COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

This according to Tom Ricks of the Washington Post.

The article is a must read for leaders of units who are about to deploy, because it hits on some very important things from the soldiers' point of view.

It's not for me to criticize the battalion commander or command sergeant major, here. But having been through the mobilization process myself I might be able to make some useful observations.

Or not.

1.) Leaders should remember that while active duty soldiers CONUS have their families with them as they get set to mobilize, reserve component soldiers are quickly yanked hundreds of miles away from their wives and children--in the 1-124's case. Active duty soldiers get to see their families almost until they head to the airfield. Too often commanders put soldiers in the position of having to go AWOL in order to get the family contact that active duty soldiers get as a matter of course.

Should a soldier violate a direct order and go AWOL? Is that justified? No.

But commanders should realize that families are part of the unit, too. Forget that, and you won't have a National Guard very long.

2.) Active duty soldiers live in modern base housing, either in dorms or in their families--mobilized reserve component soldiers are usually housed in temporary, open bay barracks, not designed or intended to hold soldiers for more than a 2-3 week annual training. For a 60 day mobilization period, this isn't a huge deal. But when predeployment training lasts for months on end--as it has for this unit--it's predictable that frictions are going to arise within the barracks. All it takes is one barracks thief or one guy to hit on another guy's girlfriend, and things go downhill rapidly from there.

Soldiers aren't dumb. They are very much galled by how differently they are treated compared to their active duty counterparts at the same base.

3.) If soldiers have serious problems at home, then the unit loses combat power. I've seen it time and time again. If a soldier's wife is having a nervous breakdown at home, then the soldier isn't very effective in Iraq. And his NCOs spend a lot of time counseling the soldier through the crisis. Often you have to send the soldier home on emergency leave to take care of the problem.

Conversely, if a soldier's life is squared away at home, and his family is supportive of the unit, you will have twice the soldier.

I'm pretty confident that morale isn't as bad as the disgruntled soldiers who are talking to Ricks say. But it's definitely not as good as the Battalion Commander and CSM say, either. The truth is always somewhere in between.

The soldiers want to be in a good, tight-knit unit. I don't think, after 4 months in mobilization training, that the fact that the unit is a composite unit makes much difference by now. Everyone's had a chance to settle in. And I don't think it was relevant to this unit's AWOL problems, anyway. Maybe it was a factor in the altercation between the two batteries. But I doubt it.

As for 36 hours of leave in two months--well, my unit had a similar experience during mob training at Fort Stewart, Georgia.

It sucked, but it was expected for the first 30 to 60 days of train-up. If the training is worthwhile and neccessary, soldiers understand that.

But soldiers have families, and families are part of the Army, too.

We should never forget that.

Splash, out

Jason