REFLECT
Heading to a Joint Assignment? Complete Phase II of Joint Professional Military Education (JPME)
by Thang Q. Tran It is an exciting time of the year as Assignment Officers and Detailers notify individuals of their upcoming assignments. A select group of field grade officers from across the Department of Defense will get assigned to a position...
War on a Budget: What Can the S-8 Do for Your Team?
by Henoch Gassner A relatively late addition to the Brigade Combat Team (BCT), the Resource Management (RM) staff, or S-8, enables the brigade commander to make informed decisions on how to maximize lethality by executing their budget. Although the...
Garrison Command: Lessons Learned as a Strategic Leader
By Chad R. Foster This might not be the outcome you expected or wanted. You might be shocked, excited, disappointed, or angry – perhaps all four at once. Regardless of what you know (or think you know), you are going to find that Garrison Command...
Sprinting the Marathon: Lessons Learned from an Advanced Individual Training Commander
by David G. Moehling Commanding an Advanced Individual Training (AIT) Company presents unique challenges vastly different from those in conventional units. The training calendar is cyclic and repetitive, the property book is minimal, and...
Accepting Risk in a Postmodern Military: Reducing Dependency on Information Through Creative and Critical Thinking
by Marc Meybaum The radio squawks to life, a message flashes on the screen in front of you, and your cell phone vibrates on the dash. As you sit in your vehicle during a field training exercise you cannot escape the seemingly endless requests for...
Faithful and True: Lessons Learned at Combined Resolve XVI
by Samuel “Joe” Nirenberg During the past nine months, I was fortunate to command 1-5 FA while it served as a part of the rotational ABCT in support of Atlantic Resolve. Up front, I will say that the Atlantic Resolve mission allows...
The Top 10 Things I Learned as a Battalion Commander at the National Training Center
by Ethan Olberding Editor’s Note: Over the next week, we will be running a series of articles from 4-70 AR on their lessons learned at the National Training Center (NTC). Each article is unique in that it will present a different perspective from...
Do We Disdain Intellectual NCOs?
By Chris Melendez Former officer and scholar James Joyner critiqued anti-intellectualism within the U.S. military. Opinions will diverge on Joyner’s assessment on whether such bias exists or whether an ideal balance can be struck between the...
ACFT 3.5: How the Army can Meet Congressional Guidance without Resorting to Gender Discrimination
by Kristen M. Griest I wrote an op-ed through the Modern War Institute in February advocating against the implementation of ACFT 3.0, the latest version of the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT). The new updates to this test include the option to...
Digital Dunkirk: Lessons Learned
On August 15, 2021, I doom-scrolled through social media feeds that tracked Kabul’s fall. By August 31, my phone had thousands of messages from hundreds of people I didn’t know two weeks before, and we’d helped some Afghan allies leave Afghanistan....
Should I Go to SAMS?
By: Jim Greer Someone recently asked me, “Why should an officer attend SAMS (the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies)?” But, in fact I think that is exactly the wrong question. The question ought to be, “Why would any officer not want to...
10 Rules for the Iron Major
By. Chad Foster Lists of “rules” are always problematic because they are never really complete or perfect. There is ALWAYS a better way to phrase something or a key idea that gets left out. However, the list below is one that has stayed with me for...
The Field Grade Survival Kit
By Aaron Childers You are going into a survival situation and you can only bring ten things… Sometimes being a field grade is like being in a survival scenario. You have a lot to do, build shelter, find water, and search for food. All of these...
Generations of Veterans Now Face the Duty to Reshape America
I am pleased to share the following blog post, written by Team Rubicon Clay Hunt Fellow Crista Casas. Content courtesy of Team Rubicon. To learn more about their mission of continued service through disaster response,...
Choosing Action Over Apathy
I am pleased to share the following blog post, written by Team Rubicon Clay Hunt Fellow Brandon Callahan. Content courtesy of Team Rubicon. To learn more about their mission of continued service through disaster response, visit TeamRubiconUSA.org....
3 Simple Ways to Introduce Your Kids to History
Benjamin Franklins’s father, a tradesman, had a small library in their home that Ben used to develop his famous curiosity. General George Patton’s father read the Iliad and the Odyssey with young George before he was 10, not...
What was Patton’s 7th Quality of Great Leadership?
By Josh Bowen, author of 3×5 Leadership In the West Point’s special collections inventory resides Patton’s Elements of Strategy textbook from when he was a West Point Cadet back in 1909. This textbook was used for West Point’s “History...
The Machine Will Run Without You: A Checklist for Checking Out
By: Joan Sommers There are multiple reasons that take leaders out of the office and it’s not just TDY. Non-emergency surgery, NCO professional education schools, birth of a child, Ranger school, and the normal 30 days of leave a year will lead you...
Does Popularity Get You Promoted?
A few months ago I heard Mitch Prinstein on the Art of Manliness podcast and then read his book Popular: The Power of Likability in a Status-Obssessed World. I reached out to him and asked him about his thoughts on popularity’s linkage to...
Would Your Squad Leaders Attend Your Funeral?
By. Colonel Curt Taylor I recently heard General Dave Perkins, the Commanding General of TRADOC, describe a funeral for a senior general officer long retired. At the funeral he noted the attendance of several middle-aged men who had served...
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You Want the Best? Embrace Failure
By Brad Hutchison three The troops were ready: SHARP, OPSEC, SAEDA and CTIP training complete; field sanitation, environmental compliance, and ammunition handling teams trained and identified; all Soldiers who would come within the 385 days of...
Ten Important Lessons I Learned as the S3/XO
By Jason Gallardo 1.Build relationships- your ability to succeed will depend on your aptitude at working with your sister BNs, BDE, DIV, and post agencies. You have been told throughout your career that relationships are everything, but it becomes...
Mentorship: A Strategic Imperative
By Chip Bircher Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. —Jack Welch In the fall of 1915, a young lieutenant fresh out of West Point reported to Fort...
Victory From the Sidelines
By Christopher Manganaro Coaching a football team and leading a military unit have a lot in common. Both require an understanding of the “game,” practicing multiple plays for different scenarios, and building a quality bench of “players.” Whether...
When Bacteria Beats Bayonets
I originally published this post over at The Zen Pundit as part of The Thucydides Round Table, an eight week deep dive into an exceptional work of history. If you haven’t read Landmark Thucydides yet, I encourage you to pick up a copy,...
How Group Dynamics Brought Athens and Sparta to War
By Joe Byerly I originally published this post over at The Zen Pundit as part of The Thucydides Round Table, an eight week deep dive into an exceptional work of history. If you haven’t read Landmark Thucydides yet, I encourage you to...
Can Intellectuals Wear Muddy Boots?
Talent management is a hot topic today, and we increasingly read articles and blog posts that are very critical of the military’s management of its personnel. However, the tension between talent management and our promotion system is not a new one....
The Evolution of Leader Development
In 1920, as commander of 3rd Squadron, 3d Cavalry, then Colonel George S. Patton Jr. held a series of sixteen lectures in which we he imparted the lessons he had learned from a mixture of self study and his own experiences in World War I to the...
Surviving Headquarters Company Command
By CPT Scott Nusom There are few assignments in the Army that produce the same unique leadership challenge as commanding a headquarters and headquarters company (HHC) and what makes the HHC command so challenging is learning how to productively...
Leadership Starts with….Love?
By: Thomas E. Meyer “Regard your soldiers as your children and they will follow you into the deepest valleys. Look on them as your own beloved sons and they will stand by you even unto death.” –Sun Tzu; The Art of War A military leader’s first...
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