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Title: Low Recruit Discipline Prompts Army to Redesign Basic Training
Source:
Military.com
URL Source: https://www.military.com/daily-news ... y-redesign-basic-training.html
Published: Feb 10, 2018
Author: Matthew Cox
Post Date: 2018-02-10 14:58:18 by Hondo68
Keywords: less attrition in, 1st unit of assignment, sloppy undisciplined attitudes
Views: 4766
Comments: 27
The U.S. Army will soon launch a redesign of Basic Combat Training intended to build more discipline after many commanders complained that new soldiers often show up to their first units with a sloppy appearance and undisciplined attitudes. By early summer, new recruits will go through Army BCT that's designed to instill strict discipline and esprit de corps by placing a new emphasis in drill and ceremony, inspections, pride in military history while increasing the focus on critical training such as physical fitness, marksmanship, communications and battlefield first aid skills. The program will also feature three new field training exercises that place a greater emphasis on forcing recruits to demonstrate Warrior Tasks and Battle Drills, the list of key skills all soldiers are taught to survive in combat. The new program of instruction is the result of surveys taken from thousands of leaders who have observed a trend of new soldiers fresh out of training displaying a lack of obedience and poor work ethic as well as being careless with equipment, uniform and appearance, Maj. Gen. Malcolm Frost, commanding general of the U.S. Army Center of Initial Military Training, told defense reporters on Friday. "What leaders have observed in general is they believe that there is too much of a sense of entitlement, questioning of lawful orders, not listening to instruction, too much of a buddy mentality with NCOs and officers and a lot of tardiness being late to formation and duties," Frost said. "These are trends that they see as increasing that they think are part of the discipline aspect that is missing and that they would like to see in the trainees that become soldiers that come to them as their first unit of assignment." As commanding general of IET, Frost was tasked with increasing the quality of training and reducing new soldier attrition. After compiling the data from surveys of about 27,000 commissioned officers, warrant officers and non-commissioned officers, the message was very clear, Frost said. "The number-one thing that was asked for five-fold or five times as much as any of the other categories was discipline," Frost said. "First-unit-of-assignment leaders want Initial Entry Training to deliver disciplined, physically-fit new soldiers who are willing to learn, they are mentally tough, professional and are proud to serve in the United States Army." In addition to discipline and physical fitness, leaders also wanted technical and tactical proficiency in warrior tasks and battle drills. After working out the details in a pilot at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the Army has approved a new POI that Frost hopes will better instill into recruits exactly what it means to be a soldier. "We really tried to attack it by getting after more discipline and esprit de corps," Frost said. One new aspect features a series of history vignettes of major battles that the Army has fought in, from Valley Forge in the Revolutionary War all the way to Iraq in Baghdad, Frost said. "We highlighted those battles; we tied them to Army Values and the Soldier's Creed and highlighted an individual who received the Medal of Honor or other valor award for actions during each battle," Frost said. "So soldiers will learn across all of Basic Combat Training at all the Army training centers what it means to be a soldier, the history of the United States Army through the battles and the campaign streamers and the wars that we have fought and they will be able to look to and emulate a soldier who executed a valorous act during that war." The new standardized booklet will be given to each recruit along with their Blue Book at the beginning of training. Recruits will also learn discipline by doing more practice at a skill that may be as old as soldiering itself -- drill and ceremony. When the war began after the attacks of 9/11, the Army decreased its focus on D&C, inspections and other skills that stress attention to detail to make more time for combat skill training. "There are a lot of folks that say 'we need to go back to the drill and ceremony because we have lost a lot of the discipline aspect of what it means to be a United States Army soldier,'" Frost said. "It's not like they are going to be sitting out there just doing D&C all the time. The drill and ceremony is going to be interwoven into when they move to and from places ... so the movements won't just be lollygagging, non-tactical movements, they will be actually executing some team drill and ceremony as they move to and from the chow hall and move to and from the barracks." But the new BCT isn't all about spit and polish, Frost said. "The other big piece we are doing in Basic Combat Training that helps with the esprit de corps and the discipline aspect and also lends a measure of grit and resilience to [BCT] is we have three major field training exercises that we are going to do now. We are calling them the Hammer, the Anvil and the Forge," Frost said, describing how the final Forge FTX is an homage to the Army's historic ties to Valley Forge. "That is going to be a culminating FTX which is a graduation requirement. It will be an 81-hour field training exercise with about 40 miles of tactical road marching that is conducted through a series of tactical events and mini field training exercises." The Forge will include a night infiltration course and a medical evacuation mass casualty exercise. There will be ethical dilemmas soldiers have to negotiate as well as a battle march and shoot, a resupply mission which involves moving supplies, ammo, water to a link-up point, patrol base activities, combat patrols as well as an obstacle course, Frost said. "If you succeed in making it through the 81-hour FTX ... then what will happen is you will earn the right to become a soldier," Frost said. "You will earn your beret, you will earn a 'soldier for life' certificate, you will get your National Defense Service Medal and your uniform will look exactly like a United States Army soldier." The new BCT POI weeded out "lot of redundant areas and areas that have crept in that did not get after the basics" -- shoot, move, communicate and protect or survive, Frost said. For weapons qualification, recruits will be required to qualify with backup iron sights instead of just on close-combat optic sights. Physical fitness standards will also be increased, requiring each soldier to score at least 60 points on all three events of the Army Physical Fitness Test instead of 50 points on each as a graduation standard. Each recruit will also receive 33 hours of combatives training instead of 22 hours, Frost said. Recruits will receive an increased amount of tactical combat casualty care training such as basic combat lifesaver. The course will also teach "some of the basics that we had kind of lost with respect to communications such as basic hand and arm signals, and we have doubled the amount of basic reporting on the radio communications" such as MEDEVAC and similar requests, Frost said. The new BCT does, however, do away with hand grenade qualification and land navigation course qualification as graduation requirements. "What we have found is it is taking far, far too much time. It's taking three to four times as much time ... just to qualify folks on the hand grenade course than we had designated so what is happening is it is taking away from other aspects of training," Frost said. "We are finding that there are a large number of trainees that come in that quite frankly just physically don't have the capacity to throw a hand grenade 20 to 25 to 30 meters. In 10 weeks, we are on a 48-hour period; you are just not going to be able to teach someone how to throw if they haven't thrown growing up." Recruits will still receive the same amount of training in these areas, Frost said. "Just because we took it off as a graduation requirement does not mean they won't be conducting hand grenade or land navigation training," Frost said. "They are going to learn all the technical aspects of the hand grenade, and they are going to learn tactical employment and they will throw a live hand grenade. "With land navigation, it's the same thing they are still going to conduct land navigation training; they are still going to conduct the day course they are still going to conduct the night course." The new changes to BCT, Frost said, will hopefully make new soldiers better prepared for their advanced individual training, first unit of assignment and result in a lower, new-soldier attrition rate "If we can get a more physically fit, better prepared, more-disciplined soldier in Basic Combat Training, AIT and [One-Station Unit Training] then we believe we will have less attrition in first unit of assignment," Frost said. 
Drill Sergeant (Staff Sgt.) Jonathan Christal, B Battery, 1st Battalion, 40th Field Artillery, marches Basic Combat Training Soldiers in for classroom training. (U.S. Army Photo/Mr. James Brabenec) 'A Sense of Entitlement'
Be a Soldier
Drill and Ceremony
Hammer, Anvil, Forge
'Get After the Basics'
Some Qualifications Nixed
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#1. To: hondo68 (#0)
Millennials.
marches Basic Combat Training Soldiers in for classroom training Millennials. Is there a great danger that they'll poke themselves in the eye with a crayon? Why do they need to wear protective eye-wear?
They just need more hugs from the drill sergeants. That will make it all better.
Hot Pants instead of BDUs. Or maybe poodle sweaters. Gotta make those quotas!
Use your imagination. Sex changes and ice cream for everybody!
Mark for comments
Sex changes should be insisted on before recruitment, no pussys
The problem with today's US military recruits is the nation has limited choices for recruitment when there should still be a draft system. If the national mandate is to place troops all over the planet then it needs to recruit from everywhere in the USA.
They are building robots to replace them.
The problem with today’s US military is not having limited choices for recruitment, Tooconserrvative was spot on when he identified one problem: “Millennials.” The millennials have taken over showing us “a primer for the military’s generational shift.” The millennials in today’s US military “are too reliant on technology, buried so deep in social media that face-to-face communications becomes impossible and they are they too busy questioning orders to follow them.” "The problem that we do have is that right now the generation we have coming in is not as disciplined as we would like them to be," said Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Gragg, the senior enlisted soldier for the Center for Initial Military Training, earlier this year. "So we have to provide them with discipline over a longer period of time." At the service academies, students have complained the military's rigid career tracks and "up or out rules" discourage continued service. Complaints like these from cadets at West Point helped hasten the Defense Department's current plans to reform the promotion system and allow more flexibility in recruiting, assigning and promoting officers. Social media is also creating new complexities for recruiters. Years ago, a successful strategy entailed some television ads and sending individual recruiters out to high schools for face-to-face conversations. Now, that’s changed as prospective recruits spend endless hours connected to smartphones. "It is difficult to be able to get their attention in a world where social media and so many other different types of activities are pulling at their attention. It is difficult sometimes for recruiters to really prospect these candidates and connect with them in a meaningful way," Miller said. The takeover is here. /..../
This problem didn’t just start yesterday, Mark Thompson at Fort Leonard Wood explained the problem back in June, 2001. As a group of Army recruits relaxed last month in a grove of tall oaks at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., finishing their catered lunch of roast turkey, scalloped potatoes, green beans and apple pie, Captain Lee McQueen's cell phone rang. The call was from his commander, warning that a practice assault planned for the base's bayonet-combat course might have to be called off: the mercury was creeping into the 90s. McQueen's team of drill sergeants--those fabled hard-noses delegated to whip raw recruits into shape--went into action. They dutifully set up a "wet-bulb globe- temperature-index calculator" and tested the air. Sure enough, it was too hot to attack. Instead, the 204 men and 57 women of Bravo Company spent the afternoon walking the course, looking more like the slo-mo replay of an N.F.L. game than the cutting edge of the 21st century U.S. Army. "There isn't any training value in walking the course," McQueen groused. Even his recruits were unimpressed. "I expected basic training to be tough, like the movies," says Private Jerry Brunelle. "This is more like summer camp." It's not just the Army. Complaints are ricocheting in all branches of the service that "basic" has lost its edge--the rigors aren't all that rigorous, there's more silliness than saluting at shape-ups and there's altogether too much flirting between men and women. For most of this century, basic training was a deliberately harsh introduction to military life, a daily dose of screaming drill instructors dishing out vulgarity and physical intimidation to mortify--and motivate--trainees. These days drill sergeants spend more time mentoring than menacing. "We're no longer the charge-the-beach, stogie-in-the-mouth, cussing, hard-drinking, woman-chasing, World War II guy," says Senior Master Sergeant Paula Byrnes, who supervises basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. As the military's technology has grown more sophisticated, she says, the need for traditional warriors, trained in traditional ways, has waned. "The more technologically advanced we get," says Byrnes, "the less overtly brutal we need to be." Maybe. What is certainly true is that the services are under increasing pressure to stem a high dropout rate among trainees. One way to do that is to make basic training easier for everyone to complete. The number of recruits who wash out after fewer than six months--which is how long it takes most members of the service to complete basic plus some advanced training--has climbed by a third over the past decade. "What we're ending up with is a kinder, gentler drill sergeant who is trying to keep attrition down," says Charles Moskos, a leading military sociologist at Northwestern University. "And kinder, gentler drill instructors are not necessarily creating the kind of force you want to go to war." Although the military denies it, many male soldiers and outside experts also believe that mingling men and women in boot camp--as the Air Force has done since 1977, the Navy since 1992 and the Army since 1994--leads to relaxed standards of physical performance and sexual tensions that diminish boot camp's effectiveness. Misgivings about the sturdiness of basic go all the way up the ranks. As part of a review of the integration of women into the services, Defense Secretary William Cohen has ordered an outside panel to assess training in all four branches of the service. In the defense-authorization bill it passed in June, the House also called for an independent panel to examine basic training. That request is expected to be part of the final bill that goes to President Clinton later this summer. No one who went through boot camp in the 1950s or '60s would recognize the place today. Soldiers-in-training have swapped combat boots for sneakers (easier on the feet), fatigues for gym shorts and T shirts. Instead of running in formation, they run at their own pace, to challenge the speedy and avoid injuring the slower ones. On military obstacle courses they can run around, instead of over, some walls. In some quarters the very phrase "obstacle course" is frowned upon as too harsh. For the Navy, "confidence course" is now the preferred term. To discourage physical abuse, which was once tolerated though never sanctioned, drill sergeants are forbidden to so much as touch recalcitrant recruits in an effort to get them to perform. "Stress created by physical or verbal abuse is non-productive and prohibited," says the Army's training manual. "Drill sergeants used to be able to discipline soldiers on the spot when they misbehaved," McQueen says. "But now you can't even touch them to check their ammunition." The nine weeks of Navy basic training begin on a luxury bus that takes recruits from O'Hare airport to the Navy's lone boot camp, Great Lakes Recruit Training Command, just north of Chicago. Onboard they watch an 18-min. orientation video with a rock- music soundtrack in which recent boot-camp grads tell the new arrivals that "physically, anybody can get through boot camp," and that it's O.K. to cry. Recruits get a "Blue Card," which helps them deal with stress. The card instructs a recruit to hand it over to a Navy trainer if he or she feels blue. "Thinking about running away?" it asks. "Help is less painful!" On arrival recruits face a "moment of truth" during which they are told to divulge every secret in their past, such as drug use, arrests and even traffic tickets. For years, that debriefing was a bit like a police interrogation, with signs threatening $10,000 fines and jail time for liars. Those signs have been replaced by posters of naval vessels and slides exhorting the kids to embrace "honor, courage, commitment." "When they see all these nice pictures, that gives them a warmer welcome than I got," says Senior Chief Petty Officer Norman Pretlow, a recruit division commander. The Navy has dropped other basic-training practices that old timers say fostered cohesion and discipline. Since sailors don't usually salute other sailors below the rank of officer, recruits no longer salute their drill instructors, who are petty officers. Since few will ever use firearms in the line of duty, marching with rifles went out last year. The Navy says it's trying to instill standards that the recruits will understand and embrace, not just follow. "If I just say, 'At attention! Fall in!' I may get the behavior I want--80 recruits standing at attention--but what are they thinking about?" asks Master Chief Petty Officer Alan McCue. "But if you tell them that we're going to have this personnel inspection to instill pride in the unit, you will get pumped recruits who want to do it." The Navy also says that approach gets results with young recruits who crave strict standards they may not be finding at home or in school. "The old method of getting right in your face and screaming and hollering sends them running," says Captain Cory Whitehead, commander of the Great Lakes boot camp. "They're hungry for standards, and if they're given one, they embrace it." Some officers outside of boot camp still think the whole enterprise has gone squishy. "When these kids get to the fleet," one commander says privately, "you can see it isn't working." Lighter physical training, which many recruits get just three times a week, is another sore point. "They want us to put the Navy into our heart, not our muscles," complains recruit Michael Evans. Captain Whitehead counters that the old system overworked recruits, leading to stress fractures and other medical problems that delayed, or ended, fledgling Navy careers. "We had recruits piling up, waiting for them to get better so we could do it to them again," she says. "Now we rarely break them." As it happens, basic has become more congenial at the very moment when instructors face more recruits who, as products of an unbridled youth culture, have no instinctive respect for authority. "The resistance to leadership exhibited by this 'generation that was never spanked' undermines discipline and the rank-authority system," concludes a draft report prepared for the Pentagon by the Rand Corp., a California think tank. Older officers also complain that the new generation is more motivated than their predecessors by the financial incentives of the all-volunteer Army. "People used to come here for the 'duty, honor, country' aspect," says Sergeant Shawn Brown, an Army Reserve drill sergeant. "Now they're here for the Army College Fund." Retired Admiral Stan Arthur, who commanded Navy forces in the Persian Gulf War, sums it up this way, "It is almost as if the services are becoming unionized." Mixing men and women in basic training has also caused some problems. Fresh from the sex scandal at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, the services are determined to make drill instructors understand that sexual exploitation of female recruits will not be tolerated. At the same time, military brass wants to discourage trainees from becoming distracted by the opposite sex. A recent Army study of mixed-gender training two years ago concluded: "Drill sergeants felt they had to keep the soldiers focused on the training, while the soldiers were focused on one another." Congress is looking into the wisdom of resegregating basic training. The Army in particular is sensitive on this point, having suspended mixed-gender training in 1982 after a five-year attempt--too many women were injured and too many men complained that training with women wasn't tough enough--then reinstating it in 1994. While Army officials insist it's going well this time, reports from the field suggest caution. "Some male drill sergeants said standards had to be lowered to accommodate females, especially for physical training," a new Army report says. "They felt they could not go 'full bore'." Last week there were rumbles at the top levels that change could be looming. The Army's top trainer, General William Hartzog, said he may lengthen basic training beyond its current eight weeks, primarily to include more human-relations instruction designed to curb sexual harassment. But Army officials say they are also weighing beefed up physical standards for recruits. That draft Rand Corp. study now circulating around the Pentagon says only 42.9% of the troops surveyed believe their unit is ready for a crisis. "That number is unsettling," the study notes, "given that the military's job is to be prepared for what is essentially a sustained crisis." At Fort Leonard Wood, a lot of recruits agree. "If basic training was tougher, we'd end up with better soldiers," says Private Tony Steinhart. "I want somebody with me in my foxhole who can help me fight, and doesn't expect me to do it all."
Millennials are the worst. Except for the Millennial women. They're even worse.
Not to worry. Those recruits will eliminate themselves from the course. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
I was wondering the same thing. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
If only that were true. Robots can learn. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
Those regulations ONLY apply to white male students. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
Robots can learn. http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/02/us-army-now-holding-drills- ground-robots-shoot/145854/
That's only true until right up to the moment the enemy infantry kick the door in. Soldiers-in-training have swapped combat boots for sneakers (easier on the feet) Maybe,but sneakers offer no ankle support at all. fatigues for gym shorts and T shirts. So much for 5 mile rucksack runs with a rifle and full basic load of ammo,food,and water,plus the occasional mine and spare radio batteries,medics bag,and radio. Instead of running in formation, they run at their own pace, to challenge the speedy and avoid injuring the slower ones. Say WHAT? That's WHY people used to run in formations. It kept them from tripping all over each other. For the Navy, "confidence course" is now the preferred term. That seems reasonable for a branch of the service that wears blue and white "cammies" so they look like the ocean and seagull shit,supposedly so they can't be seen by the enemy out on the open ocean. Other than the sub force,the modern US Navy is a joke as a military organization. In the event of a major war they would all disappear within the 1st 30 minutes,so what good are they? On top of that,is there even any other nation that has a Navy for offensive purposes? At the same time, military brass wants to discourage trainees from becoming distracted by the opposite sex. ROFLMAO! Yeah,getting young healthy people cut off from home and normal male/female daily contacts to ignore the opposite gender during training sounds like a good plan. Good luck with that one! Look,the reality is that anyone speaking from the Pentagram is repeating the company mantra,which is GIVEN TO THEM TO REPEAT. The US military does NOT make these decisions,the politicians not in uniform make them,and the politicians in uniform parrot them. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
Good Post ...
Not to worry. Those recruits will eliminate themselves from the course Pete, -- is it correct that at one point in Nam a grenade was issued that was so powerful that it was nearly impossible to throw it beyond the grenades blast radius? I remember reading something like that. Was it true?
That's only true until right up to the moment the enemy infantry kick the door in. The top post of the day.
Not that I know of. The standard frag grenade back then had a "danger circle" of roughly 45 feet,IIRC. This is with the explosion happening in the middle of that 45 foot wide circle. At the outer edges you could still get hit by a fragment if you were standing.but the ground tended to act as a force shield to help push most of them up higher. The whole "killing blast radius" thing is a theory based on perfectly flat terrain with no brush,trees,other soldiers,equipment,etc,etc,etc in the way between you and the blast. If you are standing next to a US grenade when it goes off,you are dead,period. Not such a sure thing if you are on the ground and even 15-20 feet away,though. Like all explosions,the farther away it passes from the explosion location,the more widely scattered and slower the fragments are moving. Sometimes they do go off a little closer than you would like though,and I have picked fragments out of my rucksack,boot heel,and web gear after a fight. Some or all of that may have been fragments from Chicom or Soviet grenades or RPG's,though.No way of telling for sure,other than the size of the fragments. I once had a B-40 rocket blast pick me clean up off my feet and toss me a few feet,but I only ended up with a few shallow scars on my arms from that one,and torn shirt sleeves. I can look down today and still see the scars,but they all scabbed over and quit bleeding on their own. No Purple Heart. I,and a lot of the other SOG guys usually carried the little (Danish,I think) "cherry bomb" grenades in a canteen pouch on our web gear. IIRC,they were supposed to have about half the power of the US "baseball grenade",but were about 1/4 the size. The advantage being of course that you could carry more. A HUGE advantage when you had to carry it all on you. I also carried a couple of White Phosphorous grenades on my web gear harness,and a couple of claymore mines in my rucksack. Lots of people didn't want to carry WP's because they would go off while on you due to a bullet strike,but when running recon or being surrounded and needing to get away,NOTHING beats a cloud of Willie Pete! Ain't NOBODY going to run through a cloud of Willie Pete no matter how much they want to get at you. Plus it's also good to mark your position in heavy jungle if you need close air strikes brought in right NOW,and you can't be seen from above. Smoke grenades also work,but not as good because the WP has a more powerful blast and because it is heavier and doesn't dissipate so much. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
There was a deployed mini-nuke in the late Fifties called the M-29 Davy Crockett Weapon System. Supposedly they made and deployed several thousand of these.
At some point in thelate 50's to early 60's the US developed "backpack nukes". The idea being that if war with the USSR seemed imminent SF troops would parachute behind enemy lines,carrying one in a spare rucksack. They would then go to a designated location,arm it,hide it,and run for their lives. Supposedly they had plenty of time to escape back out of blast range before they went off,but if you have never been in the military,ask someone who has about perfect plans. Perfect plans never take into account that we don't live in a perfect world. I personally knew several people who had received that special training and whose names or on "go rosters" if the need ever arose,but I had no idea such a program even existed when I knew them. The whole program was a step or two above top secret,so nobody talked about it. Not even to friends that had TS clearances. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
Yes, it is a known device from the era. Wiki: Special Atomic Demolition Munition The Davy Crocket and the SADM were essentially the same W54 warhead design. A second Wiki page: Suitcase nuclear device Out of the ~250 the Soviets supposedly had, a Russian defector told us that 100 are missing. We don't know the truth or at least our government doesn't admit it. JFK once told someone that he had it on good authority that there was a nuke down the street at the Soviet embassy but who knows how true any of it is. There was another W54 weapon: the AIM-26 Falcon air-to-air nuke, yield around 250 kiltons. It was a smart missile that could home on Soviet bombers (those old turboprop planes they still fly). They had an earlier dumb missile that was nuclear too. Not sure how many times they tested any of these smaller nukes. These designs were all related to the atomic cannons and their shells, the W48 artillery shells, active from 1963-1992. The Davy Crocketts and the AA missile were only active from early Sixties to early Seventies.
Thanks to both of you for the info/replies. Is it possible I'm remembering someone writing about trying to throw by hand a more powerful type of rifle gernade? ---- It wasn't atomic, fer sure.
I guess anything is possible,but the largest and heaviest grenades I ever personally handled were the White Phosphorous grenades,and the typical healty male infantryman could chunk one of those things a long way when he was being shot at and the adrenaline was spiking. Not that you would want to. Grenades were designed to be used up close. Infantrymen have a perfectly fine rifle to take out enemy soldiers off at a distance. You also have radios that are in contact with artillery and tactical air units. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
#2. To: Tooconservative (#1)
#3. To: hondo68 (#2)
#4. To: Tooconservative (#1)
#5. To: VxH (#4)
Hot Pants instead of BDUs. Or maybe poodle sweaters.
#6. To: rlk (#0)
#7. To: Tooconservative (#5)
Sex changes fo everybody
#8. To: hondo68 (#0)
#9. To: hondo68 (#0)
#10. To: buckeroo. Tooconservative (#8)
(Edited)
The problem with today's US military recruits is the nation has limited choices for recruitment when there should still be a draft system. If the national mandate is to place troops all over the planet then it needs to recruit from everywhere in the USA.
#11. To: All (#10)
Low Recruit Discipline Prompts Army to Redesign Basic Training
#12. To: Gatlin (#11)
That draft Rand Corp. study now circulating around the Pentagon says only 42.9% of the troops surveyed believe their unit is ready for a crisis. "That number is unsettling," the study notes, "given that the military's job is to be prepared for what is essentially a sustained crisis." At Fort Leonard Wood, a lot of recruits agree. "If basic training was tougher, we'd end up with better soldiers," says Private Tony Steinhart. "I want somebody with me in my foxhole who can help me fight, and doesn't expect me to do it all."
#13. To: hondo68 (#0)
"We are finding that there are a large number of trainees that come in that quite frankly just physically don't have the capacity to throw a hand grenade 20 to 25 to 30 meters.
#14. To: hondo68 (#2)
Is there a great danger that they'll poke themselves in the eye with a crayon? Why do they need to wear protective eye-wear?
#15. To: A K A Stone (#9)
They are building robots to replace them.
#16. To: Gatlin (#10)
At the service academies, students have complained the military's rigid career tracks and "up or out rules" discourage continued service.
#17. To: sneakypete (#15)
If only that were true.
#18. To: Gatlin (#11)
"The more technologically advanced we get," says Byrnes, "the less overtly brutal we need to be."
#19. To: sneakypete (#18)
#20. To: sneakypete (#13)
"We are finding that there are a large number of trainees that come in that quite frankly just physically don't have the capacity to throw a hand grenade 20 to 25 to 30 meters.
#21. To: sneakypete (#18)
"The more technologically advanced we get," says Byrnes, "the less overtly brutal we need to be."
#22. To: tpaine (#20)
Pete, -- is it correct that at one point in Nam a grenade was issued that was so powerful that it was nearly impossible to throw it beyond the grenades blast radius?
#23. To: tpaine, sneakypete (#20)
(Edited)
Pete, -- is it correct that at one point in Nam a grenade was issued that was so powerful that it was nearly impossible to throw it beyond the grenades blast radius?
That's the old myth of the atomic hand grenade. It's gone around for 50 years. Supposedly the military had an atomic hand grenade that would obliterate everything for 300 yards but no one could throw it more than 100 yards so they dropped the program. This is all a complete myth.
Video of the test:
#24. To: Tooconservative (#23)
(Edited)
#25. To: sneakypete, Gatlin (#24)
At some point in thelate 50's to early 60's the US developed "backpack nukes". The idea being that if war with the USSR seemed imminent SF troops would parachute behind enemy lines,carrying one in a spare rucksack. They would then go to a designated location,arm it,hide it,and run for their lives. Supposedly they had plenty of time to escape back out of blast range before they went off,but if you have never been in the military,ask someone who has about perfect plans. Perfect plans never take into account that we don't live in a perfect world.
#26. To: Tooconservative, sneakypete (#23)
#27. To: tpaine (#26)
Is it possible I'm remembering someone writing about trying to throw by hand a more powerful type of rifle gernade? ---- It wasn't atomic, fer sure.
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