Zero-Defects Mentality

[Hacksaw]

Wow. Your mechanics were ambitious. Mine would have just tried to convince me that the fault was misdiagnosed and that the part is no longer necessary.

I was about to type something tongue in cheek and realized it would be a disservice to SFC Oh and many others... yes they were very ambitious, very good, and a large part of my unit's great success... weren't much to look at in Class A's but I bought many a pitcher of beer for guys who got vehicles operational (broken down in convoy) when others couldn't...

So yes they were ambitious, and loyal to a fault when they were called into the Bn Cdr's the following day and I went in first and took all the heat and they walked... funny thing was a week later the Bn Cdr bought me a beer and told me he'd have been disappointed if it had gone down any other way...

So they weren't all zero defect, just the overwhelming perponderence

Live well and row!!!

[Schmedlap]

I was about to type something tongue in cheek and realized it would be a disservice to SFC Oh and many others... yes they were very ambitious, very good, and a large part of my unit's great success... weren't much to look at in Class A's but I bought many a pitcher of beer for guys who got vehicles operational (broken down in convoy) when others couldn't...

I know exactly what you're talking about. I had a love-hate relationship with my mechanics. Hated them in garrison. Loved them when deployed. Getting them to do anything even half-assed in garrison was as hopeless as trying to unmelt ice cream. While deployed, it was like someone pulled the q-tips out of their brains. Putting a thrown track back on while under fire (despite my telling them to just skull drag the damn thing), pulling pack on an almost daily basis in a tiny patrol base that literally got mortared every fricken day, doing all of the emplacement and recovery of concrete barriers around polling centers and getting attacked several times in the process; filling Hescos and emplacing barriers at newly established outposts throughout our AO at night and then going back to fixing vehicles during the day; recovering damaged vehicles under fire, etc, etc. It was not glamorous, but it was hot, miserable, dangerous, and tedious.

A buddy of mine who recently deployed asked me what I would have done differently on that deployment, had I been the CO, rather than the XO. I told him, "I'd meet the support platoon everyday as they delivered LOGPAC and I'd thank them. And I'd meet the mechanics everyday on their maintenance pad to thank them for the day of work that they were about to put in." I had a lot of respect for the guys who did that miserable work and then re-enlisted.

[Steve the Planner]

Hack:

"e.g. If I tell a Motor SGT... your team doesn't go home until that truck is off the deadline report, and the part to fix the truck is not in... I have no one else to blame when they get caught acquiring the part from some other unit's vehicle..."

In one of those armor battalions in Germany in the 70's, we learned the essential lessons of Soviet economics---stockpile other stolen parts to use for trade for the ones you needed----heater parts at Graf in February were always worth their weight in gold. (OK, so I date myself, but not some much that Ken's don't make me feel young and chipper).

This Army training was all very helpful to me in later economics courses---I really understood command economies, and the black markets essential to make them work.

Steve

[Ken White]

In one of those armor battalions in Germany in the 70's... (OK, so I date myself, but not some much that Ken's don't make me feel young and chipper).

M4A3E8, M26 or even an M41A1C at the newest...

[Pete]

Slapout, what you say about the Army as a developer of high-tech systems has an element of truth. Although the Cold War Army was dominated by the Armor and Airborne cliques, for a while in the late '50s and early '60s the Redstone Arsenal guys with their rockets and missiles gave the "I rode with Patton" and "I jumped with Ridgeway" factions a run for their money. Air Defense Artillery eventually became a branch of its own in 1968 when their tubes had been replaced by missiles. Maxwell Taylor's book The Uncertain Trumpet in 1959 argued that the Army had to get away from an over-reliance on massive retaliation and high-tech and get back to old-fashioned Infantry soldiering. In more ways than one that is what this forum is all about.

With that having been said, what I want to know is whether Ken wore his Ridgeway cap with the brim stiffened or natural and wrinkled.

[Ken White]

With that having been said, what I want to know is whether Ken wore his Ridgeway cap with the brim stiffened or natural and wrinkled.

It wasn't really a Ridgeway cap and few in the Army called it that, it was a Lousville Spring Up (LINK) (well ,the good ones were, anyway). In the linked page, the two MPs in the top picture have Spring Ups; the one with the silver leaf is a Spring Up while the guys loading the truck in the bottom pic have stiffened field Caps.

Lot of people made fun of it but it was about the only headgear ever worn by the US Army that wasn't copied from someone else. It was a pain to wear and carry regardless of the web page's contention it was popular; that was sort of a mixed bag...

The original field cap which Ridgeway and the whole Army wore was worn 'natural and wrinkled' -- sort of; people applied their own mutations which is why Ridgeway wanted something done to improve uniformity and appearance (proving even the really good Generals can get wild hairs about inconsequential stuff...). The first fix was a flattened and folded newspaper or manila folder; the second was a plastic stiffener which cost $.35. Then came the Spring Ups. Of course, in Airborne units, even that wasn't enough so you had a plastic stiffener in your Spring Up and then shrunk the fabric so it was perfectly straight and unwrinkled...

The sacrifices one makes for ones country...

[slapout9]

Slapout, what you say about the Army as a developer of high-tech systems has an element of truth. Although the Cold War Army was dominated by the Armor and Airborne cliques, for a while in the late '50s and early '60s the Redstone Arsenal guys with their rockets and missiles gave the "I rode with Patton" and "I jumped with Ridgeway" factions a run for their money. Air Defense Artillery eventually became a branch of its own in 1968 when their tubes had been replaced by missiles. Maxwell Taylor's book The Uncertain Trumpet in 1959 argued that the Army had to get away from an over-reliance on massive retaliation and high-tech and get back to old-fashioned Infantry soldiering. In more ways than one that is what this forum is all about.

With that having been said, what I want to know is whether Ken wore his Ridgeway cap with the brim stiffened or natural and wrinkled.

It is all true, I grew up with it and watched it happen from the Cuban Missile Crisis on. A better book is War and Peace In The Space Age by General James Gavin. The Army never did believe it massive retaliation....They believed in "Bring The Battle Back To The Battlefield" and they also Believed that Special Forces were the people to handle the "The Brush Fire Wars of The Future" along with The Air Cavalry and the Marines. I see you are kind of new here so you may not have read all the previous posts on this subject (which has been discussed several times before). Which is why me and Ken rag each other so much, we already know what each other is going to say, except Ken never did learn the proper way to exit an aircraft without causing twists in his suspension lines.

[Ken White]

replaced the PRC 8/9/10 that replaced the SCR 300 I used in Korea? Where I also used an '03A1 with a star gauged barrel and a 7.8 power Unertl scope, much less an M1. Also carried occasionally a BAR that fired semi-auto (will reveal secret to that for a small fee)...

Note that Slap still believes all that foolishness they told him in Jump School in an effort to slow jumpers down prevent run out, high speed exit jumps which increase the possibility of hung jumpers -- that was bad juju for the boys in the Black hats who had a bunch of peacetime safety constraints.

I didn't get twists after I discovered that keeping your Static Line UNtwisted was the key to keeping your chute untwisted. Body position and exit have almost nothing to do with it. If they did, you'd never see twists on a helicopter jump -- but you do...

It's probably noteworthy that the old 101st Jump School at Campbell which normally conducted a Benning-like three week jump School ran two Wing awarding courses with three jumps instead of five and of only four total days back to back during the Lebanon crisis of '58. The Benning course is as long and dumb as it is in order to justify Instructor Contact Hours (ICH) which the Staffing guides use to determine the manning for TRADOC and Division / Post Schools. Said ICH are the real reason most Army schools cram a 40 hour course into three to four weeks...

Solution to that problem is to do away with those really dumb staffing guides which are primarily job justification booklets for manpower survey teams. Just eliminating that staffing criteria and the survey teams can reduce the cost of training and that saving can be applied to better, outcome based training.

[Schmedlap]

(OK, so I date myself, but not some much that Ken's don't make me feel young and chipper).

Young is very relative in the Army. At the age of 28, I was one of only a handful of people in my company who had used a PRC-77. Just me, the CO (when he was a cadet), 1SG, and the PSGs. Wow.

[Pete]

Shut up, Schmedlap, you're making me feel old with that PRC-77 talk. On the other hand, unlike a certain person the Army never gave either of us an M1 rifle or carbine or an M14. (I had to buy my own Inland carbine.)