Army Staff and High School Cliques: A Comparative Analysis

This is pretty inspired... an analysis of how Army staff sections map to high school cliques over at Two Jonahs

S1 (admin) - Yearbook Committee: This is group of people that think their job is much more important than it actually is. They are usually mostly female and their main job is to make sure that they know who everyone is, but they usually forget some people here or there. (see photo not available)

S2 (intel) - Goths: Almost never seen out in the sunlight and when they are they are very disengaged from the rest of the group. Usually very quiet and will not talk to others unless it is to dispatch some crazy warning about a mysterious and probable made up danger.

S3 (operations) - Jocks: For some reason this group has total authority over all the other groups despite any merit or logic. They are by far the biggest and most desirable group to be in, but resented by the other groups. Any decision made by this group, however frivolous, must be carried out by the rest under penalty of being shunned and mocked.

S4 (logistics) - Drug Dealers: A necessary evil, this group is generally disliked, but condoned by the other groups. They develop strange and intricate webs of favors and have far reaching connections and "hook ups" to get people what they want. Almost any request given to the group is changed and manipulated in the end to whatever they can get their hands on, which most people are generally happy enough with. Any dealing with this group could result in a loss of a significant amount of money for the individual.

There's more... follow the link above for the S5, S7, Special Staff, and the Hippies!

By: Brant

Sound Off: Birthdays!

Who's the coolest person born today:

- Mick Jagger
- Kate Beckinsale
- Kevin Spacey
- Carl Jung
- Gracie Allen
- Stanley Kubrick
- Helen Mirren
- Gary Cherone
- Jeremy Piven
- ME

State your case in the comments below!

By: Brant

Battalion TOC Charts - Adjacent Unit SITREP

Leftover from the maneuver days of the '90s, here's a battalion-level adjacent unit situation chart for tracking operations from the command post. You need to maintain awareness of your adjacent/higher units, because you never know when you're suddenly going to be in charge.

As always, click to enlarge the image. More charts, orders, and other handy tools to follow as we get them converted and uploaded. We may take a few weeks off before we come back with more of these, though, so give us some slack :)

By: Brant

Technical Difficulties

I've got a laptop on the fritz, a desktop that needs a new internal hard drive, and a 7-year-old laptop limping through emergency duty right now while I have 2 projects to work on. If there's not a whole lot getting done over the next few weeks, you now know why. Thanks to Shelldrake for helping fill in, and here's hoping the rest of the gang chimes in.

By: Brant

Battalion TOC Charts - Enemy SITREP

Leftover from the maneuver days of the '90s, here's a battalion-level enemy situation chart for tracking operations from the command post.

As always, click to enlarge the image. More charts to follow as we get them converted and uploaded.

By: Brant

Battalion TOC Charts - Maintenance SITREP

Leftover from the maneuver days of the '90s, here's a battalion-level maintenance situation chart for tracking operations from the command post.

As always, click to enlarge the image. More charts to follow as we get them converted and uploaded.

By: Brant

Battalion TOC Charts - Recon SITREP

Leftover from the maneuver days of the '90s, here's a battalion-level recon situation chart for tracking operations from the command post.

As always, click to enlarge the image. More charts to follow as we get them converted and uploaded.

By: Brant

Origins Staff Wargaming - Lessons Learned

This is the longest I've had to sit still and write something around Origins going on right now, so this is going to wrap up lots of ideas, thoughts, and feedback into one extended list of bullets.

- This is hard. There's a reason you have to spend a lot of years learning a lot of different parts of the staff process before you're considered to be merely competent, never mind an expert.

- This is hard. James Sterrett is an underappreciated guy. Putting these exercises together takes a lot of time and effort in identifying the scenario, prepping the handouts and player materials, teaching the basics of staff operations, and coaching the staff through the process.

- Process matters much, much more than outcome. The entire point of this is to learn how the staff is expected to function, and how the roles work within the staff, and to gain an appreciation of how much work this is. That's far, far more important than sitting in front of a computer game just trying to pwn a noob. It's one thing to punch buttons to just take down an AI, but an entirely different thing to develop a plan with other people, arrange all the moving parts, conform to something resembling doctrine, and then execute it and adjust it on the fly.

- In the FlashPoint Germany game, the players were the reds, with the US cav running into them in a large meeting engagement. The players had a pretty good read on the US movements but didn't trust their recon, and then didn't reinforce their recon once they gained contact, which ceded the initiative to the cav. After that, the cav came rolling at them. I'm not sure the players had a true appreciation of just how much combat power a cav squadron rolls out with.

- In Battles from the Bulge, the players were a German unit heading west through the Americans, past some place called Bastogne. The thing they really learned in this one was to establish some graphic control measures, as checkpoints, phase lines, and support/firing positions. It saved the players from referring to "this intersection" or "that town" and instead got them all speaking the same language to locate things on the map.

- The Strat/COIN game, using the GEMSTONE system from the NDU, was - unfortunately - a terribly slow game because of the computer interface. To be fair, we are busy fixing that interface, but we never really gave the players a truly tough set of choices to make to have to sort through the different priorities and figure out what to do. This was a failing on the part of exercise control, in not fully preparing a good, solid set of tools in advance, with the worksheets, maps, briefings, game setup, etc. This one was run a little too off-the-cuff, and it suffered for it.

- I was not at the naval wargame, but from all I've heard, a key lesson there had to be that when you lose the key organizing member of the team, it's time to call off the game, or change to something completely different, rather than try to plow ahead with something not quite fully-baked.

- Decisive Action had a barely-engaged, and -interested commander, which trickled down to the rest of the staff. One of the keys to DA is teaching the players how hard it is to integrate all the different moving parts that are more abstracted, or less relevant, in the other games, such as logistics, fire planning, route/traffic management, etc. However, with only a few players, Snyder took on the fires role, and I had the logistics. I was never even asked to brief the log plan, or offered a briefing on the maneuver plan and asked if/how I could support it. Ditto with the fires. I guess they assumed if the exercise control staff had it, then they didn't even need to think about it. In truth, we did, but they shouldn't've been afforded that luxury.

- Persian Incursion had the possibility to really go off the rails, with the us abstracting out a LOT of details from the game, and trying instead to focus on the air campaign planning. We gave them a variety of initial constraints, and turned them loose. Then the game's designer walked in. Oy. In truth, Larry Bond was a delightful addition to the process, in that he was very helpful when we had some resolution/adjudication questions, and he seemed to really enjoy the changes to his game that we made for the purposes we needed in the campaign planning. We had 5 players, and split them as CO, S2, Current Ops, Future Ops, and Ground Boss/maint-readiness (note to USAF readers: no idea if this is realistic or not, but we went with it and it worked). We threw them some curveballs, but they really took well to their roles and reacted as a great team. By the end, this turned out to be one of our better exercises.

- Unfortunately, with the date change next year, we can't be there as a team running these again, which really sucks. Maybe GAMA will come to their senses and realize they're screwing up a lot of really good things. Or maybe not, and we'll try to find a new home for this.

By: Brant

Origins Staff Wargaming: Flashpoint Germany

The first of the staff wargames is well underway...

The game is Flashpoint Germany, and the participants are playing the Russians instead of the US forces (major change from previous years).

The XO working with Jim Snyder to input the orders

(more photos after the jump)

Battalion TOC Charts - Logistics SITREP

Leftover from the maneuver days of the '90s, here's a battalion-level logistical situation chart for tracking operations from the command post.

As always, click to enlarge the image. More charts to follow as we get them converted and uploaded.

By: Brant

Origins Prep

We're getting ready for the Origins War College Staff Wargames, and that means today is a whole lotta prep before we start setting up tomorrow.

Today is prepping the scenarios for games like Persian Incursion, and getting the player aids ready. While other folks are bringing extracts from the Battle Staff MDMP & Operations Order Planning Handbook, I'm working on blowing up some wall charts, like the Tactical SITREP posted here last week, and the synch matrix here.

By: Brant

Battalion TOC Charts - Tactical SITREP

Leftover from the maneuver days of the '90s, here's a battalion-level tactical situation chart for tracking operations from the command post.

As always, click to enlarge the image. More charts to follow as we get them converted and uploaded.

By: Brant

Origins War College Staff Wargames, With Event Numbers

EDIT - added room numbers / locations, too!

WED
1800-2200: Battles for the Bulge (event #6061) - Marion Room (tho we're looking to get it moved)

THU
1100-1500: Flashpoint Germany (event #6156) - room C212
1800-2200: Strategic Counterinsurgency (event #6254) - room C212

FRI
0900-1300: Naval Wargame (event #6384) - room C212

SAT
0900-1300: Decisive Action wargame (event #6629) - room C212
1500-1900: Persian Incursion wargame (event #6715) - room C212

don't be put off by number of registrants - we can take about 36/each; even if the registration process says it's full, it's probably not.


By: Brant

A Few Observations

1. Sorry I didn't get more coverage up last night. I'd been running the camp kitchen for the Cub Scouts all weekend and I was tired. I got the quickie news post up and was unconscious in a hurry.

2. I've been watching Morning Joe since 0610 EDT. It's not 0750. Not one commercial break.

3. Love this photo I saw on Facebook. That middle firefighter says it all...

4. Here's another good article from the LA Times.
How Osama bin Laden died: Details of the commando raid that killed the world's most wanted man

EDIT
5. Here's Small Wars Journal's link to their list of media coverage. It's pretty exhaustive.

By: Brant

Random Friday Wargaming: Cybernaut

Long out of print, but still very cool is the magazine game Cybernaut from Joe Miranda and Jon Compton**



Although it's out of print, you can still track it down over at Noble Knight games.

There's actually no CSW board for this one, either. Doesn't stop it from being a cool little early cyberwar game, though, and worth checking out. I've got a copy in storage somewhere I should probably dig out and look into...

Master links/images from Boardgamegeek.com; message boards linked to Consimworld. Other links to the actual game pages...

** yes, he's the same as 'our' Jon Compton :)

By: Brant

Slooooooooow Motion

Thanks to the staff gettin' festive, expect things to slow down a bit over the holidays. We'll still try to get something meaningful up every day, but you may not see every one of the weekly features as we go.

Merry Christmas, everyone!



By: Brant

Happy Thanksgiving!

To all of our US-based readers, Happy Thanksgiving!

And to the rest of you, well, Happy Thanksgiving to you, too :)

By: The GrogNews Staff

Tuesday Q&A: Ugh!

D'oh! We forgot to get the Tuesday interview in for today. Man, we suck. Look for it in the next few days. Sigh. Sorry, y'all!

By: Brant

Tools of War: Sig Sauer P220, Glock 36, and CZ-75

Okay, so this is not my normal ToW article. I'll be covering three distinct pistol models, and they aren't very similar at all. Really, I'm just combining three separate pistol reviews into one article. However, they DO have two things n common. First, I own all three and have put thousands of rounds through each of them, and second, I shot all three today.


First up:
The SIG Sauer P220

This is my duty pistol, and it is chambered in .45ACP (when you care enough to send the very best). It is a single-stack, so capacity is only 8+1, but that allows for a small-hands-friendly grip (not an issue for me, but then I'm 6'1" and 195lbs). The trigger action is DA/SA, and it has a thumb-operated decocker.

I love my P220....now. When I first picked it up, I was less than enthusiastic, and after my first box of 50 through it, I remained rather disconcerted. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something just didn't feel "right" about the thing. Turns out, several folks that I have talked to had the same initial impression that I did. Nobody else seemed to be able to pin down what the issue was either, but something felt a little off.

That said, as more and more rounds went through it, the more it grew on me. Whatever the "wrongness" was, it gradually went away and was replaced by "rightness". A couple thousand rounds later, and I am now just waiting for the day when I can buy it from the department and make it actually "mine-mine". I feel very comfortable with this pistol, not just ergonomically, but in terms of accuracy and reliability as well. It has a solid out-of-the-box trigger (though the new Short-Reset-Trigger that a fellow officer has in his weapon makes me want to weep with its goodness) and somehow manages to feel "hefty" without feeling "heavy". This is accomplished through the use of a lightweight alloy frame, so most of its 28oz are carried in the slide, where it should be.

The P220 has a relatively high bore axis, which is the height of the barrel above the grip. Now, in general, the lower the bore axis, the better, as the recoil and muzzle flip are minimized due to less mechanical advantage (leverage) against the shooter's grip. In theory, the higher bore axis should translate into longer target-reacquisition times, but that hasn't really been an issue for me in practice.

So yeah, I like it. And considering that the P220 has been continually refined over 35 years, it definitely earns its reputation as a "Cadillac" weapon. The only modification that I have made is to add some skateboard grip tape to the front strap, reducing slippage from sweaty hands during a hot day or an Oh-Shit call.

Now, I'm about to discuss two other weapons that have little similarity to this one, so let me comment on the contrasting feel of the P220. It's a full-size .45. A hand cannon, if you will. It feels, and is, big. And that is a good thing. Easily concealable? No, but that isn't what this thing is made for. It's made to easily, accurately, and reliably put big rounds on target, and it does that very, very well. And, though it took a few hundred rounds to get me there, it feels that way too.


Next Up:
The Glock Model 36

I might as well name this pistol "Gilligan". It's my "little buddy" and goes everywhere with me. On duty, it's my back-up weapon. Off duty, it goes with me everywhere except the gym and the pool/beach. It's a Glock, so it is utterly reliable, extremely tough, fantastically simple in design, and very lightweight.

This one is small too. It's very narrow for a .45, accomplished by making it a single-stack (the only Glock to date that isn't a double-stack). Capacity suffers a bit as a result (6+1, with +1 magazine extensions available...see the pic), but these are big-boy rounds, .45ACP, and each one packs a heavy punch. I own several standard magazines and several with +1 extensions. The extended mags LOOK like they should feel more comfortable, but I'm happier with the standard mag feel. And since the standard mag package is more concealable, that's what I carry.

This is a lot of firepower in a very compact package. It only weighs around 20oz, and the magazine needs to be in the weapon if you want to get your pinky involved in gripping the pistol. Of course, 99.8% of the time, that's a given, but it does illustrate that space is at a premium here, and controlability suffers a bit as a result.

Aside from it being a single-stack, the Glock 36 is the same as most any other Glock. Same reasonable-but-not-great striker-fired trigger. Same uber-lightweight polymer frame. Same indestructible Tennifer coating. It's the Tupperware of the firearms world...not sexy, but damn does it work. And that pretty much is exactly my criteria for a carry-pistola.

I've become accustomed to shooting it, and can qualify without issue. But all things considered, it isn't the first thing that I want to pull out at the range. While the Glock 36, like all other Glocks, has a very low bore axis, that only goes so far in attenuating .45cal recoil. Effective? Hell yes. Sweet-shooting? Eh....not so much. But I can fall asleep on the couch with it in an inside-the-waistband holster, and I hardly notice that it is there....and did I mention that the damn thing just works?


Finally:
The CZ-75B

For those of you going "Huh? What the hell is a CZ?", let me introduce you. CZ (or Ceska Zbrojovka) is a Czech manufacturer that just happens to produce some EXCELLENT weapons. Not well known in the US until relatively recently (that whole Iron Curtain thing got in the way for a while), CZ is rapidly gaining in popularity. What that means is that pricing, which is ever driven by demand, is creeping up as well. I just happened to get very lucky back in '99 when I was looking for a "good, cheap 9mm", and I walked away with this baby for $400. In hindsight, a steal.

The CZ-75 is fairly similar to a Browning Hi-Power, and that is a good thing. It is a full-size, all-steel 9mm, which translates to a lot of weight (40oz) absorbing a low recoil, with a low bore axis to boot. That translates to follow-up goodness. This is a very easy pistol to put multiple rounds on target quickly.

It's a double-stack 9mm, so capacity is 16+1. It is DA/SA, and has a manual safety (which I don't like on a pistol) and no decocker (so you lower the hammer like a revolver...which can be a little disconcerting). In hindsight, if I had bought the CZ-75BD, both of these issues would be solved.

How does it shoot? Like butta, baby.... Everyone loves this gun. Nice smooth trigger (though long travel and long reset). Comfortable grip, with a grip angle that is virtually identical to the much-loved 1911 grip angle. It all just combines to make for a very enjoyable shooting experience. And it's fun to have something a little different from the everyday as well. This is the one that I reach for first at the range. This is the one that really makes me smile.

By: Steve

Slow News Day?

Actually no - we've got the World Cup going on... oh and a road trip to DC. Shelldrake, you have the con!

By: Brant