U.S. Army Tries New Recruiting Tactics

Go to "Army wtf" on Facebook if you want more.

I swear yesterday I read a memo that someone posted on there and I read all of the hundreds of comments thinking it was a tongue in cheek sort of thing that a Private wrote up to be funny or something. Turns out it was a real memorandum put out by that particular unit and I sat here in pure awe once it was confirmed to be legitimate.

It is absolutely ridiculous to me that this is going on right now.

I watched a live town hall from my local unit Commanders the other day and I sat here shaking my head at their plan to deal with this whole pandemic thing. Granted I won't caste stones too far, I don't envy those folks AT ALL, these Commanders are in a crappy situation and I made a personal choice to not go down that career path because I have zero desire to ever be a military Commander because of reasons like this. However, I just sat there shaking my head listening to their brief and once again I sat there wondering if I was in fact losing my mind. I'm sorry but when a military General Officer sits there and says "I can't think of a situation on this installation where Soldiers are ever really in groups of more than 10 anyway" then that is willful ignorance. Their entire hour long brief boiled down to basically "We aren't going to do anything". Then when asked by a wife why we aren't at least doing what our neighboring Air Force base is doing the response was "We aren't aware they are doing anything different than us". When their response is in fact drastically different than ours seeing how they are literally a few miles away and all of us can go over there and see for ourselves as plenty have done.

Me personally I don't really care. I'm single and I live alone and I will always be "essential personnel" if they ever decide to issue a stay at home order for non mission essential Soldiers or something. So I have no stake in the game, not like I can infect my nonexistent family or anything nor will I get any time off from work if they start kicking folks off the base. But for those who are not in my shoes I don't really blame them for being this pissed off about the Army seemingly pretending that we are somehow immune to this virus while the entire nation and every other branch of service is pretty much taking every precaution they can. Hell the chief medical Officer of our installation flat out said during the town hall in response to the "Why aren't we doing anything" question with "We are mostly young and healthy troops so our risk of severe illness or death is minimal".

But when this pandemic passes we'll be reading Army Times articles again talking about retention issues and the Army asking for feedback as to why because "the data regarding why Soldiers are choosing not to reenlist is inconclusive" lol.

But of course every memorandum put out by unit Commanders regarding this pandemic begins with "The care of our Soldiers and their families during this Covid-19 pandemic is our number one priority, therefore.....[we are going to send 500 Soldiers to the field because they are safer in the field than they are in garrison where this virus is going around] (Unless one of them has it and infects the entire battalion while sleeping head to toe in tents with no running water for weeks)"

Some unit literally posted that ^^^^ lol...

 

Surprisingly according to a recent briefing the Army is floating around the idea of knocking this sort of thing off. Basically allowing someone to remain the "hands on" E-5 or E-6 for as long as they so desire. Same with Officers, after Company Command if you decide you don't want to pursue the path towards Battalion Commander and wish to remain a Captain or possibly a Major and do other stuff then they will allow it.

It was an idea tossed around as a way to combat the retention issue and I have no idea how serious the Army was about implementing such a thing but it was discussed. I personally think it's a great idea because it has been my experience that not everybody is qualified to even be in these higher up positions yet somehow they seem to make it there. I've met my fair share of 1SG's and CSM's who should have never gotten beyond Squad Leader at most. That's the product of a broken system in my book, especially this whole "looks good on paper" style of promotion nonsense that the military is so famous for.

This is the main reason why I jumped ship from being an NCO and ducked and dodged all attempts to make me an RLO. I have no desire whatsoever to be in charge of people anymore nor do I want to spend my days at work doing everything but my hands on job. Once I became the rank to where I spent way more time at a desk than with my Soldiers I walked away. Granted the job I have now is basically all paperwork with my MOS sprinkled in. But I basically work at my own pace and I'm that weird rank that everybody hates to where I have too much authority to get told what to do by either NCO's or RLO's and not enough rank to have to make any decisions lol.

This is the only gig I would ever agree to in the Army.