Money quote(s):
"My strong guess is that the author is a non-commissioned officer, probably a Sergeant First Class, with minimal familiarity with Google, much less the Army above the batallion (sic) level."
("Batallion" is the correct spelling, but only if you're writing in German. - CAA.)
"If I were holding a contest to see who could come up with the dumbest idea for reforming the Army, I’d stop it and declare a winner. This would set the Army back two decades, ruining hard fought gains in achieving a Total Force.
Now, twenty years ago, I’d have given this a big Hell Yes and a Hooah or three. The National Guard was an embarrassment and seeing these fat yahoos in sore need of a haircut running around in my uniform made my blood boil. But a hell of a lot has changed since then. We’ve integrated the promotion system so that Guardsmen have to earn it in the same way that active force soldiers do. And many Guardsmen have seen more combat time than their active duty counterparts owing to the vagaries of the force structure. These people are every bit the soldier as the guys on active duty now and it would be a slap in the face to label them as second class citizens."
This responded to a suggestion that since the National Guard now has a four-star seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the NG be split off as a "sixth service." Several specific (and wrong) recommendations are made in this connection.
Mr. Joyner has the right of this one.
"I did plenty of D&C as a cadet but can’t imagine when you’d find time to do this at a unit. Especially with the current opstempo, there’s just too much to do. And, frankly, most soldiers would see spending a lot of time practicing for parades to be degrading, not just a colossal waste of time. We’ve cut out shining boots and pressing fatigues; let’s go ahead and keep this gone, too."
"D&C" means "drill and ceremonies." In other words, marching around and stuff. It's taught (and learned) in basic training, and our NCOs learn how to teach it at the first level of NCO academy training. As Pvt. Winger once said of it: "Especially that "marching in a straight line" business."
Soldiers already know how to do this and use the techniques when appropriate. If they need to brush up for a specific ceremony or event, well, that's why practices are held.
"The old battle dress uniform that I wore finally gave up the ghost during the Iraq War, when the Army decided that it just made no sense to have multiple camouflage patterns and went to one standardized one. The hasty replacement, the Army Combat Uniform (ACU) turned out to have multiple problems–most notably that the “universal” camouflage pattern not only isn’t universal but doesn’t even work in the main theater it’s being worn, Afghanistan–so they’re looking to replace it. It’s a bit frustrating.
Getting rid of the polyester green uniforms with the lime green shirt as a garrison dress uniform and making the dress blue uniform the standard service uniform again was something I campaigned for back in the late 1980s. They’ve finally done it. The problem is that, rather than going back to the old tradition of khakis or some other substitute uniform for hot weather, they decided to have a “class B” version of the uniform that consists of the light blue trousers with a white dress shirt and all the ribbons and skill badges on it. This makes soldiers look like shopping mall security guards." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)
The "universal" ACU digital pattern works if you're in an environment consisting of (recently) dead grass. Otherwise, it simply tries to be too much at once. While it's understandable that the Army didn't think it was cost-effective to field four sets of each camoflage pattern to every soldier, there could probably have been a way around it; issuing only desert pattern uniforms to soldiers at Fort Hood and (other Southwestern U.S. forts) for instance and woodland-suitable patterns only to soldiers in temperate locations (East Coast, Germany, Pacific Northwest, &tc.).
As for the Paul Blarts (i.e., "mall cop" Class B uniforms), I'm with Mr. Joyner (as well as Petronius); they're garish. A khaki shirt would have made a lot more sense, even if the light (actually medium) blue trews were retained. CAA has never been all that fond of the mint (and polyester) green "Shade 44" Class A/B uniforms. Something a bit drabber, closer to the brown/green of World War II army (and current USMC) service uniforms would have been better.
11/19
