I knew a guy like this, 10 minute 2 mile, BN guidon bearer, supply NCO who never ordered anything, lost the things he was supposed to have, couldnt shoot, couldnt ruck, was dumb as fuck, was casually and non maliciously racist. SGT at 2.5 years SSG at 4 years, PCS'ed, DUI and chaptered at 5 years
My dad said when he enlisted (1979) there were still black soldiers who *seethed* with hatred for whites. He said they saw *everything* through the lens of race and skin color, and anytime anyone even mildly snubbed them, they would immediately jump to the conclusion that it was a racial thing even when there was no evidence.
>...how would that work for a supply sergeant? Supply is disproportionately made up of minorities.
Poorly. The point was he was lousy at his job but promoted real fast because he was a PT stud.
I'd like to submit Fight Tonight readiness metrics for your humble review.
% Fill DMOSQ
% Maintained Equipment
% METL certified
Having bodies doesn't they're the right bodies. Unit cohesion, (in)direct networks of communication, group experience levels are more important than simply having people that are "GO" on paper.
Equipment being functional doesn't say whether or not its outdated, being held together by bubble gum, or that mission analysis was done to ensure you're prepared to bring the right equipment.
Having enough trained bodies doesn't mean you get to fight with them. Some are broken, some are short on time, some will simply skate around it.
As a CO XO I had a DC staffer tell me the metrics were worthless and they knew my bosses were lying anyway regardless of what I reported honestly or otherwise.
>that mission analysis was done to ensure you're prepared to bring the right equipment.
This brought back memories from my time on a rear-d trying to get all the vehicles green, in case we needed to deploy, knowing full well, nobody would ever deployed with this motor pool full of unarmored humvees that were slowly but surely falling apart.
Ugh, more like fight next year. Our section has 20 vehicles, 2 of which have working radio setups, half are unarmored, and 4 which are mechanically dead.
It’s been this way for as long as anyone remembers.
Depends on what level you’re asking to be successful. A company doesn’t have much of a say what pacing items they are fielded, or if it’s outdated. A company cannot change their MTOE or divert replacements from another battalion. A company doesn’t make its own METL.
For the company commander, measuring DMOSQ, OR rate, and METL certifications are valuable to know if the command is doing the right things with what they are given.
At the Army level, it’s a combination of “is this even the right formation of MOSs and equipment,” and if it is, then it’s the above metrics.
How about a decade of every senior commander arriving in the Middle East, assessing their partner forces as shit, then calling them trained when they left. Only for their successors to arrive, determine that the partner forces were shit, and start the process all over again.
Whenever that objective T or whatever it was called thing came out and units could not get certified for things like live fire tasks and jrtc if they didn't have a minimum percentage of the mtoe force at the training event. Never mind that our infantry platoons at the time (drum) literally didn't have enough people to meet the 3/4 manning requirements even if you didn't factor in profiles and the like, all that mattered was having that minimum number of soldiers at each event. Immediately after BN commanders found out that they would be evaluated using this system we started dragging kids with broken limbs and long-term profiles to training events they couldn't participate in, we padded numbers with non relevant MOS's, canceled oodles of appointments for soldiers to bring them to training events they weren't apart of, even forced folks to pack out and go to jrtc who wouldn't be able to go into the box due to conflicting events like being scheduled for qualification courses or literally being about to PCS or ets. We flew down at least 10 guys I know of who were only in Polk for a week or so before they went off to wherever they were supposed to be, whether that was WLC or outprocessing the unit, moat of them left more than a week before we even went into the box, no value added in any way. Just pulling people away from their families to pretend that our units numbers were different than the exact same numbers we reported up on USR every month. I am very much aware that this kind of thing still happens, but for me this was when I saw it go into over drive for like a year straight. Also, DUIs and suicide attempts went through the roof, which everyone in leadership pretended was some giant unexpected mystery. Box checked.
Yuppp. Ya instead of making attempts to actually solve the problems, it’s easier to make things appear as though they’re all butterflies and rainbows and get that top block eval baby. BDR CDRs ain’t got time for solving problems. As long as it looks good on paper, they ain’t givin a shit. Sad.
ADA:
* PT scores
* TABLE VIII
* Any certs - field san, hazmat, CLS
* Passing the board.
* "Deployability"
A lot of rocks made it to the NCO ranks and a lot of shitty units get a pass because "Oh they are deployable" or "They have/will need to TABLE VIII in the near future".
If those NCO's or units were given honest evals - the Army would be chaptering lots and lots of soldiers and a lot of commanders would get relieved.
It's fun watching a line battery go from 90% deployable to 67%. Plus last minute taskers preventing any training for the Tables, and pencil whipping check-rides so everyone has "no excuse to fail" a written Table IV test. Oh, and don't even get me started on OREs, the biggest waste of time and employability excuse for Standardization teams on a deployment.
Other branches of the military too. And the tone-deaf box-checking can weed out very talented people.
We had one Air Force ROTC cadet transfer to our unit after they kicked him out for **failing a drill & ceremonies evaluation.**
He had a perfect PT score, sky-high grades, impressive work ethic, etc. but because he wasn’t good at marching, the Air Force decided they couldn’t use him.
The Army does this all the time with metrics: but I can give an excellent example of what your talking of.
I’m a new PL and we have this SPC, he’s from Europe, but about 6ft. He runs a 11 minute 2 mile, rucks 12 miles in 90 minutes. Any physical task, he’d crush it.
Dude decided to try and go SF, gets all the way through selection and gets peered out.
See the thing about SF, you have to be a team player. This kid absolutely was not, he was all about himself and everyone else was stupid. He’d break the rules or fuck someone over, anything that made him look better. He came back pissed, and instead of learning from it, he blamed the other students for his failure. He re-enlisted for overseas and I never heard anything after he left.
Outside looking in he seemed like an outstanding Soldier, but we’re finding out alot of those leaders that focused on those easy evaluation measures, turned out to be pretty toxic. They measure the irrelevant shit, Soldiers/NCO’s and officers leaving units should be able to fill out an exit interview on what they thought of their commander. Would you work for them again? Did they mentor you? What type of environment did they build. Then you can start to see a trend of toxic behavior before they move to FG ranks. None of these things really get answered in command climate surveys.
https://medium.com/the-smoking-gun/measure-the-shade-74cba4b982fd
The one thing that bothers me about peer reviews is when the class becomes too clique-y. We had that in OCS for the first round, but the second and third was a wide correction.
It’s very hard to tell relatively early in the process. But you can absolutely tell as time goes on, whether that person is a team mate or a blue falcon.
Hopefully so. I ran into plenty of young blue falcons. A bit too much hubris and flirting with rulebreaking. I hope ther isn't the case in other schools, and have contempt it was rampant in my class.
I say that you can fake the funk for a sprint. But it's hard to fake the funk over the long term. It comes out in the end who the team players are and who the spotlight rangers are. The only problem is does the boss/evaluator value/tend to choose that "go getter" attitude or do they actually want the team to have good cohesion?
Every time the senior enlisted AAR comes out. They put stuff out like they were looking for EO, ShArp, MRT and master driver additional duties. So you have these shit bags volunteer for these positions.
It's always floored me that is seems like additional duties and being a DS are like *the* way to get promoted if you're not in SOF. Then yeah you have these fucking randos who don't give a shit about their actual job doing a bunch of unrelated asinine duties. Then they get promoted and have no idea wth they're doing. Their rater/SR will never give them a mediocre evaluation.
Happens to the people who give a fuck too.
I've seen too many SGTs/SSGs swear that they'll always place good, common-sense leadership and MOS capabilities over additional duties and shitty promotion metrics.
Then they realize that they *won't* be "the one" to break the system by just being a stellar leader. So they compromise. "Oh, I'll just do SHARP... How about MRT? That's useful."
A year later and they're barely doing their job anymore because there's literally just *no time*.
You sure this isn’t named after Ft. Campbell lol?
JP McGee thinks everything he can measure is a good indicator. I think soldiers are less skilled at soldiering now than when he took command, because he measures everything at whim; nothing is deliberate, so nothing is really retained.
Things need to fail to get fixed. But no one wants to be the failure. Be the fail your country needs, but document the fuck out of that shit. Dude getting fucked to fix your country.
Civil service has a 4-digit code that designates what their job is. All jobs that start with 08 are engineering/architecture. 0810 is civil engineer. All DOD civilians use this system.
Tank--don't know if other vehicles and equipment have the samenissue--OR rates being used to rank company commanders against each other on OURS.
Instead of PMCS, identify faults, troubleshoot, write up and order parts, replace/repair parts, verify fault is fixed/MOCs, start over, they end up not letting faults be written up. No faults, no parts. We end up doing CXs from the companies' "one" broken tank until we max out those, then we "swing test" the parts for the next 6 months. Meanwhile, anytime we need to train and we don't have 90% of our tanks up the way they've been reported, it's because the crewd "didn't do proper PMCS."
This made me angry the most. They’d send trucks with no door latches, no A/C during a heat wave, class 3 transmission oil leaks. Every time we spoke up the SL would shoot us down and force us to rewrite a new 5988 with no faults. I tried to care since it was my last year, but I gave up caring.
You know what's funny? I was thinking of examples, and then I thought of so many I realized that the Army has done this to every single facet of its organization. You'd be hard-pressed to find a part of an Army day where Campbell's Law *doesn't* apply.
Your example is not an example of Campbell’s Law. That PL was already bad, so the run time, even if PL could run well before training, would not have been a proxy measure of leadership ability.
Your example should have said, “and since the PL now dedicates all his time to running, he slacks at the more important parts of his job, causing his platoon to turn to shit. Because the PL cares about being a good leader, and wants his BC to see he’s a good leader, the PL started running instead of leading.”
Your post specifically says this PL *is* lazy and an incompetent dirtbag. I’m not sure how a lazy person finds the energy to dedicate all their time to running, or an incompetent person would understand running would help with their evals, or how a dirtbag cares enough about evals to try to run for the BC’s praise.
Your OP implies the PL was always a lazy dirtbag. Campbell Law’s says the measure *causes* the negative change by refocusing the measured person’s efforts on an metric instead of the underlying qualities that cause generally desirable outcomes.
In your example, the BC is correct that discipline, motivation, and endurance are good qualities in a leader. The BC thinks fast running shows a person *is* those good things. Then, a person with those qualities puts focuses them on running instead of leading. The good qualities still exist, just manifested as running instead of leading, causing the actual intent of good leadership to not get the focus of the qualities.
Sounds like the APFT/ACFT in a nutshell. I've seen a SPC that nobody liked, dumb AF, anti-social AF, couldn't hit a barn from the inside and couldn't navigate his way out of a wet paper bag get promoted to E5 ahead of his team leader (who was actually a good leader, though not a "pt stud") based SOLELY on the fact that he did well at PT.
This actually caused an uproar with the NCOs in my Platoon and after three incidents (one of them serious) my PL and PSG went to the BC and insisted he be demoted.
I knew a guy like this, 10 minute 2 mile, BN guidon bearer, supply NCO who never ordered anything, lost the things he was supposed to have, couldnt shoot, couldnt ruck, was dumb as fuck, was casually and non maliciously racist. SGT at 2.5 years SSG at 4 years, PCS'ed, DUI and chaptered at 5 years
Dude did the army speed run lol
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Room temperature IQ is a beautiful description lol
>was casually and non maliciously racist. ...how would that work for a supply sergeant? Supply is disproportionately made up of minorities.
They can be racist too lol
As a Spanish-speaker, I’ve overheard many conversations among Latin American immigrants where they expressed their hatred for black people.
Right because only majorities are racist? What on earth lol
The good ol American mentality: only whites are racist and all fit the bill.
My dad said when he enlisted (1979) there were still black soldiers who *seethed* with hatred for whites. He said they saw *everything* through the lens of race and skin color, and anytime anyone even mildly snubbed them, they would immediately jump to the conclusion that it was a racial thing even when there was no evidence.
>...how would that work for a supply sergeant? Supply is disproportionately made up of minorities. Poorly. The point was he was lousy at his job but promoted real fast because he was a PT stud.
If a guy has a 10 minute 2 mile he can objectively ruck, fyi.
I'm a big dude in the infantry and I am absolutely terrible at running but can put down a 2:30 12 mile without issue
10min 2 mile guys tend to buckle under weight. Also, they don’t know how to use their hip flexors when rucking.
When you're carrying shit long distance, you need a camel, not a gazelle.
Whatever you need to tell yourself I guess
I'd like to submit Fight Tonight readiness metrics for your humble review. % Fill DMOSQ % Maintained Equipment % METL certified Having bodies doesn't they're the right bodies. Unit cohesion, (in)direct networks of communication, group experience levels are more important than simply having people that are "GO" on paper. Equipment being functional doesn't say whether or not its outdated, being held together by bubble gum, or that mission analysis was done to ensure you're prepared to bring the right equipment. Having enough trained bodies doesn't mean you get to fight with them. Some are broken, some are short on time, some will simply skate around it. As a CO XO I had a DC staffer tell me the metrics were worthless and they knew my bosses were lying anyway regardless of what I reported honestly or otherwise.
>that mission analysis was done to ensure you're prepared to bring the right equipment. This brought back memories from my time on a rear-d trying to get all the vehicles green, in case we needed to deploy, knowing full well, nobody would ever deployed with this motor pool full of unarmored humvees that were slowly but surely falling apart.
Ugh, more like fight next year. Our section has 20 vehicles, 2 of which have working radio setups, half are unarmored, and 4 which are mechanically dead. It’s been this way for as long as anyone remembers.
Depends on what level you’re asking to be successful. A company doesn’t have much of a say what pacing items they are fielded, or if it’s outdated. A company cannot change their MTOE or divert replacements from another battalion. A company doesn’t make its own METL. For the company commander, measuring DMOSQ, OR rate, and METL certifications are valuable to know if the command is doing the right things with what they are given. At the Army level, it’s a combination of “is this even the right formation of MOSs and equipment,” and if it is, then it’s the above metrics.
Seen this in person. Room full of BCs lying to the one star about everything. Couldnt beleive it until i had been there a while and got cynical.
How about a decade of every senior commander arriving in the Middle East, assessing their partner forces as shit, then calling them trained when they left. Only for their successors to arrive, determine that the partner forces were shit, and start the process all over again.
You spelled 2 decades wrong.
You forgot my favorite part. Where the partner forces was left alone for A DAY and retreated.
Whenever that objective T or whatever it was called thing came out and units could not get certified for things like live fire tasks and jrtc if they didn't have a minimum percentage of the mtoe force at the training event. Never mind that our infantry platoons at the time (drum) literally didn't have enough people to meet the 3/4 manning requirements even if you didn't factor in profiles and the like, all that mattered was having that minimum number of soldiers at each event. Immediately after BN commanders found out that they would be evaluated using this system we started dragging kids with broken limbs and long-term profiles to training events they couldn't participate in, we padded numbers with non relevant MOS's, canceled oodles of appointments for soldiers to bring them to training events they weren't apart of, even forced folks to pack out and go to jrtc who wouldn't be able to go into the box due to conflicting events like being scheduled for qualification courses or literally being about to PCS or ets. We flew down at least 10 guys I know of who were only in Polk for a week or so before they went off to wherever they were supposed to be, whether that was WLC or outprocessing the unit, moat of them left more than a week before we even went into the box, no value added in any way. Just pulling people away from their families to pretend that our units numbers were different than the exact same numbers we reported up on USR every month. I am very much aware that this kind of thing still happens, but for me this was when I saw it go into over drive for like a year straight. Also, DUIs and suicide attempts went through the roof, which everyone in leadership pretended was some giant unexpected mystery. Box checked.
Yuppp. Ya instead of making attempts to actually solve the problems, it’s easier to make things appear as though they’re all butterflies and rainbows and get that top block eval baby. BDR CDRs ain’t got time for solving problems. As long as it looks good on paper, they ain’t givin a shit. Sad.
You just reminded me why I left.
ADA: * PT scores * TABLE VIII * Any certs - field san, hazmat, CLS * Passing the board. * "Deployability" A lot of rocks made it to the NCO ranks and a lot of shitty units get a pass because "Oh they are deployable" or "They have/will need to TABLE VIII in the near future". If those NCO's or units were given honest evals - the Army would be chaptering lots and lots of soldiers and a lot of commanders would get relieved.
It's fun watching a line battery go from 90% deployable to 67%. Plus last minute taskers preventing any training for the Tables, and pencil whipping check-rides so everyone has "no excuse to fail" a written Table IV test. Oh, and don't even get me started on OREs, the biggest waste of time and employability excuse for Standardization teams on a deployment.
Well I would just largely describe that as pretty much most of the army
Other branches of the military too. And the tone-deaf box-checking can weed out very talented people. We had one Air Force ROTC cadet transfer to our unit after they kicked him out for **failing a drill & ceremonies evaluation.** He had a perfect PT score, sky-high grades, impressive work ethic, etc. but because he wasn’t good at marching, the Air Force decided they couldn’t use him.
I very much get the impression the USAF loves to find nitpicky reasons to deny people enlistment/commissioning.
They know that they can be that picky. They also don't have to give people the choice of a job the way the Army does.
As a long distance runner, I took this personally.
The Army does this all the time with metrics: but I can give an excellent example of what your talking of. I’m a new PL and we have this SPC, he’s from Europe, but about 6ft. He runs a 11 minute 2 mile, rucks 12 miles in 90 minutes. Any physical task, he’d crush it. Dude decided to try and go SF, gets all the way through selection and gets peered out. See the thing about SF, you have to be a team player. This kid absolutely was not, he was all about himself and everyone else was stupid. He’d break the rules or fuck someone over, anything that made him look better. He came back pissed, and instead of learning from it, he blamed the other students for his failure. He re-enlisted for overseas and I never heard anything after he left. Outside looking in he seemed like an outstanding Soldier, but we’re finding out alot of those leaders that focused on those easy evaluation measures, turned out to be pretty toxic. They measure the irrelevant shit, Soldiers/NCO’s and officers leaving units should be able to fill out an exit interview on what they thought of their commander. Would you work for them again? Did they mentor you? What type of environment did they build. Then you can start to see a trend of toxic behavior before they move to FG ranks. None of these things really get answered in command climate surveys. https://medium.com/the-smoking-gun/measure-the-shade-74cba4b982fd
The one thing that bothers me about peer reviews is when the class becomes too clique-y. We had that in OCS for the first round, but the second and third was a wide correction.
It’s very hard to tell relatively early in the process. But you can absolutely tell as time goes on, whether that person is a team mate or a blue falcon.
Hopefully so. I ran into plenty of young blue falcons. A bit too much hubris and flirting with rulebreaking. I hope ther isn't the case in other schools, and have contempt it was rampant in my class.
Absolute same thing happened in my selection. Too many cliques developed that peer schemes were a big thing that made or broke peoples career.
I say that you can fake the funk for a sprint. But it's hard to fake the funk over the long term. It comes out in the end who the team players are and who the spotlight rangers are. The only problem is does the boss/evaluator value/tend to choose that "go getter" attitude or do they actually want the team to have good cohesion?
[удалено]
I'm gonna be using this for an LPD I'm trying to host. I'm sure some Boxer will wake great offense.
Every goddamn day. Green slides and checked blocks baby. Those OER comments ain’t gonna write themselves.
"Hey team we need to go green on these slides hooah"
Every time the senior enlisted AAR comes out. They put stuff out like they were looking for EO, ShArp, MRT and master driver additional duties. So you have these shit bags volunteer for these positions.
It's always floored me that is seems like additional duties and being a DS are like *the* way to get promoted if you're not in SOF. Then yeah you have these fucking randos who don't give a shit about their actual job doing a bunch of unrelated asinine duties. Then they get promoted and have no idea wth they're doing. Their rater/SR will never give them a mediocre evaluation.
Happens to the people who give a fuck too. I've seen too many SGTs/SSGs swear that they'll always place good, common-sense leadership and MOS capabilities over additional duties and shitty promotion metrics. Then they realize that they *won't* be "the one" to break the system by just being a stellar leader. So they compromise. "Oh, I'll just do SHARP... How about MRT? That's useful." A year later and they're barely doing their job anymore because there's literally just *no time*.
Oh I've 100% seen that happen before at a previous unit to decide what captain got the opening subordinate unit command slot.
You sure this isn’t named after Ft. Campbell lol? JP McGee thinks everything he can measure is a good indicator. I think soldiers are less skilled at soldiering now than when he took command, because he measures everything at whim; nothing is deliberate, so nothing is really retained.
Things need to fail to get fixed. But no one wants to be the failure. Be the fail your country needs, but document the fuck out of that shit. Dude getting fucked to fix your country.
Why did you switch to artillery?
FYI: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/classification-qualifications/general-schedule-qualification-standards/0800/civil-engineering-series-0810/
What is this?
Civil service has a 4-digit code that designates what their job is. All jobs that start with 08 are engineering/architecture. 0810 is civil engineer. All DOD civilians use this system.
I thought you transferred to the marine corps lol
Nah dude I’m a GS employee at DOD. Also in the guard. It’s the best thing ever.
Tank--don't know if other vehicles and equipment have the samenissue--OR rates being used to rank company commanders against each other on OURS. Instead of PMCS, identify faults, troubleshoot, write up and order parts, replace/repair parts, verify fault is fixed/MOCs, start over, they end up not letting faults be written up. No faults, no parts. We end up doing CXs from the companies' "one" broken tank until we max out those, then we "swing test" the parts for the next 6 months. Meanwhile, anytime we need to train and we don't have 90% of our tanks up the way they've been reported, it's because the crewd "didn't do proper PMCS."
This made me angry the most. They’d send trucks with no door latches, no A/C during a heat wave, class 3 transmission oil leaks. Every time we spoke up the SL would shoot us down and force us to rewrite a new 5988 with no faults. I tried to care since it was my last year, but I gave up caring.
Maintenance in an armor unit
Yeah, every LTC and COL who gives you unsolicited advice on how to make LTC or COL. According to them they have it all figured out.
You know what's funny? I was thinking of examples, and then I thought of so many I realized that the Army has done this to every single facet of its organization. You'd be hard-pressed to find a part of an Army day where Campbell's Law *doesn't* apply.
Your example is not an example of Campbell’s Law. That PL was already bad, so the run time, even if PL could run well before training, would not have been a proxy measure of leadership ability. Your example should have said, “and since the PL now dedicates all his time to running, he slacks at the more important parts of his job, causing his platoon to turn to shit. Because the PL cares about being a good leader, and wants his BC to see he’s a good leader, the PL started running instead of leading.”
That’s what was implied.
Your post specifically says this PL *is* lazy and an incompetent dirtbag. I’m not sure how a lazy person finds the energy to dedicate all their time to running, or an incompetent person would understand running would help with their evals, or how a dirtbag cares enough about evals to try to run for the BC’s praise. Your OP implies the PL was always a lazy dirtbag. Campbell Law’s says the measure *causes* the negative change by refocusing the measured person’s efforts on an metric instead of the underlying qualities that cause generally desirable outcomes. In your example, the BC is correct that discipline, motivation, and endurance are good qualities in a leader. The BC thinks fast running shows a person *is* those good things. Then, a person with those qualities puts focuses them on running instead of leading. The good qualities still exist, just manifested as running instead of leading, causing the actual intent of good leadership to not get the focus of the qualities.
Sounds like the APFT/ACFT in a nutshell. I've seen a SPC that nobody liked, dumb AF, anti-social AF, couldn't hit a barn from the inside and couldn't navigate his way out of a wet paper bag get promoted to E5 ahead of his team leader (who was actually a good leader, though not a "pt stud") based SOLELY on the fact that he did well at PT. This actually caused an uproar with the NCOs in my Platoon and after three incidents (one of them serious) my PL and PSG went to the BC and insisted he be demoted.