recognize them and know they need to be trained, it's a combination of philosophy, cost and human fallibility.

Most of our initial entry training, officer and enlisted is based on WW II models (which in turn was predicated on WW I models). Those techniques worked marginally for a large mass Army of draftees and by the end of WW II, were generally fair. However, given the fact that the US Army has been at peace since 1945 (I know parts of it have not been but the institution has been..) and given the general softening of society, the mothers of America are not willing to accept a significant number of injuries to their kids in training. Thus those items that can be injurious are softened or eliminated.

The broader problem is that the Army has not adapted to the fact that Joe Entrant, 2007 version, is far more mentally capable (and less emotionally and physically capable but not terribly so) of absorbing more and better training. We train a mile wide and an inch deep; many of the basics are taught but only superficially and they are not drilled in (a critical point). Initial entry training for combat arms enlisted folks should be around 32 weeks -- it's only a little over half that in many cases; Officer accession training should be about a year, it's less than half that. So the philosophy is bad.

In fairness, the Marines do better.

The Army believes it cannot afford to train an individual for more than his or her next job. This is obviously fallacious because at any institutional level, the trainees or students will almost invariably perform the duties of at least one more rank step and most likely two before they get additional training -- this is just dumb; by refusing to spend the money up front, we make subsequent training more expensive, shortchange those trained -- and we get people killed unnecessarily due to that. The Tillman case comes to mind. So the cost factor is very real and very false logic.

Then there's human fallibility. It's a big problem but I'll cite just two examples. Immediate action on an M16/M4 is simple but calls for drilling and muscle memory or it doesn't become the reflex action it should be. This may have changed but 30 years ago, the solution was not to drill it in but to extend the time allotted to perform the action to save training time (and go easy on the Drill Sergeants). Hopefully, they are no longer teaching any use of the forward assist assembly and I don't know what that time is today but if it's more than five seconds...

The second item is that those tasks which garner low pass rates in training are not trained in the schools and training centers in many cases, they are flagged out for "in unit training." Not because they're too difficult in all cases for the institution to train but because the low pass rate makes the school or center look bad. There's more but those are two examples.

Then there's the fact that units don't have time in too many cases to properly train because of the same three factors -- but that's another thread.