Showing posts with label NCOs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NCOs. Show all posts

Wednesday, 1 January 2014

Pot22pouri

It has been observed that I neglected to give you the benefit of learning my film of the year. Apologies. I am going to plump for 'Django Unchained', not perfect, too long, but containing some excellent performances and some laugh out loud moments.

"Why is I'm scarin' you?"

My occasional correspondent Dunny Highway recently posted an erudite comment on the blog about the value of NCOs to armies. I haven't replied before simply because I know nothing whatsoever about the subject. I did, forty odd years ago, reach the level of my incompetence by becoming a flight sergeant in the Air Training Corps, but believe me there wasn't much competition. I once had a boss who operated a very delegated command and control structure in an environment that, in my opinion, was unsuited to it. When challenged he gave me a load of tosh about the German army in WWI having the best NCOs. I pointed out that a) they lost and b) what we were embarked upon (a multi billion dollar project) seemed to me to have rather more in common with D-Day than a trench raid and NCO quality was quite a way down the list of why that was a success. For the record neither he nor I are there any more and the project has continued to burn money with no concrete results.


The dunny hits the highway