Train as we fight, but fight as we train?

Train hard, but make work easy – not the other way around. I was waiting outside a building today, and a I waited, I watched the NCO give a talk to her squad. She said, among other things, that we “train as we fight.”

I don’t know what her talk was about. That was all that I could catch given my distance and the wind.

THE MORE WE SWEAT IN PEACE…

Sometimes, at work, it feels that if something happens too easily, the military should make it harder. After all, “The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.”

That refers to training. When we’re actually doing the thing we’re paid to do, we want to make it as easy as possible for us.

STAFF OFFICER SLIDE SHOW BULLSHIT

Such is the case with our slides and our writing. Just look at resumes for Federal jobs versus resumes intended for the private sector. For a federal job, more is better.

Presumably, some automated screening processes for keywords, and therefore the wordier the resume, the more likely it’ll get past the automatic screening.

The same thing to with writing. The Army’s manual on writing, AR 25-50, encourages brevity, succinctness. Yeah, a lot of our doctrine say one thing and give a certain impression – it’s a different story in practice.

The emails I receive? Frequent rambling.

The forms I fill out? Rambling, and lots of it, and lots of shit re-said in different. And lots of forms. That request for dumpsters and latrines that I mentioned in previous posts, it’s still an issue. I had to fill out yet another form, thus adding up to 17 documents and 50+ pages.

The PowerPoint slides? The worst. Although, it seems that for many of our slides, the intent is to have it printed out, and kept as a type of order or reference.

JUST STICK TO THE BASICS

None of what we have to write about I find all that complicated. We can 80/20 our work into people, equipment, and information, time, places. Yet… eh, fuck it.