Safety Standdowns Aren’t Working

I see a lot of comments from vets here, but since a lot of you left, the military has gone high and to the right with safety stand-downs as well as mandatory training periods both in the classroom and online. A lot of it, frankly is CYA material. You have classes on drinking and driving every time some idiot gets a DUI. You get sexual assault classes when something happens in another unit or in another country. Safety is achieved by inspecting what you're expecting at multiple levels of leadership. The issue with the air wing specifically at this point is that their aircraft are falling apart since some of them are past their service life. Right now, the Marine AAV7P7, developed in 1969 is undergoing a second survivability upgrade. We've allowed the military-industrial system to become a pig and the acquisitions process to become a bureaucratic nightmare. Gone are the days of WWII when were able to provide upgraded variants in rapid succession. Today, we're mired in red tape and bureaucracy and the "safety stand downs" are apparently convincing senior leaders that it's making the junior Marines/sailors/soldiers/airmen take the training seriously when they see a decrease in incident numbers for a brief period. I'd argue that while our personnel have been cut, our missions have not in most cases, and you can't maintain a sprinting op-tempo forever so the stand down just gives personnel a chance to catch their breath. However, I don't think anyone is recalling these hundreds of wasted man-hours when they make a mistake or not.

One of my first safety stand-downs has kept me wearing a seat belt ever since. They lead us into the base theater at Cherry Pt. They're were Corpsmen in the back of the theater and along the walls. The temp was up I assume froms the number of people (1200 seats) but who knows. They started the presentation with trauma and plastic surgeons showing us pictures of accidents with individuals who were not wearing their seat belts. Some were ejected from the vehicle and impaled on trees or posts. Some were just road mush. One man hit his steering wheel so hard his ribs broke through his skin and became stuck on the steering wheel. The surgeons describe in detail all the photos. The Corpsmen carried out those who could not make it through the presentation. This went on for around three hours and then we went outside to take a ride in the convincer. It was a sled that simulated hitting a wall at 35 miles an hour. I have worn my seatbelt religiously for the last 30+ years.

One can only hope it works.