The CPX continued today, again allowing some people to shine, but also exposing many weaknesses, especially amongst several senior leaders. How some of these people can make such senior ranks and not have knowledge or experience in things that even I have is beyond me. I guess as some people progressed through the ranks they became complacent and were content without challenging themselves in developing different skill sets along the way.
Take for example our second most senior SFC. He has been an SFC for nearly 8 years. What he has done in those 8 years is beyond me. I guess he just stayed at the company level, played Acting First Sergeant for a bit, and never really tried to work in a battalion operations center before, something that many of our junior enlisted Soldiers have been doing for years. The pace is a little different than that of a company operations center for sure, but it is not that much different. I am not 100% sure what his problem is, but he always seemed to be lost, developing tracking charts to track how much water and MREs we had on hand, something that is completely notional in an exercise such as our CPX. Because he was busy tracking phantom MREs and water supply, he was missing some of the requirements from the exercise. He was also not developing any of his Soldiers so that they knew how to work the section, setting them up for failure when it comes time to do operations for real. I’m sure he can’t work 24-hour days for ever in an actual operation; everyone needs to get at least a few hours of sleep a night. It was because of people like him that the CPX did not go nearly as smoothly as it should have.
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