Not a perfect medium for communicating -- I'm over wordy mostly in an attempt to get past the lack of nuance and visual clues that we'd have in a face to face conversation. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes things that seem obvious to us as we write do not come across as obvious to others.

The fact that the US Army training system is modeled after the WW I mobilization training process which was slightly modified for WW II had been discussed here numerous times. Here are just a few recent threads: LINK, LINK, LINK. A search will turn up more. Generally, it's a good idea here to run a Search before posting a 'new' thought; probability is someone else has already mentioned it. That is not said to deter posting but really to encourage it -- just with some knowledge of what might previously been said on the topic.

The current task, condition and standard foolishness is also a good mob / low IQ effort -- it is totally inappropriate for a professional force.

Basically, many here seem to agree that our training is broken and fortunately, a number of initiatives are underway to fix a lot of that. We're still training a low IQ conscript Army when we actually have a high IQ Army of volunteers that are fairly professional. The bad news is that the personnel system is in even worse shape than our training. I think the training will be improved, I'm not as hopeful on the personnel aspect...

Re: Rifle marksmanship -- that's getting fixed (LINK), (LINK), (LINK). That "nothing added without something being taken away" was from the 1980s and 90s, a time when we 'trained' (poorly) to budget, not to standard for all the lip service paid to standards. That's changing, not rapidly enough nor adequately but it is improving. Your comment re: McNair is spot on.

Selil is right, bunkum it is -- we're supposed to be smarter than that now...