What a difference a day makes...
Wow.
I'm truly impressed by the breadth and depth of the responses you have received and your replies. I think you will do well with your presentation.
As a suggestion, have someone record the presentation. I guarantee you will learn from your audience and you will learn even more by reviewing the presentation. You may end up with a couple of articles out of your ideas and/or questions and comments.
I was an instructor at the JFK Center and an O/C at JRTC. A lot of the topics you and others have suggested we have tried to incorporate. I'm afraid that what a lot of us see as "common sense" will never become apparent to some of the folks who really need that information.
For what it's worth, I'm still learning from things I observed in Vietnam and subsequent locations. As a result I feel kind of bad about all the things we tried to teach but couldn't get across or didn't think about.
Please recover completely and quickly. You are the future of the Army.
Some things never change...
Just some quick notes for tonight then I'm off on a date with a sweet southern belle. Smalls wars can wait :D. Unfortunately, they are not going anywhere.
From Bob's World:
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Mike sounds more like a GWOT campaign assessment
I think I'm gonna start calling this post-colonial small wars.
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Originally Posted by
MM_Smith
As a suggestion, have someone record the presentation. I guarantee you will learn from your audience and you will learn even more by reviewing the presentation. You may end up with a couple of articles out of your ideas and/or questions and comments.
Working on it. We found a scout that also does photography and videos.
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Originally Posted by
MM_Smith
I was an instructor at the JFK Center and an O/C at JRTC. A lot of the topics you and others have suggested we have tried to incorporate. I'm afraid that what a lot of us see as "common sense" will never become apparent to some of the folks who really need that information.
For what it's worth, I'm still learning from things I observed in Vietnam and subsequent locations. As a result I feel kind of bad about all the things we tried to teach but couldn't get across or didn't think about.
MM, thank you for your service. The more I consider, common sense and METT-TC seem to be learned along the way directly correlated to one's age and experience. I look back at how much I've absorbed from combat, grad school, and SWJ from guys like Ken White, Goesh, BW, Wilf, Stan, Tom Odom and countless others. I want to minimize that gap.
So back to the real world. A 1SGT (former PLT SGT of mine) is crashing at my place while he's going through a divorce. Right now, while I"m working through my own ####, he's helping me. In his own words, "Sir, brother, you took care of us and now I'm gonna take care of you." That's the type of unit we had. Anyways, he's done four tours in Iraq and A'stan, and we've spent many nights with a bottle of Jack just talking things out. He told me that I've always had a way to know and explain things on a level that was comprehendable from a PFC to a 4-star.
I showed him the first three days of courses today. He loved it, but he laughed. "Mike, you gotta dumb that down for the E6's. Too many college words. Take your enemy situation and make it 'shape, hold, and clear.'"
So, I'm gonna relook the format and the questions (as per MarcT's suggestions on inversion) to make something accessible for everyone.
With that, here's some good tunes for the weekend that cover it all...
v/r
Mike
Sounds like Hitler's plan for taking over the world to me
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Originally Posted by
MikeF
Here's where I'm headed next week.
Day Four: The Biggest Tribe- Clearing the Village and taking Control
Day Five: Annihilation of the Opposition- Holding the Village
Day Six: Reconstruction at Gun-Point: Armed Nation-Building and the Build Phase
Day Seven: Transition- Conflict Resolution and moving to the Role of the Arbitrator
Day Eight: The Combat Advisor: FID. SFA, and the alternative, indirect approach- One Tribe at a Time
Day Nine: The Intangables: Three Cups of Tea, Winning Friends and Influencing People, and Peace Corps ####
Day Ten: Having a Life/Going Home before 2100- Resetting, Rebuilding, and Revamping our Army in a time of war: Working through injuries, grief, training the next breed, and new commanders.
This is NOT a recipe for effective foreign policy. If this is what you are having your military do, your foregin policy is hard broke.
Depends on how you define the enemy
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Originally Posted by
Bob's World
This is NOT a recipe for effective foreign policy. If this is what you are having your military do, your foregin policy is hard broke.
I was rereading Mao yesterday so I had his thoughts in my head when I wrote that :D. Yes, I need to relook at the tone. However, it's not that far off.
Annihilation of the Opposition- If you shut down the Enemy's training camps, political and military apparatus, and convince him to CHANGE behavior, you have won. Keep in mind, the enemy is an IDEA. I'm not talking about genocide or trying to take total control. The former is immoral and the latter is an illusion. One could argue that Greg Mortenson is attempting to annihilate al Qaeda through teaching the girls how to read.
Application of Violence- It is a necessary function. The level depends on the intensity of the insurgency, the threat level in one's particular AO, and the ROE from one's CoC.
Post-Colonial/Post-Cold small wars- this is not my foreign policy. I"m much more of an isolationist. The more that I study these type of wars, the more I remain convinced that one can only help someone that ASKS for help.
I agree with Commando Spirit that the SMART acronym has merit,
however, I will throw in a caution. The 'M' stands for measure and most educational treatises will point out that all activities should be or are measurable at some level. That's a true statement. The SMART process was used to design our current training system of Tasks, Conditions and Standards -- so we end up with the required measurement activity defining the methodology and even what gets taught by who and where! Not a good idea because while you can get pretty objective result reports, they are at the micro level. Teach or train at the micro level in order to grade at that level and the guys don't learn to do macro... :mad:
You can dumb things down to the micro level to get metrics and objective measurements (as we did, under some pressure) but I submit combat is an art that requires the amalgamation of a number of knowledges, skills and abilities -- put another way, combining all or parts of a number of tasks under some widely varying conditions to survive and win -- to achieve composite results and that measurement of those results at the macro level will usually, in training, be subjective. Do not get too heavily into metrics...
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The sign of a true scholar - in the Socratic tradition.;)
Oh and avoid the koolaid... :D