more on this later

Remember all, if your not a gunner, your a target.

Ubique

You wanted an answer to your question and you got one from ender. If you didn't like it, tough. Get over it...or, you may try to learn the etiquette of the internet. When you start a sentence, capitalize the first letter of the first word. The end of a sentence usually ends with a period or a punctuation mark suitable to the intent implied. If you don't know how to spell something, look it up. You'll learn something and your professionalism will start to show through.

I never got past the 9th grade (officially) but I watched and learned.

By becoming more than what you are you grow and when you grow you change into what you want to become become.

You could benefit from doing the same.

Dileas Gu Brath

Could you describe at all what the actual abuse was on the course your fellow troops went on?! Did they PT those 10 troops into the ground when they were injured?! That is abuse. Define what behaviour occurred to give me a better sense of what your troops went through.

The CF runs courses for one reason: to train soldiers to develop specific competencies -- whether general military skills, leadership abilities, or specialist technical knowledge, etc.

Courses are not -- or at least should not -- be run to "weed out" perceived weakness. Nor, should they be run to provide "pay back time" for experienced instructors.

If 10 of 20 candidates are medically washed out of a course, one has to question the skill of the instructors. Does it mean instruction was poor? Not necessarily. But, it should prompt some investigation.

It could be that the candidates were simply unfit -- in fact, given the general state of fitness in Canadian youth today, I'm sure they were. In that case, the task for instructors is even more demanding: how to produce skilled, capable soldiers without hurting them.

At the end of the day, the Army needs skilled, capable soldiers -- not an opportunity to brag in the mess about "how hard" the course was, or "how many people we RTU'd."

The attitude that no course is a good course unless people get hurt and fail is/was/always has been/always will be simply asinine.

I have seen instructors who were abusive, and who knew it. I have been abused by instructors on course who were subsequently charged and convicted. I have seen instructors who were abusive, but didn't realize they were -- they were just "doing what had been done to them". This, particularly, happens a lot on leadership courses.

Fortunately, the vast majority of instructors I have seen are hard-working, caring and work damned hard to make sure their students learn what they're supposed to learn and develop the competencies they're there to develop in a way that maximizes their usefulness to the CF. Does this mean the coddle troops and run "soft" courses? No. It means they're smart enough to develop strong, skilled, fit soldiers without killing, hurting or abusing them.

And, for the "Bonafide" counters out there, I've instructed, developed, supervised, and been a candidate on dozens of serials of courses, reg and reserve, including: GMT, QL2/3 Inf, QL4 Dvr wheel, dvr track, MG, Comms, Recce, JLC/Infantry ISCC, BOT, Pre-RESO, RESO Ph I, II, BIOC Ph III, IV, CFSS, NBCW Offr/Supvr, Unit NBCW, RCMP ERT field trg, Search and Rescue Management, Cliff Rescue Team Leader, Basic Financial Advisor, yada, yada, yada.

It seems to be a common trait amongst junior NCOs and some senior NCOs to look upon the "next generation" of soldiers as weak and the CFRCs "scrapped the bottom of the barrel" with candidates for this course. I've been around long enough to realize this isn't true. Luckily the days of course standards being at the whim of an instructor/course WO/course Offr are hopefully gone forever. The days of kicking people off course because you don't like what they look like, don't like their attitude, etc are over.

Are standards low today. Yeah, they probably are but until we (the army) show that we require a soldier to do a task at a certain standard we probably won't get it raised. Standards are based on Fact..not a leaders personal whim.

[ 28 August 2001: Message edited by: Infanteer ]

I'm sure that training standards today are unrealistic. How can I be so sure? Because, they've always been unrealistic.

When it comes to training, we've always made it up as we went along. Is a soldier who can carry a 50kg pack 10 miles in 1.5 hours really more combat-ready than one who can carry a 45kg pack 9 miles in 1 hour? Or, a 30kg pack 20 miles in 3 hours? Who knows?

Certainly, I expect that soldiers should be fit. How fit? I don't know. The toughest, most combat-experienced soldiers I knew never seemed very fit. They smoked, were overweight and couldn't run fast. But they were battle-proven and combat-tested.

I also know that there is a tendency among young officers and NCO's to take the "granite" philosophy to heart when training recruits and junior leaders.

The "Granite" philosophy????

Here's my analogy: Picture two artists at work. One is a sculptor who works in Granite. The other is a sculptor who works with clay. The Granite sculptor creates art by chiseling away everything that isn't a beautiful statue. The Clay sculptor builds his statue from scratch, using raw materials to create something wonderful from base clay.

Too many military instructors think like Granite sculptors: they believe their role is to take a platoon of recruits and "weed out" those who aren't soldiers. That, frankly, is a pretty simple one-day job and requires zero instructional skill.

In fact, military instructors should be Clay sculptors. Their task is to take a platoon of raw recruits and, using ingenuity, creativity, intelligence, skill, knowledge and perseverance, to build soldiers out of them.