There's a lot of problems with the Army's new wave of recruits. Part of it is poor levels of discipline with new recruits, but to put all the blame on that is missing the bigger point.
The Army has three main problems that I've observed. The first is the way promotions work. Too often I've seen people, who aren't bad soldiers or bad people necessarily, get their stripes, even when it's patently clear they aren't really fit to be leaders. But because they say the right things at the board or are good at PT, CSM's and First Sergeants assume they're all squared away, and as a result you have teams and squads that are run by people who don't really have the necessary skills to lead others. But once you get E-5, suddenly everything's untouchable. "Check down, not up" is probably the most toxic saying I've heard around my unit.
Second is PT. The Army sucks at PT. If it's not ultra-repetitive PRT sessions that leave everyone demotivated and annoyed, it's bone grinding bull**** like constant ruck marches. Rucking is a vital light infantry skill but's absolutely terrible on the body, especially when it's announced abruptly and without warning the day before PT. Add in that a lot of new soldiers don't know how to set up their rucks properly, so they end up hauling **** on their spine for miles and people wonder why we have so many muscular skeletal injuries. More annoying at a lower level is that so many units insist on never doing PT below the platoon level, but this is incredibly counterproductive. Part of being an NCO is knowing your soldiers strengths and weaknesses. It's a lot harder to tell how your soldiers are doing when everyone's bunched together in a company formation. And yet we have this incredibly stupid mentality that "Our PT isn't enough to get you fit." Bull****. We have an hour every morning dedicated to this crap, are you really telling me we can't get a good workout in? It's nonsense, but because we either do half assed bull**** that doesn't work out anything, or we do retarded PRT sessions that get incredibly repetitive and stupid, it ends up being true. You wanna fix this, then start having PT conducted at lower levels and hold NCO's, especially team and squad leaders, responsible for the physical fitness levels of their soldiers. Obviously there are things they can't control like diet, but they still should have a bigger role in that then it currently is.
And lastly, the disconnect between senior leadership and lower levels is absolutely ridiculous. Nobody in my chain of command seems to be able to track how many hoops we have to jump through just to dispatch a god damn vehicle, which ends up taking days on average, and of course this information only comes down at the last ****ing minute. Too many command teams have no idea what happens at the lower level, and too many times junior enlisted have no idea what the **** they're doing or for what end their doing it towards. Too many command teams I've seen on Fort Hood alone are only concerned with checking the boxes rather than actually finding out what's going on. And it's a shame, because a lot of times those commanders and First Sergeants mean well, but there's an almost systematic problem with it comes with information dispersion between battalions and their lower echelons. Maybe's it just my unit, but that's what bothers me a lot.
Anywho, just my 0.02 cents.
eace
