re: 5 Ways Rank-and-File Leathernecks Are Disrupting the Marine Corps *VERY LONG*

Honestly, I think they DGAF about what the enlisted guys have to say. They’re just throwing us lowly NCOs a bone, making us think we’ve really got a say.

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Read it.

A lot of it makes sense but they really over complicated the problem/s. The Marine Corps needs to function as a war-fighting machine and ONLY THAT. When I was in, 2006-2010 active duty, we were at war and the Marine Corps was built around fighting wars.

Of course that was under Mattis. Many of my friends who stayed in talk about the culture shift and the willingness of high level SNCOs and Officers to go full PC.

Culture needs to go back to Spartan type training and cutting throats, not pushing women through SOI. Leave that to the Army Rangers

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That wasn't under Mattis, that was mostly under Conway. And he sucked.

And of course nothing about holding females to the same PT standards.
Male has to do 20 pull-ups, female has to do 8. Sounds like equality to me.

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Thoughts?

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Leaders might not like what their junior Marines have to say, Neller warned, but the Corps needs people willing to challenge the status quo.

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Unfortunately, Neller's advice is going to ruin the careers of some young NCO's and officers as they are going to ruffle the wrong feathers, in good faith, and end up purged as a result.

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"No one incentivizes innovators,"

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100% correct

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Reeder's been serving with the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory's

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I was around some people from the Army's counterpart to this unit, and tried to bring some of their recommendations, and my own recommendations forward. I was looked at like I had a 3rd fricking eye.

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CROWDSOURCING IDEAS

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This is good but they better be already thinking about how to handle the information overload that comes with it. Kind of a good problem to have, but a problem, still. There will also be a problem with lack of standardization. This generally only triggers the E-9 and E-8 species. They will have difficulty here.

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"FLATTENING THE BATTALION."

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Briefs well but I suspect it won't work well in practice.

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Infantry units are set up in a pyramid structure and built for efficiency, Mershon said.

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Here is a reason why it won't work well - this young officer does not understand why units are set up the way they are. There is a tradeoff between speed/efficiency and synchronization. Our military has emphasized speed of maneuver but synchronization of support infrastructure.

The whole reason we have jet engines in tanks is so they go fast, for example. But the logistical setup to keep them going is set up for synchronization because if you frick up and can't get fuel to the tank - it stops. In combat, you may assign a main effort and priorty for support but the enemy has a say, so you need synchronization in how you shift support.

I'm curious if these LT's also want to see the fires bn eradicated and if they bristle at how little the maneuver battalion is actually covered by the big guns when you look at the map in FDC. My guess is that they are unaware of this. They probably haven't stepped back to look at the utility of Call For Fire and shift the guns so a commander can "pull" fire support where needed in a short amount of time.

These critical points have been attacked by synchronization and the infrastructure was built to support that.

Back in WWII the nation engaged a lot of big thinkers in tackling logistics. From such efforts, major think tanks of today emerged. From that time, logistics have been a real big deal in our military. As they say, 'tactics are for amateurs, logistics are for professionals'. I'm a bit hesitant to believe we have it as fricked up as these LTs may think. Most of our logistics problems come from screwups in acquisitions - which is something that needs to get fixed.

I seriously LOL'd when I read that he thinks shite is set up for efficiency.

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Flattening them out by eliminating non-combat command billets would instead optimize them for adaptability. By integrating logistics and intelligence officers and analysts at the company level and sharing information from across the battlespace, Mershon said, it'll allow commanders to make decisions faster.

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My hunch is that these guys saw how some intell dudes were pushed down to company level in the GWOT and thought 'hey why don't we do that with all support assets?'. I'd need to see the exact vision on this, but I'm struck they think we don't already share information across the battlespace. I'd like to know if these two LTs have deployed.

The reason those support battalions are stand alone commands is because supplies are almost always transported in bulk by necessity, and then combat units "pull" the supplies in as they need them. Sounds like these guys want more of a "push", which will make support and supply faster at the small unit level - so long as there is materiel available. If you frick up your battlefield calculus and push the wrong amounts you are likely to have more than adequate Materiel X for Alpha Co (nested with that company) and come up short for Bravo Co. And, you're going to have fewer assets available to get that from Alpha to Bravo or from the main supply point to Bravo Co, due to this flattening.

If you get this wrong while on the offensive you lose the initiative but perhaps your attack merely stalls. You can consolidate and go again, though you'll incur more risk. If you get it wrong when conducting a defense it can be ball game very quickly.

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Mills and Mershon also propose removing Marines performing administrative functions from the battalion, such as the headquarters and service or weapons platoon commanders. Those extra personnel could be moved into a training cadre, which Mills said would help relieve some of the strain on company commanders, and provide higher-quality training across the whole unit.

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Maybe I don't understand what they're actually suggesting here, but this seems like a whole lot of stupid to me, and I also think it's a bit of a slap to company commanders.

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IMPROVING TRAINING.

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"Is the workforce we're going to hire going to adhere to paper manuals that stack four feet high?" asked Maj. Dan Whitt

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Um, yes. This was done in the past and it was done incredibly well. As someone that had to deal with a set of manuals that stacked up well above 4ft, I can say that I had no problems doing it. In fact, I know without a doubt I could locate something in a manual like that, way faster than I could via digital. Once familiar with the material, I could pretty much grab the manual and open it up to the page I needed within 5 seconds. You can't navigate through digital materials that quickly because they are nested so you have to do a lot of clicking. I've tried this - hard copy is faster. I thought I could make it work digitally- couldn't be done.

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Instead, depot personnel pitched moving toward animated digital manuals that display on a pair of augmented-reality glasses.

"We have 400 pieces of equipment we work on," Whitt said. "How great would it be to speed up our training requirements?"

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This isn't how our brains are wired. We need a tactile component to reading and learning. We need to take notes, draw diagrams, get up and see the parts, how they function, etc. You can't do that with these devices.

We have to accept the fact that it takes time to train and to learn things. I see this with millennials a lot - they have the world at their fingertips, digitally. They quickly find information but don't retain it. They often excel at finding something, and then moving on quickly. I see other people that take their time and learn things a bit slower, but with more durability. After a short time, they've mastered material while the millennial has to continue looking it up again and again. But that's what millennials have gotten used to, because they grew up 100% digital. I understand it in everyday life, but in the military where you have a job that is constrained, it pays off in the long run to spend the time up front to do proper learning and mastery.

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"Data has no rank," said Long, who would go on to win the Marine Corps' 2016 Innovation Challenge for a lightweight wearable device that allows Marines to communicate and resupply quickly. "You just have to know how to present it."

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This kid here is a dumbass. And the device is completely redundant. And the last thing we need is another fricking piece of kit to hang off our bodies.

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Me being a mortarman by trade, I know that that shite can be spun up on a plotting board in a fricking hurry, and if you’ve got FOs that know what they’re doing and you’ve got guys on the boards that are worth their salt, is incredibly accurate.

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yes and our current logistics approach is conceptually similar.

I had an artillery officer once and he could not properly read grids on a map. Once during a live fire (inert rounds of course) he fired danger close to my platoon. The safety called to ask us to estimate how far away the impacts were using the laser. We tried to cover and said 'looks like 650'. He comes back with 'Ah, that's inside 200, wait one....break break break cease fire cease fire cease fire' and then there were changes.