Retired CW5 to Army leaders: Getting bigger is a mistake!

Of course CWO5 Edgar would notice a deficiency in current Army marksmanship and PT. He cut his baby teeth on both marksmanship and PT as an enlisted Marine on the way to Vietnam (judging by his ribbons).

as Much as we beed to Be beefing up of the military the Politically correct factors in Dc and the Fast tract commanders in the training commands are worried about Numbers and Not the Quality in those Numbers...
we started seeing the Non-since starting in the early 90's when the Trainees were allowed to Card the DI/Ds in both Basic and AIt ... the Trainees were given cards Yellow cards to give to a Drill Sgt. ot Instructor because the Individual was feeling too stressed out or felt he or she was being unfairly singled out or "picked ON"... they Instructors and Drill Sgt.'s were actually administratively corrected for Receiving too many cards in a day or week...
Many of the Rangers and SF guys were sent back to The Bn/Groups because they were Overly hard on the Troops in basic and AIT...
Thus we were and are still getting Buttercups and Snowflakes who think Reality is Little more than Playing Call of duty and hitting the Reset button when they screwup...

I don't agree with every point of his solution, necessarily; but his assessment of the problem is spot on. We have a risk averse environment that makes proper training extremely difficult. For an example, the old timers from my Army National Guard company talk about going out in the county forest to do training. There's an abandoned bridge north of town that got used for demolition training. All inert of course. They did river recon practice by having guys bring in canoes instead of using zodiacs, but actually did get to do a river recon. By the time I got in all that was verboten, but we had access to all the highest quality training sites at Ft. McCoy. However, those have to be carefully planned for, sometimes years in advance. It's not just the "big Army's" fault either. It also rests on the shoulders of unit leadership that doesn't realize the importance of giving their troops realistic training. I can't count the times we've had some good training planned and then at the last minute had some part of it fall through. One expletive that comes to mind that I was particularly salty about was 300m or so of triple strand. The brigade wanted us to set up triple strand concertina around their TOC. No big deal, that's what engineers are for. We've got a love/hate relationship with Tina. However, whoever was responsible for ordering BOM, didn't order barbed wire. They also didn't order enough tina. Or enough pickets. When we began putting in the wire somebody told us it was too hot to do it in kit. So we downgraded to k pots and c wire gloves. But, every step, I'm explaining to the troops, "you wouldn't stretch the wire like this in real life," "these pickets are too far apart," etc., etc. In short we got robbed of all training value. I hate putting in c wire, but if you're going to make me do it, at least let it be meaningful! That's just one example of untold experiences.