Quote Originally Posted by jenniferro10 View Post
...for all the "success stories" that you guys are pointing out, there seem to be many more failures.
on this thread. If you're referring to comments on other threads, I'm sure there are some success stories -- and I'm equally sure there are far more failures.

That's mostly due to priority of effort followed by the size of the Armed Forces and a lot of bureaucratic impediments. It's also due to this phenomenon:
"...People ask them about the functioning of their weapons, in order to improve the weapon or training to use it, but there's no similar system (outside of some informal loops, or "on paper" processes that aren't executed) to do the same for cultural training."
Rightly or wrongly -- and I'm making no excuse, just telling you what 'is' -- the weapon is seen as important, the cultural training is seen as as nice to have by most (not all) at all ranks. 'Important' beats 'nice to have.' That also means there's no good answer to your original question re: how do we capture cultural information from the soldiers' experience, make it useful... and also feed it back into the training system. The issue isn't seen as important enough to make a full scale press on it -- which is what your query would entail. The system is too big and too broadly focused (which culture is important next year? In 2015? 2025?)
"...then I think it's to be expected that there's no real institutionalized method to avoid problems like the one I heard the other day: about 25 soldiers received language training specific to a particular region that, when they got there, was useless because all of the local people spoke a very dissimilar dialect. Not one person ever asked these guys: Hey, was your training useful? No? Why? What do they speak there, if not what we thought?
Bad, wrong -- but stuff like that happens frequently; not only with language or cultural training but with other even more important and more expensive training. A unit is destined to do something somewhere and before they arrive, events occur that mean a unit is needed elsewhere for a different mission. The planners have to weigh priorities and assign someone to the most important mission regardless of training. That again is not an excuse, just a reason. It shouldn't happen; we could certainly do better but it's a chaotic system, not a smooth machine and, again, the priority goes to life and death stuff, not aids to performance.

I'm old and long retired, so I can't talk about now with any facility, I can only tell you, based on experience, the 'why' of some things and wish you luck in your quest:
I remain open to discussing directly with interested parties...