Some Miscellaneous Notes I Found

As I was trying to determine a topic for today's post I came across some interesting notes I wrote to myself in one of my many "green books" that I have managed to keep from my time in the Army (a green book being a book for notes that everyone in the Army carries that just happen to be green). Based on the date these notes were written in late February 2011 as I was wasting my time at FT Benning, GA as an augmentee for the military's Joint Forced Entry Warfighter Exercise...as opposed to wasting my time at FT Huachuca. Anyway, here are my thoughts/notes at this particular moment in my life. Discuss amongst yourselves:

- Draft deferments given to college students. Many in higher education avoided military service (during the Vietnam War and prior). Has this led to anti-military thought and practices in many universities?

- Maneuver (i.e. infantry, armor, field artillery) platoon leaders and company commanders receive training on how to integrate enablers (engineers, psyops, etc) but are not trained on integrating military intelligence enablers (HUMINT teams, SIGINT teams, etc). This leads to a lack of knowledge on how to utilize these assets and a determination that they are not useful when they end up not being utilized properly.

(I have a slightly interesting story that I may discuss in the next blog about an infantry Ops Sergeant Major who clearly didn't understand how HUMINT teams operate.)

- Why do we train foreign militaries to organize, fight, and train in a Western/American style? Smaller nations (Georgia, Kuwait, etc) should be trained to fight asymetrically in order to defeat a larger military.

(I would argue that in a conflict between Georgia and Russia, a few dozen IEDs could be more effective than a few tanks if placed and detonated properly.)

- A Combined Arms BN is authorized 15 soldiers in the S2 (intelligence) section.

(Too many or too few? At it's highest number my S2 section with 1-14 numbered 9 which includes me, not factoring in the HUMINT soldiers I received from brigade. And I only had 8 in Iraq since one analyst didn't deploy due to legal trouble. Include the 1 soldier I always had tasked out and that left me with 7...split between two different bases 100km apart for much of the deployment. Talk about a challenge. The infantry battalion I was with also only had 9 total soldiers and that included the additional staff sergeant we were given from one of the companies. When I was in the support battalion there were only 3 of us.)

- There is a reason military intelligence officers are not in command of maneuver elements...they over-think and create confusion.

(This note just makes me laugh)