A worrisome report on the eroded combat skills of an Army Stryker regiment

[unhappycamper]

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/21/a_worrisome_report_on_the_eroded_combat_skills_of_an_army_stryker_regiment




A worrisome report on the eroded combat skills of an Army Stryker regiment
Posted By Thomas E. Ricks Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - 10:30 AM

The 2nd Cavalry Regiment (Stryker) is reamed out in an internal Army study for its performance last month at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center, a training ground in Germany. It is worrisome that this unit appears to have deteriorated so much, yet paradoxically reassuring that the Army is using its maneuvers identify shortcomings.

The conclusions are hair-raising. Everybody from the way senior leaders understand command to the way privates poop comes in for criticism. Here are some of the highlights:

--The report found "Commanders and command sergeant majors tethered to command posts, rarely visiting subordinate units. This results in a lack of mentoring and face-to-face interaction to judge understanding of the operational situation and intent and time to make on-the-spot corrections." And those corrections clearly were needed.

~snip~

--Soldiers don't even know how to do basic field sanitation, and were "defecating randomly on top of the ground in unit positions."



unhappycamper comment: Talk about lessons forgot. In my day soldiers in camp had to crap in half a 55 gallon drum and then we burned the shit. It was the smell I remember when I started my 'vacation' in late 1967.

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[peace13]

2. What a sad report.

You would think that we would be really good at war by now. Hope we learn something from this!

[Victor_c3]

3. I don't even want to read the report

I had a lot of run-ins with 2SCR (the unit the article was about) and those guys were broken when I dealt with the unit around 2006. I was Chief of Infantry Training Operations on Grafenwoehr Training Area and I had to approve/assist their unit with developing and implementing their live-fire training. They would train without any regards for safety (i.e. one unit decided that they were going to fire .50 cal in a 360 degree free-for-all with no regard for range markers) and they even managed to get at least one of their Soldiers killed during a squad level live fire exercise. Given what I saw and dealt with in 2006, I'm not at all surprised.