An Army of One (Brain cell)

As most people know, I dislike the Army. This isn’t just an Army - Air Force rivalry; I have had the misfortune of working on several joint operations and exercises.

Every time I have called to a distant end Army communications center a private or sergeant picks up the phone, but once I start talking technical lingo about whatever it is that I called about they immediately go blank and patch me through to their lieutenant or captain. That’s because these guys (Army Captains and Lieutenants) are my intellectual peers when it comes to anything high tech. The monkeys that answered the phone, although they make as much as me (if not more), are not trained to do more than answer phones, make coffee, and alert their superiors if any condition in which they’ve been assigned to monitor changes.

By far, the Army soldiers (of any rank) are more ignorant than any other branch’s equivalent graded (and many times several grades lower).

Definitions:

Ignorant:

1. Lacking education or knowledge.


2. Showing or arising from a lack of education or knowledge: an ignorant mistake.


3. Unaware or uninformed.

This is different from being Stupid (read Navy, but they can’t help it)

Stupid:

1. Slow to learn or understand; obtuse.


2. Marked by a lack of intelligence or care; foolish or careless: a stupid mistake.


3. Tending to make poor decisions or careless mistakes.

My reference to Army soldiers being ignorant is in no way an indication of the individual soldiers ability to learn. I’m not saying Army soldiers are stupid; in fact most soldiers I have met are in fact very smart. The Army however chooses not to teach, mentor, or nurture their greatest natural resource: People. As a whole, the Army "machine" is slow to react, unintelligent, and breeds the same among their individual soldiers.

There is a reason for this intentional dumbing down of their force.

A large majority of soldiers get out of the service after their first enlistment (for a number of reasons), or after their first conflict (for an even larger number of reasons). Why should the Army spend such a large amount of money on soldiers that only hang around for two to six years?

We lived beside an Army Civil Engineering grunt in our last house. He was currently in school at Fort Belvoir and had been for most of his enlistment. Once he graduates this summer he’ll have less than two years of service left before his enlistment is up and he’s not sure if he’ll reenlist. The Army will have to start all over training someone else if he gets out.

For most positions, the Army teaches you the bear minimum for you to operate in the field, no more no less. My neighbor was the exception when it comes to decent training in the Army, but if he gets out (which he probably will) it only helps to further solidify the Army position of minimal training.

I’m happy to be in the Air Force and proud of the excellent training we, as career Airmen, get. With that being said it’s becoming progressively more difficult to work in an environment that is becoming ever-increasingly ran by joint operations. Most of us Airmen were oblivious to the difference in training and ability levels between the military branches several years ago. Each service branch stuck to itself. Now in a time of money and personnel cuts the service branches have had to start helping each other out. We do nearly everything jointly now.

Working with Soldiers that make as much as you but are completely clueless is infuriating. If I performed at the level that some of these soldiers perform then I would be discharged. It’s accepted though, and laughed off as a joke, “What do you expect… He’s an Army Grunt.” He’s not an Army grunt anymore! He was an Army grunt when I didn’t have to see him; He was an Army grunt when he was just one of the newest casualties in whatever conflict was going on; He was an Army grunt when he HELD A GUN AND SCRATCHED HIS ASS! Now he’s my coworker, my peer, and technical counterpart. If he’s paid on the same pay scale as me and he’s now working in the same tech center as me then he should be able to pull his own weight next to me… not his lieutenant!

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All right, lets turn this argument around. Whose fault is this actually? You can’t blame the Army for being frugal on training when the majority of enlisted men don’t hang around. I blame the Air Force.

The Air Force has tried to be frugal to the point of abusing their Airmen. Most people are not aware that the Air Force is the only branch that doesn’t have Warrant Officers. In attempts to save money and reduce manning the Air Force deleted the highly technical grades of W1 through W5. Who would do all the things that Warrant Officers used to do? The enlisted Airmen, of course. This happened many years ago, and since then more and more responsibility has been pushed down to the enlisted ranks. In fact the combination of Officers realizing that there is no end to what a motivated Airman can do, and rank hungry Airman willing to do anything to get promoted has caused this problem to escalate at an exponential rate! A negative side effect of this trend is that it has caused Air Force Officers to atrophy in their leadership skills while creating power hungry enlisted Airmen that behave like Gollum off of “The Lord of the Rings”. This horrible arrangement is the topic of another post.

So, in the end, my aggravation with the Army is, if truth were told, an aggravation with the Air Force, the Army, and our new joint environment that has brought all these things to the surface. If I’m going to be mad at anyone it should be the Air Force. They have told us Airmen for years how proud we should be at the fact that we are the best-trained, most professional enlisted corp in the whole Department of Defense, No… The World.

The truth is we are simply the Air Force's twisted financial science experiment.

Sparky