[Backwoods]

Great points and arguments Hardroad; however, I am not sure that the SF WO you are describing is practical or possible today, and in my humble opinion should not have been the baseline when the program was started.



We currently have guys who have 5-7 years on teams and all they have done is combat rotations. With 6-9 months on and 6 months off the days of JCETs et al are rare. They are going to have to be learned again.

Additionally, in your point the practice of taking former 18Zs as Warrants does not work 100% of the time. (I had an 18Z make the same comment 5 years ago and say that SF WO should have 18yrs on a team before they become WOs.....please) Most of the time, when a guy has become an 18Z he is toward the end of his career and ready to make SGM or finish up. In addition, most of our 18Zs are in their late 30s or 40s and are finding it sucks to get up in the morning un-crink the bones and move out. (I am not saying this is true for all 18Zs, I have some friends who are studs and make the young guys wish they were dead after a PT session.) I say this because the days of the WO sitting in the back of the TM RM and typing concepts while the team trains are gone. In fact, if a WO tries that now he is branded a S!@# Bag and his team tries to move him along.

Hell, they were branded the same thing in the past. How many times have all of us heard derogatory comments about WO. When you ask why the guys, usually SR E7 or 18Z, say “All my WO ever wanted to do was sit in the back of the room and make power point slides or type concepts. They never went to the range and ducked out of all things with the team.” (Trust me on this I have seen this happen twice in the last 8 months.) Also, I have seen my fair share of SR NCOs who would be “qualified” in your argument to be WOs but don’t know their 4th point from a hole in the ground about UW or the full spectrum of SF OPS. I have also seen dudes with 3-5 years on the team who not only understand such things, but can conceptionalize the 3rd and 4th order effects of said operations. THOSE are the guys we need to be hunting and recruiting. Those are the guys that make the regiment revere the WO position. If we work off of seniority alone, we give guys like kgoerz a very good reason to believe that WO was the worst team decision ever made.

Today the WO is as much if not more of a combat leader as any other officer in the regiment. He should be expected by his team to throw on his ruck and keep up. He doesn’t need to be the best, but he needs to be right there with the team. The days of the old sage WO1 or CW2 sitting in the back of the room and just interjecting wisdom should not have happened in the past and those of us in the W01-CW3 typically don’t want to see them happen again.

When it comes down to brass tacks it should be the WO and TM SGT on that ODA that makes the decision if a guy is capable of being a good WO or not. Not his time line, JCET participation etc.

I do agree with you on the 18F issue. I think that as the WO you are the fusion cell of the team and it should remain as a criteria.

When it comes down to it for knowledge, we need to improve the 180A education course, period. 180A NEED to be the SME on all things UW/Ops/Intel and that needs to be the focus of our training.

I know that this post will ruffle a few feathers. Also, I can not be as articulate as is my typical nature…its 0230 here now. Sorry. BLUF WO are COMBAT LEADERS. SF Leaders lead from the front. WO NEED TO BE the example of an SF Officer. That means recruiting guys that are in the jr E7 range, putting them through a process beyond their WO and TM SGT picking them to insure we have the right guy, and then putting him through the best SF educational system we can produce.

my 2 cents