NFL?Originally Posted by fixer
NFL?
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
Low morale and little/no faith in the mission breeds resentment, resentment breeds insubordination and mentally justifying rule-breaking, which in turn breeds criminality. Criminality can hide a lot longer in smaller elements with less oversight and more flexibility in logistics and everything else. This isn't in-flight missile repair.
It's not even limited to an SF/SOF problem - look at the the grand royal CID clusterfuck happening at Ft Hood with III Corps. That's a true 'Big Army' mess that is the end result of having essentially two different sets of rules for leadership over the past 20+ years. Rule set #1 talks all about Soldier care and pride in your mission and looks great in G.O.'s command philosophy memos and what not. Rule set #2 you'll never see in a memo, but it's basically 'you better not be the guy in charge if something goes wrong'. Essentially an unspoken demand for a zero-defect formation regardless of who's in that formation. This strongly encourages leadership to minimize, downplay, and straight-up hide shit as much as possible to literally save their careers.
Until we're ready to acknowledge that senior leaders can't be expected to fully control their E4's 24/7/365, and that sometimes that E4 is the only one at fault, and thereby the only one whose balls should be in front of the band saw, we're never going to fix that problem. But the current political/social climate demands blood from anyone with position or authority if anything goes wrong, so that's not likely to happen any time soon.
From what I've seen, the Army's still figuring out what they're allowed to do with SFAB's and how well they work in those roles. Morale in SFAB's tends to be low - a 'worst of both worlds' sort of thing to hear their guys tell it. Which I can totally understand.
It's not just a NSW problem (they do seem to have a pretty great opinion of themselves) It does however, seem to be a unit culture thing. I have firsthand personal experience with a fairly wide swath of operatour-y types. Some of them are dangerous professionals who I trust implicitly - no questions asked. Some of them were certainly dangerous, but were severely under-supervised and could not be trusted not to get into some pretty significant trouble when left to their own devices (many of the problems being ones I was personally responsible for fixing/investigating).
I am not sure if it is a problem with op-tempo, or poor screening to eliminate the personalities who are not suited for independent operations. But stuff like the murder of Logan Melgar and guys smuggling commercial quantities of coke (https://www.businessinsider.com/army...cocaine-2019-1) are not simply dudes being over worked, they are fundamental failures of character. These guys may be the worlds best killers, but a bit fuzzier on the abstract concepts like discipline - I'm not talking about parade deck, uniform policy, pog fobbit attention to meaningless detail discipline, I mean the depth of character that shows you can be trusted to operate independent of over-site and be trusted to do the things you are sent to do (and nothing else).
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