If You See Something, Say Something

That's the admonition we have from our government.  OK, well, try this ...

It appears that one of the benefits of ridding the planet of the obnoxious Mr. bin Laden is that we can't go to our offices anymore without proving who we are every time we go into the building--the same building we enter every day, five days a week. Every day it's like we've never been there before and it makes not difference if we've worked in that building for 25 years.  The elevated force protection measures in effect at DOD installations worldwide call for access to government buildings be granted only to those who possess a DOD-issued identification card.

This, er, precaution is believed necessary because an obnoxious devotee of the obnoxious religion of the obnoxious Mr. bin Laden might try to enter a government building and shout Islamic slogans.  (He won't be able to blow anything up because the random searches of vehicles entering the installation would have caught the obnoxious devotee and his obnoxious contraband would have been confiscated; his only recourse, therefore, would be to enter government buildings and shout obnoxious Islamic slogans).

Of course that's never going to happen, but we're going to require an ID before we let you into your own workplace anyway.  It's for your own safety.

Such is the thinking.

100% ID Card Check

So, you can imagine how tiresome this gets.  The same sergeant is on entrance duty four mornings out of five.  You're practically on a first name basis with him or her by now--unless he (or she) is the ignorant sort who keeps their nose stuck in book except to wave you through after he (or she) has checked the expiration date on your government issued ID.

I actually entered the building a few days ago and the female sergeant on duty never even looked at me.  She only broke off her thoroughly engrossing conversation with her buddy to fain checking my ID's expiration date, then went back to her thoroughly engrossing conversation.  I could have been Ayman al Zawahiri, for all she knew.

Like we (or even an obnoxious terrorist) would try to gain entry with an expired ID card!  Have you any idea how much trouble it can cause you to try to access the network with an expired computer access card--a government ID card with an embedded microchip?  Besides, using an expired ID is such an obvious, lazy way of gaining fraudulent entry.  You can't tell that the NCOs have been instructed to check expiration date.  I mean, they're not checking actual, authorized entry because they're not using access rosters.  So your name means nothing.  Only the expiration date on your card.  They will physically stop you and will not let you pass without verifying that the government-issued ID in your possession is not expired ... even after the 10th or 20th time you've accessed the same building and have been checked by the same sergeant. If the ID card wasn't expired at eight in the morning, it's not going to be expired at lunchtime.

The stated intent of the ID card check is to prevent unauthorized entry to a government facility.  I get that.  What I don't get is that, after a month now, it's pretty obvious that the folks entering the building every morning (and then re-entering after leaving for a meeting, or for an appointment, or for lunch, for crying out loud!) are authorized.  Re-checking their ID's expiration date only shows that you're too dumb to figure that out.

Not to impugn the professionalism of the NCOs required to pull card check duty.  Like the female sergeant above, most of them figured out on about day #2 that checking expiration dates is silly.  No one was any safer on any of the past 30 days because an NCO checked the IDs of everyone who entered the building.  It's officers who dream up stuff like this.

It's small stuff, agreed, and shouldn't be "sweated."  Still, it's so obviously a charade that it's insulting.

An obnoxious charade, at that.

Reading

I'm reading a yellowed, used, paper-back version.

I'm in my office.  The fan is on high.  Got some background music playing.  I'm kicked back in my favorite chair reading Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far.

Favorite TV Shows of the Past: Hercules

Congratulations to Ryanna Zoellner

(From L to R) Ryanna,
Todd, and Aileen Zoellner

My previous pontifications on the merits of high school commencement exercises notwithstanding, it is a pleasure to send out well deserved congratulations to Ryanna Zoellner and to her parents, my friends Todd and Aileen.  Ryanna graduated yesterday, with honors, from Warner Robbins High School.  She will attend the University of Georgia in the fall.

In case you are wondering, the supper gathering at El Bronco's, to which we were treated afterwards, more than compensated for the ordeal of the ceremony and the six hour round trip.

Best wishes, Ryanna!

High School Graduations

Drove from Augusta to the Georgia National Fairgrounds just south of Perry, Georgia for yesterday for a high school graduation.  That's a long way to go for a graduation.  Shoot, walking across the street is a long way to go for a high school graduation.  Those things have got to be about the dumbest excuse for a gathering of people that I can think of ... but I probably need to explain that.

Car Wash Blues

Took the old Sable through the car wash this morning.  Of course, the whole time I was thinking about the last time I did this.  The little man was with me then.  It was the day we washed the car together, then went for ice-cream.  On that day he observed, with vanilla ice-cream all over his face, "This is a good day, right?"

Well, this is a good day, too.  But it was just a little bit melancholy going through car wash by myself.

This is How we Train Doctrine Writers?

Last month at the Army Force Management School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, I spent four weeks away from the Signal Center of Excellence where I am working to produce the Signal Regiment's first keystone field manual since FM 24-1 Signal Support in the AirLand Battle, published in 1990.  The manual I'm working on is FM 6-02 Signal Operations.  Within the Concepts and Doctrine Development Directorate, it consistently ranks in the top three of the director's list of priorities.  So, if you thought that the training I received at Fort Belvoir would help me speed along the development of FM 6-02, you would be making a logical assumption, but you would be wrong.

This is How the Army Runs?

I was sent to Belvoir to take the 4-week Force Management Course.  The Force Management Course is required training for me because I am an employee of the Capabilities Integration and Development Directorate at the Signal Center of Excellence.  All CDID employees take this course early in their careers.  The nearby graphic shows what the course is all about.  The folks who write the Danger Room Blog for Wired Magazine call this the Pentagon’s Craziest PowerPoint Slide.  They describe it as a "three-foot wall chart the military uses to explain its gajillion-step process for developing, buying, and maintaining gear."

A couple more zingers from DR:  "Stare [at it] long enough, and you’ll start to see why it takes a decade for the Defense Department to buy a tanker plane, or why marines are still reading web pages with Internet Explorer 6."

In DR's summary take on the DOD's Integrated Acquisitions Technology and Logistics Life Cycle Management. they call it "a twisting, endlessly-recursive, M.C. Escher-on-LSD three-dimensional hedge maze. Actually, it’s kind of amazing our troops have any gear at all."

And, what exactly, you may ask does that chart, er, horse blanket have to do ... no, wait, let me put it differently.    What what does the 4-week Force Management Course have to do with doctrine development?

Nothing, actually.

__________________________
Author's note:

See my April archives for several posts I made from Fort Belvoir. The Force Management Course is a great course. It's well run, the instructors are among the best you'll find anywhere, and the material is absolutely essential if you're going to work at the Pentagon or on a CDID staff or somewhere else in the generating force where your job is all about developing organizations, training, materiel capabilities, leader development and education, personnel (human resources), or facilities (military construction). My thinking is that CDIDs are the wrong environment in which to cultivate good doctrine developers. And I think that, if you're serious about developing a good, solid stable of writers, then the Force Management Course is the wrong kind of training for them.

twh

Where Should Doctrine Writers go to School?

This video is a brief overview of the concepts of design and conceptual and detailed planning.  It's about what commanders do in preparation for commencing an operation.



It seems to me that, if doctrine is written for the operational Army, then the Army would benefit most from writers who have experience in planning and conducting operations.  A good place to round out or deepen the education of doctrine writers would be at an institution that taught operations--or how to think about operations ... how to conceptualize them ... how to design and plan for them ... and the art and science of conducting them. Places like the School for Advanced Military Studies or the Command and General Staff College, both located at Fort Leavenworth, or the Army War College at Carlisle Pennsylvania would provide excellent intellectual training for new doctrine writers.

As a new writer, I was sent recently to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to the Army Force Management School, to take the 4-week Army Force Management Course.  I came away with a much clearer understanding of how the generating force works--they call it, "teaching how the Army runs."  But I learned nothing at all about how to write and develop doctrine for the operational Army.

At the Signal Center of Excellence, doctrine development is placed within the Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate (CDID).  I don't know if that is the case with the other TRADOC schools and centers who also have the same level of proponent responsibilities for the development of doctrine.  But it is not done that way at the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, where the development of doctrine Army-wide is overseen.  At the Combined Arms Center, the commander has placed his Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate outside of his CDID organization.  CDIDs are all about development and fielding new capabilities, be they organizational, training, materiel, leader development and education, personnel, or facilities--in other words, everything in the 'DOTMLPF' acronym except for the 'D.'  Doctrine development is out of place in a CDID.  It should be a separate organization, oriented not towards the Army Requirements and Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) but towards the Combined Arms Center--the intellectual center of the Army.

The video is not about doctrine; it's about design.  But design is about how to think and in that way is a near cousin of doctrine.  Doctrine is the way the Army thinks about how it will operate in order to conduct the nation's business.  The place to educate those who write and evaluate emerging Army doctrine is in a place where they teach commanders how to think and how to plan and how to design their operations.

General George Casey used to say that Doctrine must be the driver of everything else.  Well, it will never be that if we keep sending doctrine writers to schools that teach the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development Systems, Army acquisition, and the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Process. Those things are important and they have their place. But they don't equip doctrine writers with the tools they need to understand broad, overarching ideas about how the Army operations in pursuit of national objectives, about how it goes about to conduct combined arms maneuver and wide area security. So we need to do something else. We need to send our writers to places like the Army War College, to the CGSC, to the SAMS, and to joint schools. They must be trained on how the Army operates, not just on how it "runs."

Melancholy Memories

Just sitting here within my dominions pondering those occasions in childhood when it was time to leave our grandparents' house and go back home.  Tearful they were.  Such a contrast to the excitement of arrival were those sad farewells.  In the car, we would wave as we cried, waving until the house was out of sight.  I don't have a memory of either of my grandparents actually weeping.  Since it was hard for him to get around, we always said our good-byes to Granddaddy inside.  He didn't say much, just "Bye-bye, now, be good, and come back to see us." So, it was always Grandma who saw us to the back porch and watched us begin our long drive home.

Miss Rory

Now that I have my own grand children, it interests me to imagine how my grandparents felt whenever we grandchildren finally left after a long visit.  Yes, we had long visits.  Couple of weeks ever summer.  Thanksgiving.  Christmas.  Seems there were more.  I spent almost my entire fourth grade year there.  Yet, when we left, it was always the same.  Sad.  So, so sad!

But I wonder how it was for them?

A Good Day

After a long night, a seemingly normal day started, but more on that in a second.

"Staff work suffered under his too-frequent absences and erratic, inconsistent demands."

Signal Towers

This was the description of the eighteen days of Field Marshal Walter Model's command of OB West and Army Group B, on the western European front as described in Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far.  Model, by his own candid admission, was in over his head.

Though in a situation not nearly as desperate as Field Marshall Model's, I and some of the guys I work with can certainly identify with the German commander's circumstances.  We only wish that those circumstances had lasted only eighteen days.

Favorite TV Shows of the Past: Leave it to Beaver

"Confidential"

Daniel Village Barber Shop

Visited the barber shop today.  The barber who served me was out the porch when I arrived, taking a smoke break I guess.  He's the one who rides the big Harley and, when it's your turn, says, "step into my office."

Last time he cut my hair I told him that I wanted a light trim.  "That's my favorite kind of haircut," he said.

This morning, after I stepped into his office, I asked him to give me his favorite haircut.  With a wicked grin he answered, " a crew cut!"

"No, no!" said I.  And I reminded him of what he had told me before.

Today he let it be known that his favorite haircut to give is really the Confidential.  When I asked him to explain, he said, "you sit down, I comb your hair real purty, and you give me money," and we both laughed.

I made sure that he understood that I wanted just a light trim.

When he finished, he said that he had given me the Confidential.  Knowing that he had actually cut some hair off I had to ask for a further explanation.  "It doesn't look like you just had a hair cut," he said, "but it doesn't look like you need one, either."

And he didn't even charge me extra for it.

Fireman Sam

There's no job too big for the little man.

This is lot's better than TV!

It was a comfortable night by Augusta's standards.  We all sat on our pitiful excuse for a front porch--or else went out and leaned on the cars--to watch Haydin water the entire yard by himself and wash Rebekah's car.  I don't know where he got the idea to wear the fireman's hat but it sort of went with the fire hose.

Then there was the shirt:  it said, "Hey girls, I'M SINGLE."  We never had stuff like that when I was growing up.  (Not that in this particular instance it would have mattered).

While Haydin put out imaginary fires in the bushes and in the flower beds and soaked himself in the process, Connie and I took turns holding Rory.  She's not used to me yet.  I've scared her twice already.  But we're getting there.  She hasn't said a word (or made a word-like sound) yet.  She just looks and takes everything in.  I'm sure that by the time it's time for them to go back home at least one of us won't want her to leave.

A neighbor down the street walked by with his dog.  We invited him to stop and we all visited for a while.

As I was getting ready for bed, the company was just getting its second wind.  When I left them, Haydin was entertaining all the ladies at a tea party at the dining room table.

But Pack Mule had to get up early and go to work, so I missed all the fun.

Company has Arrived!

Haydin and Rory

Rebekah and the grandkids made it here all the way from Seattle.  As usual, Rebekah missed her flight so they spent some time exploring the USO facility.  Then, wonder of all wonders, she drove from the Atlanta airport to our house without a guide and arrived on the same day.

So I sneak out of work fifteen minutes early.  Grandpa's got to see the grandkids, right?

My reward was to get home and find Rory sleeping already --- it was a long trip.  Rebekah's conked out, too.  But the little man was wide awake and running at full speed.  He was already in to his new tool set.  And, I could see from the layout of things, that he and his sister had briefly tried out the whole assortment of things we had got for them.

Life has changed.

And I am glad.

Lexington

Washington and Lee University

Friday, on my journey back home from a month spent at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, I made a stop at Lexington.  Just off Interstate 81, Lexington is in the middle of Virginia's great Shenandoah Valley.  The views of the countryside are captivating.  Lexington is also a college town and home to some rich Civil War history.  One of its famous schools is Washington and Lee University.  One of its most famous presidents was Robert E. Lee, who served in that post from 1865 to 1870.  On the campus is a little chapel, named after General Lee.  In the basement of Lee Chapel, Lee and much of his family are buried.  Just outside the chapel, maybe fifteen feet from where the remains of his master lie in rest, is the burial place of Traveled, General Lee's favorite horse.  I took just a peek inside the chapel.  There was no one else inside save a lady seated up front who was obviously an employee. They offer unscheduled guided tours, but I didn't want to be the only one, so I ducked out and visited the museum on the basement level.  There, the nice lady tried to sell me Douglas Southall Freeman's seven volume biography of George Washington.  The books were in excellent condition and could be had for only five hundred dollars.  Not having that much cash on me at that particular time, I settle for some post cards and walk away having spent only two dollars.

John Neel, Sergeant Major to the
Corps of Cadets, Virginia Military Institute

The real reason I made the stop at Lexington, however, was not to sightsee; it was to visit with an old friend, John Neel.