How An Expert Action Badge Will Only Hurt Force Readiness

This is why this old fogie is grateful to be on Rallypoint,post like these show how the Army has had problems with training since way back in my time,Vietnam and its aftermath saw the Military struggling with drug use,racism and the new social mores of American society,now reading this and other posts I see we have much the same problems as fifty years ago,I just hope we are smarter on these issues because the World has become a much more dangerous place than in my day.

If you want to change attitudes, habits, etc you don't need to do something like this to "incentivize".. you need to hold negative OER or NCOER bullets over people's heads. If soldiers lack training in basic tasks it's because they were never trained properly in the first place OR they were trained properly and just pushed through with that "it's the unit's problem now" mentality that seems to have become prevalent in the last 10-15 years or so. It's an officer's job to say "this is what we're doing and when" and it's the NCOs job to make it happen and make their soldiers proficient. There shouldn't be a ribbon or award tossed around as an incentive for people to do their damn jobs. Everyone doesn't need a trophy. If you start handing out trophies to people who suck then people who don't suck aren't going to work as hard and eventually you'll have a watered down, clueless bunch of knuckle dragging twits that couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Hold leaders accountable starting in TRADOC and continuing to the real military and hold individuals accountable should the leadership do their job and the individual just fail at the simplest things.

I agree. I felt the same way about soldier and NCO if the year competitions. Not that those were a bad thing necessarily, but they often turned out to be major distractions. I believe that our sapper stakes, which required the squads to train as squad and train combat engineer tasks was a much more worthwhile competition. An NCO could win NCO of the year, and still be a fairly ineffective NCO. But you can't train a winning sapper squad unless you're a good NCO! Competition is great, but it should be bgeared towards training soldiers as they will fight/perform. I honestly don't care how good a cook us at landnav if he can't make scrambled eggs without screwing it up. And I don't care how good our company comms NCO can shoot if he can't do comms!