Of history, warfare, leadership, and alcohol
Today's post is by guest author, SoonerGrunt. He is a retired Army non-commissioned officer with twenty-two years of experience in both the Regular Army and the Army National Guard. My Twitter friend Angry Staff Officer had a response from a junior officer’s perspective to a blog post entitled “31 Things Your Senior Rater Wants You …
Continue reading "Get Out of the Way and Let Us Do Our Jobs: A NCO’s Perspective"
Last week, one of my favorite blogs - From the Green Notebook - ran a guest piece called, 31 Things Your Senior Rater Would Like You to Know That He Probably Won’t Tell You. Quite a mouthful. While I disagreed with nearly everything that the author said, he did start a good conversation on leadership styles that has bloomed …
Continue reading "18 Things I Look For in a Senior Rater"
I've been to a lot of battlefields: from the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. Most are neatly marked with "this thing happened here" or "Robert E. Lee's horse drank from a puddle here." I've even been to a few from the Soviet-Afghan War and Operation Enduring Freedom, although I saw …
Continue reading "Walking a World War I Battlefield"
Back in 1941, the Army did something extreme: it tested its doctrine. Not on tabletop wargames, not in a computer simulation, not with an invasion of a small Latin American country. No, the Army mobilized over 400,000 Regular and National Guard troops, spent a year training them up, and then let them fight each other …
Continue reading "It’s Time for Another Louisiana Maneuvers"
One Friday night, dark and dreary, At my desk I slumped, weak and weary. A late-night tasker, come my way, Too “urgent” to wait just one more day. “See here, LT,” the S-3 had said, “This suspense can’t wait, don’t mark as read, “Write WARNO, write FRAGO, pen the order, And ensure your slides have …
Continue reading "Ballad of a Young Staff Officer"
Let’s have a little chat about readiness. To be more specific, let’s talk Army National Guard readiness. First of all, what does readiness even mean? The word is being tossed around like a football these days (that’s American football to you other folks who refuse to acknowledge our arbitrary break with the rest of the …
Continue reading "What is Readiness and How Do We Get There?"
He bent low. His back ached. He could smell the earth below his face, the stinking, ever-present mud. Mercifully, free of gas. For now. The soft lip of the trench - or, what had been a trench before German artillery had blasted it to ever-living hell - was a dim reflection in the early morning …
Continue reading "“Of the Highest Order:” June 16, 1918"
Whoa there, high speed. Look at you, all brand new and shiny, right out of your basic officer leader course, hard-charging to take over your first platoon. Thing is, behind that brash exterior, you're probably confused as all get-out. After years of training in ROTC or a military academy (you OCS guys know all this stuff …
Continue reading "Thrown into the Deep End: Tips for New Platoon Leaders"
Today's guest post comes from Tim Shea (@trshea88), a former U.S. Army Captain hailing from Joint Base Lewis-McChord's now defunct 4th Stryker Brigade. In 2014, Tim traded the green pastures of Army life for the exhilarating, cutthroat world of economic development consulting. He maintains his sanity by writing here. To all the badge, tab, etc. lovers …
Continue reading "A Combat Badge Does Not a Soldier Make"
You can tell a lot about someone based on their uniform. Especially in the Army. In fact, we regularly violate the "Don't judge a book by its cover" dictum. Hell, we stomp that dictum into the dirt and build a fighting position on top of it. When meeting each other, soldiers tend to size the …
Continue reading "Integrity: The Unseen Skill Badge"
