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Army Basic Training no longer works

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Hawkeye10

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The Army will soon overhaul its Basic Combat Training course in an effort to produce fitter, more disciplined and better motivated new soldiers, the general in charge of entrance training said Friday.

The Army will hold recruits to higher physical fitness standards, send them on more realistic combat training exercises and increase its efforts to teach basic skills such as first aid, arm signal communication and shooting rifles using only iron sights, said Maj. Gen. Malcolm Frost, the commander of the Army’s Center for Initial Military Training.
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Through the past three years, the Army polled more than 27,000 of its noncommissioned officers, warrant officers and officers in the ranks of second lieutenant to colonel, asking them to identify deficiencies they have observed among the service’s newest soldiers.

What Frost found was leaders primarily concerned with a lack of discipline among those soldiers reporting to their first units. The general said the surveys indicated a trend in new soldiers reporting with less-than-stellar work ethics and bad habits such as arriving late for duty or wearing their uniforms sloppily. Other concerns included soldiers who have issues following orders and obeying and showing respect for their superiors, he said.
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https://www.stripes.com/news/basic-...army-will-focus-on-discipline-morale-1.510957

More evidence for those who need it that Obama wrecked the military.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
More evidence for those who need it that Obama wrecked the military.
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More evidence you're just posting hyper-partisan hackish nonsense.

The military is the military.
If they believe things have gone bad within their ranks, it's their fault and their fault alone.

Nothing to do with Obama. :roll:

The POTUS doesn't have anything to do with daily practices and conduct.

Stop posting moronic nonsense.
 
That guy in the photo is at the same battalion I went to at Fort Jackson.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
https://www.stripes.com/news/basic-...army-will-focus-on-discipline-morale-1.510957

More evidence for those who need it that Obama wrecked the military.
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It may just be the wrong approach as this just confirms what we already knew.

And now that we have higher standards to be reimplemented and with which we can compare, maybe the real question to ask is how did that slender smooth talking black man improve our nation in any category, long or short term?

Okay ok, yes, I guess his massively below lackluster performance coupled with kicking at the rotten wood of our socialist termite undermined institutions, hollowing out and bankrupting theDNC for us, he DID usher in a Trump...so we can give some tangential credit for our growing recovery.

Thank you 0 man. :2wave: :lamo
 
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I went through a long time back. The caption and the photo confuse me.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
https://www.stripes.com/news/basic-...army-will-focus-on-discipline-morale-1.510957

More evidence for those who need it that Obama wrecked the military.
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From the article: "Through the past three years, the Army polled more than 27,000 of its noncommissioned officers, warrant officers and officers in the ranks of second lieutenant to colonel, asking them to identify deficiencies they have observed among the service’s newest soldiers."

This is fake news. No one, no one, no one in the military, no veteran, ever asked for or wanted the opinion of a second lieutenant. Never happened.
 
Risky Thicket said:
From the article: "Through the past three years, the Army polled more than 27,000 of its noncommissioned officers, warrant officers and officers in the ranks of second lieutenant to colonel, asking them to identify deficiencies they have observed among the service’s newest soldiers."

This is fake news. No one, no one, no one in the military, no veteran, ever asked for or wanted the opinion of a second lieutenant. Never happened.
Click to expand...

They were" courtesy questions" so the butter bars don't feel slighted.
 
Gaugingcatenate said:
It may just be the wrong approach as this just confirms what we already knew.

And now that we have higher standards to be reimplemented and with which we can compare, maybe the real question to ask is how did that slender smooth talking black man improve our nation in any category, long or short term?

Okay ok, yes, I guess his massively below lackluster performance coupled with kicking at the rotten wood of our socialist termite undermined institutions, hollowing out and bankrupting theDNC for us, he DID usher in a Trump...so we can give some tangential credit for our growing recovery.

Thank you 0 man. :2wave: :lamo
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https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/gol...ng-into-the-longest-expansion-in-history.html

Goldman says this may become the longest economic expansion in history
The current expansion has already lasted 95 months, now the third-longest in U.S. history in 33 business cycles going back to 1854, the economists said.
 
Recruits will undergo bunk inspections, participate in drill and ceremony competitions and face tests on their knowledge of the Army’s history.

Do they not already do this in the Army?
 
The Army will soon overhaul its Basic Combat Training course in an effort to produce fitter, more disciplined and better motivated new soldiers, the general in charge of entrance training said Friday.
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lol. If there's one thing the Army sucks at it's motivation.

The Army will hold recruits to higher physical fitness standards, send them on more realistic combat training exercises and increase its efforts to teach basic skills such as first aid, arm signal communication and shooting rifles using only iron sights,
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In what ****ing universe are recruits using red dot sights or acogs. I sure as **** didn't get one, I qualified at basic with the iron sights of my M16.

“The bottom line is that when you graduate Basic Combat Training, you are supposed to be ready for your first unit assignment [and] to be ready to step on a plane and go to combat.”
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I don't think there's ever been a single case of it being a good idea to send fresh green troops just out training straight into combat. But hey, our training must be better, right?

To incorporate better discipline, the Army will increase its focus in basic training on indoctrinating soldiers on Army values and evaluate them on their discipline.
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Ah yes, the army continues stroking it's own ego because they managed to come up with the LDRSHiP acronym. Great ****ing job.

Too bad Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage are all things that people should've been taught if they had half decent parents, and no amount of power point slides will fix that or instill it in new soldiers.

Hey I know, let's come up with another creed! Those always work!

Recruits will undergo bunk inspections, participate in drill and ceremony competitions and face tests on their knowledge of the Army’s history.
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We already do this.

Frost said the focus on the Army’s long history is meant to build espirit de corps, teaching the service’s values through lessons on pivotal battles from the Revolutionary War to the capture of Baghdad from Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Army’s 2003 Thunder Runs across Iraq.
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Hell yeah guys! Remember that time we kicked the ass of the incredibly incompetent, outmatched and underarmed Iraqi Army? Never mind the fact that it led to 11 years of COIN, strategic ineptitude, hundreds of thousands of dead people, and such a ****ing identity crisis that the Army nearly destroyed itself trying to handle it.

he increased physical fitness standards will align with ones required of soldiers in the force. That means recruits must score 60 points — determined by a soldier’s age and gender — on each of the three aspects of the Army Physical Fitness Test, push-ups, sit-ups and two-mile runs. Previously recruits only needed to score 50 points on each test in basic training, Frost said.
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This actually isn't a bad idea, but I think it's being applied incorrectly. The bigger problem here is that you're getting recruits who had absolutely no level of physical fitness. When I went through basic training we had a soldier who couldn't do four pushups. It was pathetic, but I couldn't blame her. She should never have been there in the first place. Her recruiter did her and the Army a great disservice by claiming she was ready for basic training. If you really want to increase the amount of soldiers who don't fail basic for PT reasons, you need to stop recruiters from shipping off anybody they can get their hands on.
 
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.
 
Every ten years or so a similar missive is issued by a General in charge of training, especially new Generals in charge of training.

WWII, basic was reduced from 6 months to six weeks. The civilian army of WWII got the job done.

Basic today helps weed out the undesirables before more money and man hours are invested in training them further, as well as for determining which type of training comes next. It is the more advanced training that makes the most efficient use of personnel today. Not much different than in the past. Just more complicated thanks to newer technology. Today's soldier is often in better shape, better trained, better armed and armored, than those in the past. They make stronger teams, for both combat and support.

Some people just don't know how not to complain. :)

As my dad told me, as an enlistee from the 30's who made NCO by surviving minor conflicts, "as war was declared with Pearl and Hitler supporting the Axis treaties, the only reason I was sent to OCS, I had a good behavior record. I rarely got caught. If I had poor disciplinary records, I'd have worked as a drill instructor." Times have changed and gotten more complicated. My dad, were he alive, would be standing proud in admiration, as do I.
 
SirGareth said:
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....but....but....but he was battling climate change and transexual expression in the showers.

Now some one is suggesting that our military forces should be capable of actually "forcing" something?

Why the very cheekiness of the concept.
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We cannot "force" nuclear powers without destroying ourselves so there is that. When we abandon diplomacy we give up the ability to compete in the world and must withdraw or be annihilated. That is the plan now.
 
The problem isn't new. They had the same problem in every war. You cannot make a great combat soldier in 6 weeks. There is too much to learn. Plus there is no way to accurately simulate a live fire fight. It is just to dangerous. I qualified expert with everything I shot in the military. But in advanced training I couldn't pass the same test under simulated battlefield conditions. I would most likely do even worse in actual battle field conditions. New recruits will always need time with veteran combat soldiers to adjust to the reality of war. Otherwise you will suffer lots of casualties.
 
Jredbaron96 said:
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.
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30 years ago in Germany we had the same problems with vehicle dispatch.

In my time in the Army, my best PT scores came when I was in assignments where we didn't have "organized" PT.

And yep, it was always pretty obvious to me that someone who was doing something like- for example- occupying the TNG NCO's desk was going to have more opportunity to be promoted than me. After all, he was trotting off to every military school, leaving work early to go to more college classes, taking a couple hours in the middle of the day to hit the gym, and going in front of a board composed of people he interacted with everyday. And not having the inconvenience of actual troop leadership duties to distract him.
 
PIPEWRENCH said:
The problem isn't new. They had the same problem in every war. You cannot make a great combat soldier in 6 weeks. There is too much to learn. Plus there is no way to accurately simulate a live fire fight. It is just to dangerous. I qualified expert with everything I shot in the military. But in advanced training I couldn't pass the same test under simulated battlefield conditions. I would most likely do even worse in actual battle field conditions. New recruits will always need time with veteran combat soldiers to adjust to the reality of war. Otherwise you will suffer lots of casualties.
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When I served in the mid 1970's there was a saying in the division: if we were to get deployed to a combat situation, there would be 25% casualties right off the bat and then people would withdraw their heads from their asses and get down to business.....
 
iguanaman said:
We cannot "force" nuclear powers without destroying ourselves so there is that. When we abandon diplomacy we give up the ability to compete in the world and must withdraw or be annihilated. That is the plan now.
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How many nucs have been dropped since, WW-ii?

How many soldiers have been humping rifles and grenades since WW-II (hint: Korea, Vietnam, GW I GW II Afghanistan etc)

Diplomacy doesn't work with without soldiers ready able and willing to fight. If it did we could disarm our own police and talk the gang bangers out of their evil ways.
 
SirGareth said:
How many nucs have been dropped since, WW-ii?

How many soldiers have been humping rifles and grenades since WW-II (hint: Korea, Vietnam, GW I GW II Afghanistan etc)

Diplomacy doesn't work with without soldiers ready able and willing to fight. If it did we could disarm our own police and talk the gang bangers out of their evil ways.
Click to expand...

How many warships of nuclear powers has our Navy sunk? None. Our Navy is useless against China since we cannot fire on them without risking nuclear war. Diplomacy doesn't work when you fire all the diplomats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/24/us/politics/state-department-tillerson.html
 
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