New in 2018: Services to focus on excess training, education requirements

I loved training myself.

Speaking of ineffective training, when I was in Europe in 2012, we had a suicide prevention stand down day. The whole day was resiliency training, suicide prevention, and similar training. During part of the day we had to gather around the radio while the European commander and CSM discussed the topic on AFN. I don't remember the exact days since they had a suicide in the command, but it was long, more than a year, and the leaders were bragging about that on the radio. Anyhow, that night someone killed themselves. We had to do suicide prevention training all over again. Lot of people wanted to kill the dead person again.

There's good training, and then there's beating a dead horse. I'm not opposed to SHARP, EO, Suicide Prevention, or OP SEC, but when it becomes a form of mass punishment, it loses its effectiveness.

The repeated rehashing of the same training over and over because one person violated a rule is what got me. I'm not talking about warfighting training, but rather stuff like suicide prevention, SHARP, EO, clearing procedures, etc. You could always tell when someone in regiment or brigade messed up because we had to sit through more hours of the same "annual" classroom training we had done the week or month before.

My favorite all time was during my first deployment. Every time someone shot the clearing barrel, we had to do a safety stand down to practice proper weapon clearing procedures, while the poor SM guilty of the negligent discharge got busted down in rank. Every time except once. This particular time the local nationals were pretty froggy, so we were running about 20 hours at a time in sector, escorting the battalion commander. Lucky for us, we could catch catnaps while he was in meetings on the COPs, but he was running straight, 20 hours a day, and we had been at it for 2 weeks, so he was exhausted. We pulled into the FOB, dismounted at the clearing barrels, and started the clearing procedure. Suddenly we heard the "bang" of an M-4 firing, and all turned in surprise to see the BC standing there with a stunned look on his face, smoke trickling from the muzzle of his weapon. We finished clearing our weapons, returned to battalion, and he locked himself in his quarters for 36 hours. Our high speed platoon sgt had us do the standard weapon clearing class and demonstration, but no one else did.

It was rumored that a week later, the fifth unit armorer that looked at the BC's weapon (an E-4) declared the weapon defective, the 15-6 investigation was closed, and the following month that specialist got pinned E-5 even though he wasn't promotible when he looked at the weapon. But that was only a rumor and I know nothing.