Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
my frothing rants at the personnel system, HRC and Generals and their priorities. I refuse to be baited, I'll just go quiet quietly drunk and exude silent wrath...

Contemplating on how well -- or how poorly -- the Army can reinvent wheels -- and the old saw that continuing to do the same thing hoping for a different result is insanity.

I wonder if your neighbor ever considered the fact that not necessarily everyone who wants to command a Bn should do so...
As I have said on here before, one of the common sense tests the Army still fails miserably is selection for resident War College. FAOs are the only element in the Army that deal with strategic issues as centerpiece to their existence. The War College is there trying to expand the mindset of selected officers with regards to strategy and its role--hopefully--driving operational and tactical levels of war. But FAOs do not get selected for resident War College; the best you could hope for (at least when I was in the zone) was non-resident. I suspect that any FAO who did make it did so as a dual tracker who commanded a battalion. As for GO top blocks, the DCSOPS then LTG Peay top blocked me on a special and I have no doubt that rating was important to reaching O5. It did not get me to resident War College.

Which brings up another subject--My experience with FAOs was they tended to eat their own. I had one try and make a snack out of me early on and I know that he did so to several other FAOs. He was a DATT 6 times who never mentored and always looked for chicken caca. In my case it was a coffee cup that I forgot to clean and my "failure" to keep tabs on Sudanese Army buddies after I had graduated from their junior CGSC (CAS3). In this case, he was both my rater and my senior rater--waived and approvedby personnel command. So he gave me a "2" on the front of my OER as rater and then top blocked me on the back as senior rater. Then lost the OER; I ended up giving personnel command a zerox copy rather than have a one year gap in my record.

Another senior FAO--in fact the last Africa bureau chief of DHS/DAS--used another FAO's first name on my 1st rating as the DATT in Zaire. The othr guy has the same name and we both were qualified as 48Gs. Plus we both had worked with this guy before. Still I believe--color me old fashioned--you should be able to get the first name correct of someone you are rating.

So it ain't just the GOs preserving future battalion commanders; it is us as well.

Best

Tom