Military Forced to Get Picky in Recruiting

Forced? Like being selective is a bad thing? Oh, I know the force size is an issue and strongly oppose downsizing the force. But even if we were rebuilding, don’t we want the best, the most qualified candidates?

Gotta make room for the alternative-gender and illegals...

your right, doesn’t take much math to tear cartridge and draw a ram rod. But that is not the case anymore. High quality infantry in these days requires a hell of a lot more in the way of knowledge and thinking. The old days of if you are to dumb for anything else, you go to the infantry does not cut anymore. If you look at infantry as do the Russians or the Chinese, just throw away commodities to be wasted in mindless frontal assault then
anyone that can fog a mirror will do. I think our armed services should be very selective in the educational and physical standards applied to enlistees. The resulting fighting force is much more lethal and effective.

That incident can be credited to the engineers/programmers who designed the designator and the idiots from the US Air Force who did the test and eval.

When the batteries are changed, the GPS coordinates of the target reset to the designator location.

The operator should have known that, but in the heat of battle, mistakes happen. A good CONOPS should have captured that, but the USAF doesn't do CONOPS too good.

Agreed. I was a 'B' math student in high school and went off to seek my fortune in the grunts.

They were gonna 'let me' carry a machine gun (a few miles into a forced march and it doesn't seem so much like fun anymore) .

I discovered that appropriately applying machine gun principles relies heavily on algebra, trigonometry, and geometry - particularly when you get into utilizing a gunner's quadrant and employing guns from partial or full defilade. Math is also important conducting over head fire, or if you're suppressing targets off the front of advancing maneuver elements.

Screwing up because of a math error can mean you hose down quite a few of your buddies. Same thing goes with mortars; granted they have whizz wheels to help with the math, but the dope controlling the gun still needs to figure out how to put the dope on the gun.

Now, throw in calling for artillery fire missions or requesting close air support when you can't do math - that ordinance has to land somewhere.

With the heavy push for small unit leadership, it's not always the college graduate LT dragging a radio operator around, but an E3, E4, or E5 with a high school diploma. And, that Enlisted man is responsible for a lot of lives when he's directing multi-million dollar airframes dropping several tons of HE, or bringing in 60, 81, or 155mm steel rain.

Warfare is a thinking man's game.

As a rule of thumb, anything the military does is egregiously expensive. While it does make them a top notch military, if what they are doing is extraneous to their main mission, it costs way more than it would otherwise.

This is so bad that, for example, if the US hired private contractors to work, with military logistics and transportation, in such things as humanitarian missions, it could slash the cost from tens of billions of dollars to tens of millions of dollars. Money that could then be used to keep the military a top notch military.

My concept for conditioning camps would not even be branch specific: they potential recruits there would be “free agents” until they graduated. At that point they would ask the branch they wanted if it wanted them, and if not, they could ask another branch.

This would have the added bonus of gradually forcing the standards of all branches up, because they would be vying with each other for the best recruits, while the recruits would be striving for the goal of the branch they wanted.

This means that their optimal chance is to be competitively better than their competition.