Some of my Counselors: Mark Belling

Mark Belling

Discovered Mark Belling's radio show on the web.  Mark occasionally substitutes on the Rush Limbaugh show.  That's how I heard of him.  He's my favorite Rush fill-in.  Comes across as very genuine.  Of all Rush's subs, I think Mark does the best "show prep."  He's dynamite on union issues.

Favorite TV Shows of the Past: Daniel Boone

Doctrine in the Field

During a video teleconference this morning, a colleague pointed to a figure on the screen and told me a little about him.  The person about whom he spoke was COL (P) Wayne Grigsby whose current assignment is at the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth.  My colleague had knowledge of then LTC Grigsby's experiences in Baghdad during the early stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  While researching Grigsby's exploits, I came across an interview of COL Grigsby conducted in 2008 when he was a brigade combat team commander in Iraq.  As a doctrine writer, I appreciated his allusion to sound doctrine near the bottom of this excerpt:

Doctrine 2015

General officers will descend upon Fort Leavenworth, Kansas next Wednesday to make the next round of decisions on two things.  One of them is the next revision of the Army's capstone doctrinal manual for operations, FM 3-0.  The other is what its doctrinal library will look like by the year 2015.

Let's take the second one first.  Doctrine 2015, designed by some smart people at the Army's School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, is a complete overhaul of Army doctrine.  Up until about a year ago, all Army doctrine existed in field manuals, called FMs.  In 2009, at a Doctrine Re-engineering Conference at Fort Leavenworth, it was decided that there were too many FMs and that something must be done.  What was done was to create a second class of doctrine, less general in applicability, and more oriented to narrower specialties, and call them Army Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, or ATTPs for short.  In Signal doctrine, for example, this change caused FM 6-02.53 Tactical Radio Operations to become ATTP 6-02.53 Tactical Radio Operations.  This kind of change, obviously cosmetic, has been occurring across all Army proponents for about the past year now.  It was the Intellectual Center of Army's first stab at what then-TRADOC Commander, General Martin Dempsey was looking for--fewer and better written manuals that were more relevant and more easily updated to reflect the realities of the modern operational environment.

They Shouldn't Let Him Touch it with a Ten-Foot Pole

General Cartwright

"Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Cartwright has commissioned a broad independent review to help the Pentagon more rapidly develop and buy urgently needed military equipment."  So begins a piece over at InsideDefense.Com, about how the Vice Chief is taking a hard look at "new ways to execute the joint requirements process" to replace the slow, bureaucratic" system known as JCIDS.  The Small Wars Journal also has a link to the piece, but theirs is accompanied by this headline:  Top Commanders Bemoan JCIDS.

JCIDS is shorthand for the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System.

They taught us at the Army Force Management School (AFMS) that General Cartwright is considered the "father of JCIDS."

If you've ever seen this Pentagon chart, which I wrote about recently, you know a little something about JCIDS already ...

JCIDS, DAS, and PPBE

JCIDS, along with the Defense Acquisition System and the DOD's Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution framework, is the process through which we get capabilities into the hands of our warfighters seven to ten years after they ask for them.

It's a system bemoaned by the military's top commanders.  It's the subject of a 4-week course at the AFMS.   Some of the instructors have had to go through the course multiple times before they could teach it.

General Cartwright is the father of it - the JCIDS part.

Again, it is a system that is bemoaned by top commanders - hence, the referenced article about General Cartwright looking at fixing it.

Look at the (JCIDS, DAS, and PPBE) chart again and ask yourself this question:  would you trust the man who gave you that to be able to fix it?

Now does that 10-foot pole make sense?

Favorite TV Shows of the Past: Gunsmoke

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.