Don't have much for you guys but since it's been a few days since I've posted I'll throw out some articles that I read today that I found interesting.
An article discussing why officers are leaving the Army. The author points to a recent study that polled both officers who are currently serving and who have recently left the Army. Multiple and long deployments are not necessarily a factor for the exodus of our best officers but it is a issue. Painful bureaucracy, standard promotion times for everyone with no regard to merit, and a broken career management system are primarily to blame. I couldn't agree more. When choosing my next assignment I was asked for a list of 15 "jobs" of a list of around 40 or 50 openings; that list was apparently ignored and I was sent to Huachuca to be an instructor. Not horrible, but not really what I wanted. Then, when I arrive here, someone up at G1 (personnel) decides I'm not going to be an instructor but a nameless cog in the Intel Center bureaucratic machine (Not quite nameless, but close. My military boss called me by the wrong name yesterday).
The second article is about the volunteer military and how out of touch American citizens are with that military and the current wars. People cared about Vietnam because they were drafted and sent over there, or they had a relative or close friend who was. The population was affected by the conflict which in turn shaped politics. Today very few people (around 1% of the population) serve in the military and most folks often do not know anyone deployed. The conflicts do not touch them or matter; taxes are not raised and goods are not rationed. The Army went to war while the country went shopping.
Thanks to Jake "The Snake" for the links.
Pretty good article in the latest National Geographic on Timbuktu that I'll likely write about in a day or two.
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