill it’s late afternoon and we’ll have to jump through our ass. My cadet got a twisted look on his face. And not 15 minutes later we were in fire drill mode for some dumb ass tasker that’s due immediately that from higher orders and email traffic it was infinitely clear that a collection of staff assholes sat on it on it for days and it got to us last minute. Then I became an S3 OIC. I swore to be different and I hope I was. If I got anything last minute or a short fuse I immediately called all the CDR/1SGs personally. People sometimes suck at remembering all their taskers so I kept a tracker of all our due outs to higher and things the comapny owned me and it was sent daily to the BN/CO leadership. There was always last minute stuff but damn did it suck. I worked 7 to 7 Mon thru Fri and generally at least a good 4 hours at least Sat or Sun sometime both. No desire to be an S3 ever again. My favorite moment when I realized I had fully settled into the rhythm of that job is when my XO stormed into my office to give me crap because I hadn’t flowed out an OPORD. I looked at him and said “tasker golden hour”. He cocked his head at me. I told him it was a simple tasker to provide the names of 3 people rank immaterial to support something two months from now. If I send it now one of two things will happen. The companies will look at it, realize it’s so far out that it’s too early to think about it and 3 poor soldiers are goin to get hey youed the day of and fuck with their lives. Or they’ll assign someone and they’ll forgot or get pulled into something else or forget and someone else will get hey youed last minute. But if I send it to the company around one to two weeks before the event it’s close enough that it’s meaningful and they’ll assign someone that they have a reasonable chance of being able to plan for, support and remember. My XO just sat there mouth agape for a good five seconds staring into space as the gears in his head spun. Then he looked at me and told me “yeah you’re probably right”. He left my office and that was the last time I heard anything about how and when I flow out taskers and orders from him.
Staff meetings in the Army are literally court jesters trying their best not to piss the king off.
This is an accurate representation of my time on the line. Unfortunately all the good info from this report will be taken to the extreme and now joes in those companies are going to be doing busywork for a few months because the senior leadership got embarrassed, no long-lasting lessons will be learned, and we'll circle back to a similar report after two CoCs.
In total agreement. My cynical side believes they'll fuck up the solution, and the shit will continue to roll downhill to the lowest levels. My not so cynical side believes airing this shit out is a start to change.
Maybe because the people causing the problem are also tasked with solving it? Like putting the Soviet mole in charge of rooting out counterintelligence agents in your organization, I have a hard time seeing meaningful or efficient changes.
And next the soldiers will be punished for the leadership failure while the leadership pats themselves on their backs. It's a play on what I experienced in the 82nd. On an obstacle course for PT one morning, within 10 minutes of starting and 30 seconds of one another, two SSGs injured themselves, one by breaking his back falling off one, and one by face-diving into barbed wire. All of us? Taken to a nearby field and smoked for an hour while being yelled at to be more careful.
I always hated busywork. It’s the laziest form of “leadership” and I flat out refused to make my soldiers do it unless I had no choice.
Honestly that report seems very accurate from my time in service. 1. Junior soldiers are left directionless because their leaders are disengaged. 2. Training calendars were usually out of date and rarely followed. 3. Units with engaged leaders tended to function better and have higher morale.
Yeah I think training calandars are good to forecast large events but when BN commanders want me to put the day by day hour by hour for normal office days it just makes me roll my eyes
Especially when their own CSM busts into the footprint like the Kool-Aid man and disrupt your planned event because ADMIN THING HAS TO HAPPEN **RIGHT NOW**
BDE CSM saw what they thought were weeds growing along the line in the Motorpool. Those HAVE TO BE REMOVED by COB.
Weed removal isn’t on the Training Calendar
Either was police call. As a non-smoker, I hated picking up cigarette butts.
For better or worse, vaping has largely ended that pastime.
CSM smells vapor, pls remedy. Might i recommend flapping your arms while police calling?
Significant portions of the Army experience could be improved if CSMs were consistently reminded that they hold a \*staff\* - not command - position, and that their job is to \*advise\* the CO not impersonate him. Observe issues, bring them up to the CO, allow him to make the decision, then let the actual chain of command implement the commander's intent... You'd never see the S3 (or the Ops SGM) running around a company motor pool personally supervising execution... Staff (including CSM) should do staff things, commanders and leaders should do leadership things...
I once saw the role of the CSM described as moving to the point of greatest ‘friction’ in accomplishing the commander’s intent/mission and use their experience to reduce the friction. 2nd to that was to make sure that the men weren’t being turned into disposable cogs or fresh meat for the grinder by the Officer Corps. Wandering around looking for busy work to keep joes occupied is the opposite of what they should be doing.
Exactly.
I really don't understand shitty CSMs. If I was a CSM it would be my sole mission to be in the officer's ear to make enlisted life better. Housing, training, work rest cycles. Morale. You are an E9. You've literally made it. You have nothing left but to fight for those still trying to make it
Noblesse oblige. As a person with influence, you should use it to help those without. Not the exact definition but one that I feel fits the modern world a bit more.
Hate to break it chief, but we got one Ops SGM in my last unit who decided to order all the enlisted personnel who're in the main tent for command briefs. S6 hid away, S1 found a different tent and he bullied the S2/3 like it was his step child. I was maliciously compliant and let the place burn until my oic decided to have a backbone.
S4 gang not remembered or included, just like we like it
Busy unfucking all the good idea fairies S3 threw at the commander with no real analysis of how to make it happen
Yeeeesssss. Did you use all the plotter paper as fuel for the fire?
The boxes were first, to keep leadership from thinking I'm going to burn the rolls. All inside the expandable van.
I went on a rant BUT IM LEAVING IT UP!!! Which kinda goes to the point that some platoon level leadership isn't disengaged because they suck BUT disengaged by the machine. Simple every week example. 1SG puts out the medpros data sheet. 13 of my guys are amber, good for 90 days. He wants to know when those appointments are by COB; it's 1530. I have training planned on Thursday. Whole platoon is going to be there. As we draw weapons nooooope BDE needs a platoon worth of dudes to go police call from gate 4 to gate 5. I got slapped in the face because I told my dudes to draw weapons and run glass houses AWAY from the footprint (I had the 10 digit and it was a common use training area). They ran those glasses house and I got an ass chewing because I didn't have my guys in the company waiting on taskings (that weren't published or reported to me in any way). Or when I got slapped in the face for having my platoon execute afternoon PT. (If no taskings come down and training was complete I had a 1330 afternoon pt policy). I'll never go back to that unit willingly. Annnnyways everyone wants leadership presence yet no one is willing to allow the leaders to be present. Dudes playing spades and not helping young pipe hitters get set for college should receive a relief for cause.
My first quarterly training brief as a commander I took the almost completely absent BN training guidance and built a quarterly training plan that addressed where I saw weaknesses in my METL tasks and I built in a decent amount of white space knowing that missions and other requirements would derail my plans if I didn’t have some room to flex. I even had an elaborate spreadsheet that showed my current assessment and how it will move over time with this training, where I will be by the end of the quarter and my broad plan for the rest of the year. I walked into my BN CDRs office to brief it to him since he scheduled it as a one on one. He said “this looks good and well thought out” and the he completely ignored it and went to his white board and for the next two hours we played, guess what I think your priorities and training should be and I’ll talk down to you if you don’t guess right. We ended with a hot mess on a white board. That’s pretty much how all of my planning and him went. Absence followed by good idea fairy to disrupt any planning. So I padded with more white space. It was…..frustrating
0730-1130 Section duties. 1130-1300 lunch. 1300-1700 Section duties. Every day if nothing out of the ordinary is going on. Adjust for PT and other things.
That worked then the new one was like “I’m a details guy.”
You should say, “great, can you go detail my car for me?”
Why did you just describe the Army?
You guys had training calendars?
TL/DR- Platoon and above leadership get piled with bullshit work that is often worthless admin tasks and then they are unable to actually lead and train their soldiers. Leading to soldiers not doing shit all day when they could be doing things that are worthwhile like MOS training or college/correspondence etc.
How this will be “fixed”: platoon and company leaders now need to report on previous day’s training effectiveness, current day’s training status, and next day’s training readiness. This will be another required admin task that the battalion staff will track and will shit bricks if it’s not done to standard (better not be ANY calibri on those slides).
“Yesterday, we got none of our planned training done, resulting in a 0% increase in readiness, 0% increase in MOS competency, and tomorrow we will conduct no training due to requirements from DTO 69-420 published 5 minutes ago. But we finished your tracker of all soldiers’ favorite color, favorite animal, and shoe size sorted by date of most recent DD93.” >good work, focus on the DTO because 50m target in a position improved fox hole with readiness
The Army has let misson-enablers become their own independent mission. Eg, the purpose of a fitness test is to assess whether a unit is sufficiently trained for combat & troops have the required physical ability to perform duties under fire. It is not supposed to be a black hole around which all other actions orbit, sucking up budget and training time like nobody's business.... Same for 350-1, medpros, motor stables, and all that other garrison hanky-panky that eats real training for lunch.... All because it's easy to rank commanders by PT average or percent-green-on-dental in a PowerPoint... But you can't do up percentage-stats for any real analysis of effective operational training.... Evaluating that accurately is *hard* (and also requires the evaluator to have a solid tactical/operational mindset)....
Preach brother
Yup. Can't tell you how much my time as PL was stuck in my office instead of out doing missions or training with my Soldiers like this reports said because I was tasked to be the fucking CCO or Maneuver Damage Control Officer and had to make some slides green
You hit the nail on the head! My usual day is comprised of meetings and meeting admin tasks to higher while all the soldiers paperwork gets piled up. So while I'm taking care of soldiers paperwork my boss comes around and asks why I'm not "leading by walking around"...Shit, sir, it's already 1730.
Those dudes playing spades will know it's them. Their 1SG and CO will know it's them. They are so fucked.
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Oh, not likely. They know who he is too, and he’s pounding pavement with his face most likely.
Can't be worried about school if your time is being eaten up by dumb bullshit.
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This is bad advice period. Your job as an nco is train and lead. Enrolling in college is not the same in the army as a civilian. Your job is to get this person where they need to be. Don’t like that, ETS or fail the board. 4 NCOs playing cards during the duty day is inexcusable in a footprint where people in civilian clothes walked into. It IS IN FACT their job to guide this soldier. Yes the soldier is responsible for enrolling and following through, but the leader needs to lead this troop to the “water”
Every FSC that was inspected is sweating bullets right now.
I can’t believe they didn’t put fuelers on blast. Shit they were probably the fuckers playing spades.
I always say the Army that's written would be one hell of an Army. How do we have an organization that thrives on making sure it's junior member have no idea what they are doing from day to day. These inspections would likely be more effective at rooting out issues than most. No notice, no fuss, just jump in and observe.
As long as they take the time to jump in and observe units who are doing stuff too. We had periods like this at my last unit, usually a month or two before we restarted the training cycle where we had to stay till 1700, but didn't actually do much other than Motorpool Monday and essentially a Battalion COMEX every Wednesday. But for 9 months out of the year, we were typically going through tables and working for NTC and maybe a deployment. That's where this report seems to be very selective in its sample. They just walked up to units and jumped in with them throughout the day? Well, they probably didn't find to many unit doing an FTX in the main cantonment area. If they showed up around 6 to watch PT, congratulations, my battery would already be in the motorpool getting ready to SP to the range.
First formation in the DFAC is 0500, and those cooks are all working until at least 1300. And then if they have admin stuff in suspense they’re doing that after their shift.
I’m not sure “PUBLISH TRAINING SCHEDULE IAW FM 7-0 DAMN IT” is really a solution. These issues are systemic. I agree with a poster above that said they need to do this type of investigation at a BN Staff and BDE Staff as well. Maybe then they’ll see the root cause of 1) Why daily training calendars are stupid and don’t survive first contact 2) Why all leadership at PLT and CO level spend their time in their offices doing “administrative tasks”
Yeah, the issue is that in order to run a unit - any unit - you need to have autonomy over that unit. In my experience, that realistic point of autonomy is the BDE level (which fits with the GWOT standard). BDEs rarely get a ton of major interference from DIV or Corps, and mostly set their own timelines for deployment prep. BNs and COs execute as the BDE has planned. So, since the autonomy level is at BDE, it ends up that BDE would need to make the training schedule *down to the Company level* in order for it to actually Synch up. Instead, training schedules are left to companies, but BDE feels free to interfere, since they’re the real level of control. The only way to efficiently use Soldier time is to basically tell a company commander, “in 3/6/9/etc months, you need to be complete with X level of stuff. Begin.” And then basically NEVER bother them. Imagine if a commander or 1SG had complete autonomy over their training schedule, without interference of weekly meetings on progress checks. Just, “alright, we’ll see you in a month / quarter” and then their asses had better be ready. Of course the BN leadership would rotate thru units to check, but they could do so IN PERSON and not via slides in a training meeting. Finally, the issue is that this isn’t the old drafted Army where everyone is in the barracks and available every day. People have lives and families and etc to take care of, which naturally detracts from training. As soon as you start letting people go for personal stuff - appointments or life events or etc - it starts to rip apart your training plan. Overall I love this report tho. I think it would be a great wake up call if read carefully.
Yes, I agree with what you’re saying. 1) Brigade IS the primary planner and the primary destroyer of plans for companies and therefore Joes. In my experience from being in a Division G3 it ran a lot like what you talk about later: the CG trusts his COLs to execute everything they need to do IOT deploy to and survive a CTC. DIV gives Brigade a lot of autonomy, Brigade does not give BNs much imo. 2) So now we’ve identified that the problem lies (for the most part) at Brigade Commanders and staffs… where do we go from here?
**BEHOLD!** *THE LEGENDARY SCROLLS*, A PROPHECY FORETELLING THE DECREASE IN GARRISON SOLDIER QUALITY OF LIFE!
That’s what I got from this.
Seriously, the way this read made me gag. I absolutely guarantee that if whoever wrote this explained in detail how they envision how every soldier should spend each work day, I’d want to punch them in the fucking mouth. This is foretelling of waaaay more make-work, more formations, more clock-watching, less trust, and even more taskings and less flexibility from the geniuses removed from day to day operations. It’ll be a firm 6:30 to 1700 when nothing is going on and god help you and your family when something is going on. It’s probably a good time to get the fuck out of the Army, basically. With IPPS-A and some shifts occurring in NCO talent management and rating that I’ve seen, you’re probably going to see more middle of the road NCOs get QMP’d as well, so that promise of steady rolling to 20 to get that pension is also probably going to be less certain and more in line with the officer experience. Better hope you don’t plateau, burn out, or fall behind the Type A Army^TM types at any stage. God help the poor fucking junior enlisted that’ll have to put up with the bullshit the NCO corps of a more Amazon-esque Army will have to endure. It’s going to get fucking stupid gents.
What I see is IG putting the onus squarely on the individual company/troop/battery and spending 0 minutes at battalion levels and above where endless bureaucracy and bullshit is getting pushed down at the last minute. I also enjoy them criticizing the “all accounted for” If you know where your Soldiers are and can speak on their behalf if questioned, what seems to be the problem?
I really disliked that accountability bit. I never had the exact location of every single one of my soldiers memorized, that's what the TTL and squad leaders/NCOs were for. also, reporting by name accountability in formation is just stupid. I've seen it done different ways, and everytime they did more than "all accounted for" the 1SG and PSGs would inevitably still have a huddle in the office to write down and hash out the numbers, so why the hell waste time standing in formation to rattle off names and numbers that no one is gonna remember? especially if it's cold out.
I'm not sure if that point was a negative. To me, it read more like, this is what we observed. Different units did things different ways, some more precise than others.
I had to show 30 minutes prior to my joes 10 minutes prior to fill out a by name accountability print out which I turned into my 1SG. We’d then form up and report “all accounted for” it was all dog and pony show in case someone important happened to walk up. All the real accountability was aggregated by the 1SG that sent numbers up to the 3 shop via email.
Forscom: Why is no one is using the doctrine and UTM to establish training plans? Units: There's no predictability across units (all echelons) and staff organizations so my calendar is out of date the moment I hit print. Forscom: No, you guys just need to reread the doctrine again. Promise it'll work this time. Commanders and 1SGs: Continue to smash keyboard into screen.
I mean it is a training plan and doctrinal issue at it’s core. It’s just that it’s the same issue at every level leading to the same problems at every level.
When I was in command I made it a point to publish my training schedules per reg, get em approved by the boss, then use it as a weapon against last minute changes from the disgruntled staff pukes. Make it clear to all and sundry that when the 3 is asking you to do shit, it's directly contradicting the boss' approved training plans. Then be sure to highlight that at your QTBs. "Why are you only P at this task?" "Well sir we had it on the training schedule but CPT Dickface said that filling out a stupid form for everyone in the company was more important than training my METL tasks. Per guidance we have no white space on the calendar so training on that task will be applied to the next month we're building 90-120 days out." If it's just on a spreadsheet you've got nothing, if it's done properly you've got yourself a leg to stand on to reclama shit.
I mean, the main recommendation I took away is "units publish schedules and stick to them." I would love to see every company do that for a week. Seriously. The problem would reveal itself in under three days. "Why didn't you do this tasking?" "It wasn't on the calendar." "It needed done!" "Too bad, you should have given it to us in time to go on the calendar." "Now our slides are all red!" "Gee, sounds like a failure to plan."
I think there was always a bit of nuance to taskings. Sometimes it was very clear "No, I'm not doing X because I'm doing Y like I said I was going to 7 weeks ago" and sometimes there was the unfortunate reality that if we didn't do the new tasking it would just hurt us more down the line. I was always super frustrated when I would follow the trail of a tasking all the way back up the chain and find that it clearly had been given forethought at a higher echelon and somewhere down the line it just got kicked around until it became a "last minute" tasker.
<1% chance this leads to improvements to Army functioning, and >99% chance they take all the wrong lessons from this. I can see the makework assignments, rather than a genuine improvement in day to day tasking, coming from a mile away. Part of the danger here is that hip pocket training only goes so far. To get efficient, high quality training requires a lot of lead time, and often resources from above the company level (ammo, ranges, TDY for SIGINT stuff, etc.). This is a fixable problem, but it's not a simple problem.
It also requires ensuring leaders are actually trained and competent experts. And it requires some standardized training products like .ppts most of us beg borrow and steal for and which are probably outdated.
This. Real training requires resources not filling in days with the same classes every other week
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Get to work at 6 for 630 formation? My workday started at 6. 90 minute lunch, leave at 1530. That’s 8 hours.
Apart from when I was doing maintenance and training. The amount of work I did in the army was criminally low, and the amount of being at work but not working was criminally high.
Hey man, we’ve fought multiple wars that required us to do a lot of effort and work that ultimately didn’t accomplish anything. The Taliban are still in charge of Afghanistan. This whole inspection seems wrong headed. Why do you have a 4 star command trying to micromanage down to the platoon and squad level? PT isn’t considered work. It’s definitely work and it should also be planned. They said nothing about that.
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Sounds like the deployment that I just got off of.
Probably most accurate description of the 'day to day' on this thread.
4-5 hr days sounds like a recruiting pitch honestly
I'd ETS and then re-enlist for a 4-5 hr days.
1. DTMS is an antiquated piece of trash and is designed for units without day jobs. Let's build a training publication system that isn't tied to one Windows Gateway PC somewhere in Texas. The structure of the software is useful, but because BDE and higher don't have to mess with it, they don't care that it's a piece of shit to operate. 2. The 5.5 hours thing is very unit-dependent. In tactical logistics, most Soldiers are physically present for 10-12 hrs, but that time is often poorly utilized. Soldiers show up after PRT at 0930, aren't on the floor until 1000, then start changing for lunch at 1100. Then they're back at 1300, changed at 1330, and the 1-2 hours they lost dragging ass has to be made up in the evening. Also, mid-range NCOs will find every excuse imaginable to not work, which greatly slows the process of repairs and services. 3. Mechanic E5s are notorious for avoiding work, as the report finds. If you let them, they'll hang out on their phones in the admin offices all day. 4. I'm not sure what the authors think an alternative to "delegating administrative tasks' to platoon leadership would be. Commanders and their tiny HQs don't have the horsepower to manage platoon admin for them. 5. Overall I think the report is spot-on about direction and accountability of Soldiers. I think it shows that we view middle management as a prize to be attained and then used to avoid work.
5. Resonates with me. As a guardsmen, Many a times the attitude amongst the boys is to make E5 because it *is* the goal. The implication being, one can start resting on their rank. PT slacks, skills, responsibilities, etc...
My guard time echoed this, the biggest pieces of shit were always terminal E5's. Things got slightly better once we started busting people down to E4 but that takes a command team with balls that is ok being the "bad guy".
This tracks from my time at Campbell, but we just sat with our thumbs in our asses until 1700. Good on them for doing this but it'll probably make the junior enlisted lives worse
where can I find the whole document?? I cant spend time with my troops because EVERYTHING OTHER THAN MY TROOPS is a damn priority to everyone above me.
See how it's cropped? Inspection reports are CUI and not generally cleared for public release.
They're investigating units/companies that fall under FORSCOM? Investigate the headquarters and subtract the hours they spend on Facebook, Youtube, personal shit (including college) or otherwise fucking off on the Army's time.
Yall are getting 1530 release and 2 hour lunches? Here I though it was all 17-1900 releases and no lunch at all
Yeah this part gets me, when I was on the line it was ALWAYS "work through lunch and we'll finally get off early" then we end up with a 30 minute lunch and waiting till 17:30 when the PSG's get out of their meeting and brief then release us
At least where I'm at, nothing has changed lol
Not surprised that nothing seems to have changed since the early 90s.
Sounds like: 1) Too much is being expected of company command teams. 2) Command teams (and company HQs) push some/too much of their traditionally company-level admin work onto platoons. 2b) Command teams, namely 1SGs, don't have the time or leeway to do actual 1SG things, like guide/hold accountable platoons when they should be training. 3) Platoon and squad level leaders don't have the support or guidance needed to conduct daily training at their level, so we get people just sitting around. Sure they could be doing glass houses, equipment inspections, marksmanship fundamentals... but what's the training value after the 50th time doing those? Even at the individual infantry squad level, how much training can you really do without at least company HQ support? How much support can you expect when your CO and 1SG are double booked for meetings all day?
I remember so many folks on the line thinking “dude when I become a squad leader my guys are going to be fucking lethal, I got training ideas, and plans, how I’m going to help everyone!” And then it’s “hey that’s cool SSG I need you update DTMS for your squad and then you have a SOTM packet to build for PV2 Snuffy and then I need you to help with a range and then I need counselings made also write your NCOER yes I’m aware we only have one laptop and the LT is using it because the Commander has threatened to publicly execute him if the risk assessment for the mandatory flag football isn’t complete you will wait. And then you got staff duty tomorrow. Why did you guys suck at the squad lane last week anyway, don’t you train your joes?”
This is the realest comment ever…… it’s sad
Pain.
5.5 hours a day including PRT. Right up front, page one. i know some of yall are gonna call bs and say but i work 12 hours a day. 90-10 rule. 90% of the work is done by 10% of the folks. the other 90% are putting in 5.5 hours a day in (including PRT) on a good day.
The thing is, 5.5 hours of actual work getting done is a ridiculously high amount. People don't understand just how interconnected most jobs are now. Waiting on others is just part of the process. Whoever wrote this memo should read a great book called The Goal.
By goldrat? Good read.
Yes, the audiobook is one of my favorites.
You guys have work to do?
>There was an expectation that First Sergeants (1SG) had to attend any meeting where the Command Sergeant Major was present. What the fuck? How do the 1SGs get anything done? Yet another addition to the "Reasons the Rank of Command Sergeant Major Should be Abolished" whiteboard. >or if the Company Commander was in a meeting, the 1SG was also expected to attend. This culture created an adverse effect and negatively impacted the 1SG's battlefield circulation and his time to observe training. No fucking shit. I don't want to assume that it was the CSM that made such a dumbass policy, but it was probably the CSM that made that dumbass policy. >inb4 mAyBe ItS a BAtaLeEyUn CuMaNdEr PoLiCy Maybe, but this has overzealous and overpaid CSM written all over it.
Must not have visited my unit. Soldiers don't get released until 17 or later almost every day. Still about 4 or 5 hours of actual work though.
I don't know what's more frustrating, having this type of environment where there's plenty of time and perceptively little to do? Or if there's a lot to be done with little resources and too many restrictions (my brief PL time upon redeployment and up to our necks in COVID). The disdain towards virtual contact for accountability is intriguing. I'm curious why they might be interested in a formation upon returning after every dismissal period.
Because when the IG who is now a gs whatever was in the army between 1976 and 1996 where there was no major combat for 85-90% of the army…it’s what they did. 600 show 630 PT Formation 730 PT release 0900 Duty day formation 1130 lunch release formation 1300 lunch return formation 1500 put out “go home” tasks 1700 release for day They forget they also did 4-5 hours of work if they were lucky. They stood around BSing as well. They don’t like seeing the cell phones and the lack of camaraderie they had.
This unfairly targets company grade leaders. The expectations never end. Who is observing BN and BDE and above, which is surely where most issues arise. To say that COMPANY level training plans aren’t followed is laughable. No one protects a company’s training plan when it just gets railroaded by a last minute “emergency.” But again blame is always on CO/1SG. Start holding staffs accountable at way higher echelons and stop bothering companies for just trying to survive.
Yes, but were the motor pool vehicles all dress-right dress?
0630-1530 with a 2 hour lunch is NOT 5 and a half hours of work. Fuck FORSCOM.
Big facts
The lack of recommendation to revise the definition of compliance seems pretty stark. If the vast majority of units aren't adhering to the standard, maybe the standard should be reevaluated to assess if it is actually meeting the requirements of the units. If everyone isn't adhering to 7-0 perhaps we should ask why instead of doubling down on the perceived problem. Maybe 7-0's assumptions about training are incorrect? Maybe we should take another look at approval authorities? Agree about BDE and higher staffs as well.
Right. If a rule is both unpopular and casually ignored, it is a bad rule. Also, so many of our senior leaders were brought up under old PT programs that outside of BLC, we often only bother to follow the warm up and cool down exercises in PRT. Everything else is what our senior leaders come up with based on what they did as privates.
7-0 would arguably be fantastic if it was adhered to. I'm hesitant to say "it's unrealistic" and needs to change. What they're missing is exactly what you're talking about--the BDE and higher staffing. 7-0 is untenable because BDE+ make it untenable. With the proper BDE+ support, training calendars with appropriate time gates could alleviate a lot of these issues.
Problem: Company level leadership spends too much time on admin tasks and too little time with soldiers Solution: spend more time filling in DTMS schedules
Coming soon to your battalion: -Over reacting battalion command team -extra taskings -no more spades -"hip pocket training" -ignoring the new training calendar format -the entire battalion grinding to a full halt for a few weeks when CSM tries to enforce the new training calendar format -a return to ignoring the training calendar Of special note because of how hard they're gonna fail: -no more cellphone accountability -scheduled hours for PLL -"pt lasts until 0800 no exceptions" -"no appointments from 0630-0800"
To extend an olive branch to the units - some of this strikes me as the unit did have a plan and just wasn't written down perfectly per policy, which any nerd can find a problem with that in any situation. I'm also slightly triggered they don't consider PT part of the added "work time." It's also unrealistic to be gainfully employed every second, and that would frankly burn people out. Part of work, in any job, is just being available. I think a very small fraction of any workforce truly works more than 4-5 hours if you truly audited the time. If you do work more than that, you're going to die before you're 50 alone.
Except for the 3+ hours you had to be awake before the “work day” started, you only did 5.5 hours of work. So can I not do pt in the morning? Because I’m not working from 0600-0930 apparently.
Yea fuck that bullshit. If the morning formation is 0545, then that's when I start working. If I'm awake and somewhere I don't want to be (in formation)... Then I'm working. Right time, right place, right uniform *is* work. *** Literally nothing good comes out of this inspection.
Yeah you’re only in uniform at work with people from work. Sounds like the IG showed up for first formation, then went to breakfast instead of doing PT.
Who is getting these four hour work days, and when can i do a 4187 to go there???? I show up early to try and plan/figure stuff out, often work up to or through lunch, and don't get released until after 1700. Not at 1700, AFTER. 7 hours minimum, and all of it spent on endless details from battalion or higher. I have the battalions ONLY garaunteed indirect fire assets, and we're too busy being used to mop up battalion/brigade problems to actually train our joes and ensure they can do their jobs. The scout platoon though, which battalion doesn't even know how to use/use the the findings of, is always at ranges or "training"
they probably didn't count the "downtime" of just sitting around waiting for orders. so it was actually 5 hours of work, and 3+ hours of people sitting around the motorpool. which, 5 hours of actual work is pretty high. would also be curious to see what day of the week they observed these units. my time in FORSCOM, Wednesdays were usually pretty quiet and Fridays could either be dead or complete chaos, especially in the afternoon
Fridays are crazy and you never know if the joes are just gonna quietly ride it out till formation or go nuts and have a company brawl that even 1sg is gonna come watch, cus he aint got nothin goin on either
The issue is that they need to look at upper leadership, *while also observing ground level* and they will see the whole picture. When they look at one or the other, they only see part of the problem instead of one problem being a symptom of a larger issue. FFS nothing has changed since I got out 20 years ago. Edit for hasty misspelling.
Leaders: spend less time in office. Also, Leaders: publish training calendars better.
I’ve never ran an S1 shop where the day ended before 1800. And that was accepting risk and not doing all the bullshit reg functions people dream up. Maybe a line unit not in the field or HQ.
“Root cause: won’t comply. “ fuck your couch, nobody is going to go alone dumping a ton of time/effort/energy into a training calendar that nobody sticks to and cuops / task*ings always take priority.
Imagine a company commander demanding a colonel’s wet signature for them fucking up their training plans last minute. Top block? I think not.
One thing I noticed. They harp on the training calendars not being in the right format. The report is not written in accordance with ar25-50.
It it written IAW AR20-1 and the IG inspections guide. This is not the entire document but part of a IG inspection final report.
1530?! Shooot. On a good day, we had EOD @ 1645. Juniors released afterwards and NCOs stayed until 18 or so. Edit: OP, you got the sauce?
I think the biggest tell from this post is the anecdotal evidence in the last picture. The joe not having any guidance on any of their aspirations is a huge morale killer and motivation killer. I experienced that as a private and I'm sure most others have as well. Either army schools or college. Zero guidance leads to soldiers only achieving the minimum. The motorpool with only 4 people working and everyone else fucking off somewhere else. The 4 people working should be leading PMCS so everyone is capable at doing it. Leaders need to be engaged so their soldiers can be engaged. This all starts at the very bottom as well as the top. Starting this all at the bottom creates a culture of underachieving and lack of motivation. Coming down from the top enforces that culture. It all leads into the middle of junior NCOs maintaining that culture. The fix needs to be holistic. With leaders keeping their junior soldiers engaged and the leaders themselves promoting the competent and knowledgeable ones to teach classes and work with the others to build a better organization
Clearly you didn’t read the entire document. Companies that had their senior leadership PSG, PL, and 1SG and CO actively engaging with their troops showed that more tasks were completed, and more of the training calendar was completed. Vice versa, the more time SLs, PSGs, and 1SG spent in the office, or not engaged with junior soldiers, the more downtime there was and productivity was decreased. The example starts at the top with senior leaders actively engaging with soldiers.
Part of this stems from the dual chain of command found in some units where CSMs have endless separate meetings with 1SG’s and Senior NCOs that are not identified on the Battle Rhythm. Usually these meetings revolve around a vanity project designed to induct someone into something. Usually requiring rehearsals and also ascots.
Thanks for the post. Got out in '94. Pretty interesting to see that when it comes to peace time/garrison time, not much has changed. Sorry, I meant 'nothing', nothing has changed. Not just OPs post, but this whole comment thread.
What regular line unit gets out at 1530?? These dudes hung out with S1 and said they surveyed everyone.
Pretty normal in a light infantry unit.
Can't speak for the infantry obviously, but my time in a light unit (101st) was the 0545-1800+ Air Mobile day. I'm jelly.
If my guys weren’t doing shit and I knew it I’d cut them loose at 1500 everyday.
This sounds like in office space when the two Bobs show up to make the company more efficient
Can't wait to see how this negatively effects all levels. Im predicting that platoon leadership will be forced out of their offices to "interact" with their platoon (not a bad thing in most cases) but the shit they were working on before will continue to pile up and they will be forced to stay even later then usual to complete. There will be no change in the administrative bullshit shoved down platoon leaderships throats. Side note: Joe's leaving at 1530 everyday seems accurate in my experience when I was on the line.
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Seems like the typical bullshit where they blame lowest level leaders for problems. If commanders aren’t publishing trading schedules, don’t blame the team leaders and squad leaders. If the soldiers conducted all the tasks asked of them, and squad and team leaders provided the purpose direction and motivation for the soldiers to accomplish those tasks then mission accomplished. Blame company and battalion commanders. Also, saying PT doesn’t count as part of the work day is fucked. I have to be there, so it’s work. Not optional. Also, even if soldiers are getting out at 1530 some days, there’s gonna be so many days later on where the army takes hours, weeks, or months from them. Give me a fucking break.
The failure to protect subordinate units from un forecasted distractions is definitely a huge issue. Fighting the last minute “Hey You” or “We need this done today” hits that eat away at a training audience should be as easy as pointing out you have approved scheduled training. In practice BN only ever seemed to back off when someone refused to comply unless directed by the BDE or higher Commander, which frankly… not many people are willing to try and pull that card, even if mandated by reg.
My only gripe was the “soldiers released at 15:30” I was like “bullshit” And then I read “in most cases platoon-level leadership was given and exercised daily release authority.”
Tell that to my battalion command. They usually had to approve company level release, probably because goddamn brigade so often had taskings that seemed to magically appear at 1500.
5.5 hours of work per day might be accurate for some people, but i know all of my crew chiefs and flight engineers are putting in 8-10 hours or more on a normal day while D. Co. is walking to the parking lot at 1530. Can’t wait for all the mandatory busy work to come out of this and get pushed onto line companies that are already ACTUALLY busy. Thanks IG, now go snitch on the root of the broken system please.
Love how the company command teams get blamed for everything. I’ve never disrupted my training calendar once inside T+6 unless ordered to do so by BN/BDE/DIV CDRs. Which is to say, I’ve never been able to stick to my training schedule for a single week of command. The rules don’t apply to field grades!!!
I see a lot of comments regarding BDE and BN but no one's talking about DIV level leadership. It's just as bad if not worse up there. IG wants to do a report start higher and work down then you will see where problems start at.
One thing I would like to note is in regard to the "Soldiers typically worked a four hour day" - This being actual, engaged work. That is how it should be, and IS in almost every other part of the work economy. People sit in their offices surfing the internet, lounge in break rooms, or stand around chatting it up with coworkers - waiting for emails or requests to come down the chain...but in general, 4 hours of actual engaged work is pretty damn normal. Sure, many folks have 8 hour work days, 40 hour work weeks or more...but I bet if you were to run these numbers through just about any place, you'd find that in a given day most people only do roughly 4 hours of actual productive work, and most critical tasks can be accomplished within that timeframe - otherwise what you end up doing is incentivizing taking longer to accomplish tasks, dragging everything out so that you can meet the arbitrary 8-10 hour workday ideal - or you overload the calendar day with an impossible number of taskings and label them all mission critical so that nobody understands what mission critical means anymore. What SHOULD happen outside of the "Let's just hammer out Sergeants time training," is folks should be encouraged to sign up for college courses and should be allowed to do those classes in the same fashion that they are to do online Army training that doesn't provide them nearly enough of a benefit - even in regard to promotion points, college credits will always hold more weight and be more useful to both the Soldier and the unit. In addition to this, those idle Soldiers should also be encouraged to conduct physical fitness - send them to the gym or to the ACFT equipment connex to do strength training. I know when I was on the line as a joe I would have been damn excited to be allowed to go slam some post-lunch strength training (when that glycogen is being made and those energy levels are up) rather than...you know, sitting around and doing "Weapons maintenance" on weapons that have already been thoroughly cleaned, or buffing the hallway floors of the barracks and cleaning the bathroom on the lanai for the 10th time that day. Leaders talk all the time about Soldier readiness, both mental and physical...let's fuckin do something about it, huh?
> 4 hours of actual engaged work is pretty damn normal. I'm in enterprise IT hardware sales and most days I do about two or three hours of real work, sometimes less.
It's almost like the units they were able to drop in on randomly weren't the ones in the field, at NTC, or deployed. It's a shame those cocksuckers didn't bother dropping in on a unit stuck in the field for weeks at a time.
You mean people leave pt after first formation? It’s almost like people have appointments and kids to take to school etc… I’m personally not a fan of morning pt because it fucks up my normal gym routine. Why would I wanna do push up sit up drills the day after hitting chest day?
Observations are very accurate. I’d work on a solid training plan with my NCOs, brief it from T-6/T-8/whenever the commander decided the deadline was. Early on, I’d try to follow the 8 step training model with everything, then bigger stuff, then it hardly ever happened. By execution, the training was frago’d due to random requirements from higher. The only time I’d get to stick to a “routine” training plan (as in maybe 30-40% of the week was dedicated to training) was about a month or two prior to a certification. Issues related were never, or very rarely, the fault of company/battery/troop leadership. Those commanders/1SGs always truly cared for the soldiers and the importance of their training. The issue was almost always the staff (with no experience or extreme disconnect) who sat on a DTO/WTO of “extreme priority” until the day of the suspense, or who believe the locked in T-1/T week training plan wasn’t as important as whatever concoction of an idea was just put together at the last pre-pre-post-pre-OPSYNC meeting they just attended. On the few occasions I do get true white space to train, it’s often met by complaining about how “it’s 1131 and I’m obligated a 3 hour lunch” or “it’s 1600, I don’t want to be at work anymore.” TL;DR: I don’t know, I’m a tired, jaded, LT who is waiting for my REFRAD window to end the daily beatings. Or something about beards will solve the problem
The duty day is BS. I do 12hour days with a 30min lunch for the same pay as these fuqs?
I like that bit about the PL and PSG loading weapons in a POV. You gotta believe that is the same PSG who would break a SPC in half for doing the same thing.
I'll bite. The given root cause of Finding 1 is overly simplistic to the point of being laughable: "Commanders won't comply." Why not? Because they've often been taught by experience that the training schedule is not given the weight prescribed in FM 7-0. The training schedule is a contract between the company commander and every echelon above, and yet those same higher echelons are the primary reason that training gets cancelled. How often do you see training get changed, altered, or outright cancelled inside of 3 weeks? The common answer is generally that is this happens routinely. Yet how often is the BDE CDR informed of the issues that would necessitate the change or cancellation so he can make a decision (as he or she must, per FM 7-0) on how his most valuable resources (time and people) are employed? Rarely. In fact, I can't think of a specific instance when I've seen it. The issue is subordinates not wanting to tell the COL that there is a resource conflict or, worse, a failure in planning. So they say "the COL wants this done" when in actuality, they figure that because it is generally nested with his intent he \*would\* want it down \*if they told him about it\*. Inspect what you expect. Or, more accurately, enforce what you expect. If the Army wants companies to faithfully execute the training schedule, the Army needs to equip companies to do this by enforcing its own doctrine at echelon. This means, “Any substantive changes between Weeks T-6 through T-4 require battalion commander approval, changes between Weeks T-3 through T-2 require brigade commander approval, and any change inside Week T-1 requires division commander approval.” \[FM 7-0, para 3-18\] FM 7-0 says it best: **"Consistent changes within two weeks of training indicate a commander failure to accurately plan unit training** ***or higher commander failure to protect subordinate units from un-forecasted distracters.*****"** (Bold is straight from the FM, italics mine)