RE: I feel your pain....

it's a labor market thing, right? the army needs X number of people and can only pay Y price--at Y price, only X many people are available at Z quality. (somebody add a whiteboard to omninerd. please, for reals.)

ryan's right in that the army is covered in bloat. i don't think the right answer is blackwater--sorry, but i gotta go with rome on this one, those guys are a constant accident waiting to happen--but there's an assload of dollars and quite often uniformed billets being spent on programs which don't win wars, and sometimes even just plain screw soldiers more than the civilian equivalent. and what about money spent prolonging systems which probably didn't even work right in the 1950s? (not completely agreeing with the last article, but it raises interesting criticisms of the monster that's in place.)

lastly, forgetting even the absolutely ridiculous felony waiver issue... there's an awful lot of people kicking around my organization who don't know their jobs. the Army eliminated the SQT in the nineties. (Scroll down to "training management"--read the whole article if you have time, it's interesting.) why? honestly, i'm not completely sure--i was still playing with my ninja turtles before the test disappeared--but my understanding, based on a conversation with a crusty E9 one night at a checkpoint, is that people just weren't passing it. if that's not a quality-of-labor issue, i don't know what is.

i think the solution to a lot of these issues our force is facing and is about to force is not making the Army smaller, but increasing the front-line shooter-and-supporter-to-chaff ratio, both in terms of manpower and the way money is allocated.

your thoughts?

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