Good thread, All three of you do good work.
Wilf, you can have Saturday off; Mike, you can have Sunday off, Tom -- you deployed, no soup for you!
Seriously, very good stuff -- I agree and have suffered much that both Tom and Mike say. Goes with the job, I guess...
I can recall setting up more than one R&S line that did not entail any reconnaissance to speak of and which had extremely poor ability to surveill due to human limitations; thus Mike's definitions are I think a step forward.
I agree with Wilf and Tom that RSTA is a bad combination. As is ISR...
Mike also said this:I agree but suggest that if we simply did IET (Officer and Enlisted) correctly, the critical aspects of all three plus current IET would be included -- and those three courses could be tuned to do a far better job than they now do because of having to train some basics and retrain others...In a perfect world, I'd send every new soldier and officer to the SLC (Scout Leaders course), RSLC (Reconnaissance and Surveillance Leaders Course), and Ranger school. The combination of those schools would provide a good understanding of both mounted and dismounted recon.
I went to the old I&R course at Benning a long time ago. It effectively was Ranger School minus idle harassment combined with RSLC running nine weeks and it started with the premise that most of us knew and could do more than we did and proceeded to rapidly move forward causing us to have to scramble to keep up. Best Army School I ever attended by far; the old Pathfinder school (when we still did DZs) was the next best -- operated the same way. Only schools I ever attended that did not cram eight hours instruction into three days and that dropped people for non-performance.
Reconnaissance is a necessary and vital function. It IS everyone's job as Wilf says -- it also requires a few, not many, specialists that can do it stealthily, quickly, thoroughly and tell you accurately what's out there without fighting for it. They need to be a bit better than the average bear.
I forgot.
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