You guys are trying to goad me into one of
my frothing rants at the personnel system, HRC and Generals and their priorities. I refuse to be baited, I'll just go quiet quietly drunk and exude silent wrath... :mad:
Contemplating on how well -- or how poorly -- the Army can reinvent wheels -- and the old saw that continuing to do the same thing hoping for a different result is insanity. :wry:
I wonder if your neighbor ever considered the fact that not necessarily everyone who wants to command a Bn should do so...
I think you answered my question
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Tom Odom
I am not sure what you are asking. As a 48--especially as a 48J on the ground in Africa--I was initimately involved in what would later be described as IO. Indeed I got on the phone to the Joint Staff from Goma when Radio Television Milles Collines was still broadcasting saying that we were losing the information war. I was also involved in advising the UN on demining awareness and used that work when setting up the US-Rwandan Demining office. Certainly IO considerations had great weight when we crafted a campaign plan for Rwanda.
Could I have used an IO officer? Perhaps. I did use PSYOP as part of the demining effort. And I saw first hand how an NGO doing mine awareness got it wrong with the new government.
Would a 30-series officer with some regional specialization and language be useful? Again, perhaps as long as there was a FAO watching and mentoring. I say that because I did just that with the PSYOP team and the SF teams that I had. They were somewhat regionally specialized and had some language skills. Most did very well. Some however went so far astray that they nearly derailed the demining program.
I guess my bottom line is that a generalist in IO would be better served to compliment the regional and pol-mil skills of the FAO. Doin a 2-fer would be like marrying first cousins; the results might be OK but then again they might not.
Tom
As you have just pointed out it seems like what an FAO does is IO+ or in otherwords might be one way of understanding where the IO officer fits in this sense.
To the layman such as myself it is sometimes difficult to place the actual role of the 30 but in thinking along the lines of an IO as the jack of all trades master of none and the FAO as the next evolution jack of all trades and master of several it at least paints somewhat of a more coherent picture.
OR I could be comparing apples and SPACESHIPS:wry: