'The General Mattis collection: a mixture

[Fuchs]

A thorough training should begin with little technology and then make things ever easier with technology as performance expectations rise during training.

An example: GPS
A map and a suitable compass should suffice, and soldiers should know the polar star (or whatever the people on the southern hemisphere use).
GPS-dependent soldiers are often an embarrassment when they're being tasked to navigate without GPS.


I'm also in favour of having plenty motorcycles in an army for traffic control, courier and rear scouting (such as finding a good spot for a depot or hospital).

[slapout9]

I'm also in favour of having plenty motorcycles in an army for traffic control, courier and rear scouting (such as finding a good spot for a depot or hospital).

We did experiments with that in the 70's in the 82nd Airborne. They were used as couriers between units to deliver orders and maps just to practice what we would do if we lost our radio communications due to electronic jamming or lack of battery resupply. Don't know if they ever formally adopted it as a permanent procedure.

[J Wolfsberger]

Ken covered it so well, that I won't add to it. I will take a step back and add one thing: In the US, we seem to have a peculiar belief that technology can solve any and every problem, and so we can have an "Easy Button" for war if we just spend enough money to build the right gadget. Most of us on this board reject that approach.

(e.g. Embedded training is a nice "gadget" if used as a supplement to field training. It can not replace field training. It should never have been a KPP. But it, like many other "neat" technologies, were loaded into FCS as "must have KPP" rather than "nice, but only if we can afford the burdens after we've taken care of shoot, move, communicate.")