Dirty Laundry

I dropped my laundry off today. Also dropped of my hand me down towels and sheets that have been loyally serving me and my predecessors in my trailer for a few years now. We will leave many things to the Iraqis when we leave, but I suspect that these sheets will no longer be of much use to them after a few more rotations. They are fine now, really, lest anyone worry. I'm just thinking ahead.

But on the topic of dirty laundry, I'm not going to air my specialty's dirty laundry in public but will talk about how we handle it. A little while ago one of the troops came back from a rotation and wrote down his thoughts about where we've been and where we are going. He sent it out to everybody in his unit.

I had heard about this particular paper but only recently got to read it. It is very well written and mainly says that we as a career field are spending too much time learning small parts of everybody else's jobs, which is depriving us of the time and opportunity to become true experts in our own jobs. Many of the guys out there doing the job nodded their heads in agreement.

Apparently the senior leadership did not take kindly too it. I'm starting to ask around my peers in middle management what their thoughts were. We'll see.

I suspect that their is more to it than just clueless leadership. They are getting directives from above that they have to fill which are driving our high deployment rates. This in turn limits time to train and may force a focus on basic combat tasks in place of the more complicated technical environmental characterization tasks. I'm not sure what latitude they have to push back on the taskings for bodies downrange in order to improve how we train.

In the mean time, the requirements downrange seem to be increasing. Guys are getting frustrated at the growing difference between what we do, what we are training to do, and what we are supposed to be mastering.

The smart troop that wrote the paper is going on to officer training. Unfortunately he has chosen to be an officer in a different specialty. In any case, the loss of that troop represents a leadership failure in my opinion.