Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
As an aside, Malcolm Gladwell in doing the research for that book also discovered that identifying potential experts at early stages was quite difficult. A great deal of specificity was needed in even trying.
That was something that always annoyed me from the first day of ROTC until finishing Ranger School a few years later. Nothing but poorly crafted evaluations and non-expert evaluators (most of them in ROTC were upperclassmen or LTs - what did they know?). IOBC tried to mimic Ranger School so as to "prepare us" for it, since having a tab was apparently so important; and then there was Ranger School (nuff said). If you looked at my evals from ROTC (barely passed), IOBC (center mass), and Ranger School (barely passed) - or sat in on my unit AARs at NTC (first as a PL, then as an XO) you would see a whole lot of evaluators whom I never saw eye to eye with. An RI in the Florida phase of Ranger School tried to convince the Bn Cdr to not let me graduate because I had 5 major minuses for mouthing off to RI's (I think 6 was the limit). The one exception was as a PL at JRTC where the OCs apparently couldn't say enough good things about me - coincidentally, I thought that JRTC did a far superior job of letting the scenario play out and avoiding canned scenarios.

Once I was deployed on real world missions, everything made sense to me. Most of what I did in Iraq probably would have earned me a no-go in Ranger School and a "stop training" at NTC because it didn't fit the linear-thinking preconceptions that most evaluators seemed to hold. But I would defy anyone to explain why any of it was tactically unsound or not in accordance with doctrine. After OIF I, I was explaining to one of my former PSGs from another unit how we executed an ambush a few months earlier. It looked nothing like anything in 7-8, but it violated none of the doctrine and it was tactically sound. I still remember his reaction: "Damn, that's pretty good. Good thing you did that in real life and not in Ranger School." That says it all, imo.