{"id":66165,"date":"2016-06-06T10:11:27","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T14:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=66165"},"modified":"2016-06-06T10:11:27","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T14:11:27","slug":"nyt-its-rucksacks-and-foxholes-as-army-goes-old-school-for-new-conflicts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=66165","title":{"rendered":"NYT: It\u2019s Rucksacks and Foxholes as Army Goes Old School for New Conflicts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link to the New York Times article this morning entitled It\u2019s Rucksacks and Foxholes as Army Goes Old School for New Conflicts<\/a>. I’m thinking that the Times just ran out of content and decided to publish anything that shows up in their feed. It’s about the troops returning to basic skills training after a decade of deployments to fight a known enemy in a known environment. Apparently, the worst part of being a soldier is eating MREs and digging foxholes;<\/p>\n

When Staff Sgt. Chris Brown headed into the swamplands of Georgia for a military training exercise early this spring, he found himself missing his time in Iraq and Afghanistan \u2014 and the relative comforts he had enjoyed there at the height of both wars.<\/p>\n

Without running water, he now had to bathe with baby wipes and shave without a mirror. He had no idea how his favorite basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, was faring in the playoffs. And the food was so bad that he relied on peanut butter crackers and lost 10 pounds.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Cpl. Amy Alexander, who has worked in an office for the past six years as a human resources specialist, said that the Army\u2019s new approach to training had taught how to operate in the field for the first time in her career.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a lot harder than I thought to dig your own foxhole,\u201d said Corporal Alexander, 23. \u201cWith the way the Army is changing, we have to be able to deploy into any place and set up where we are. So we all needed to know how to man our own fighting positions and pull security.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, well, as I’ve said a hundred times before here – the reason that Desert Storm was a unqualified success and the reason that it only lasted a hundred hours was because of the fact that we had trained to fight that exact war against the Soviet tactics and equipment for fifteen years. Every day, every where. It was the same for the “Thunder Run” to Baghdad in 2003. Luckily, for us, we didn’t have to stop midstream and change tactics. We ran a very long Grafenwoehr-style Table XII and then went home. The Army deserves some credit for switching from counter-insurgency training and back to basics instead of fighting the last war all over again.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure what the Times’ point is, other than they interviewed two soldiers who had gotten soft during the war against terror and who never really saw much of the real war. If this is the corporal’s first time learning to operate in the field during her career, she hasn’t had much of an Army career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link to the New York Times article this morning entitled It\u2019s … NYT: It\u2019s Rucksacks and Foxholes as Army Goes Old School for New Conflicts<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[232],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-army-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}