A Mediocre Military?

Mediocre Military?

It’s almost two years old, but I just read this article by Tim Kane about the military’s problem with officer retention. (Or, retention in general.)

As a former member of the Army, I can attribute a lot of my frustration to bureaucratic nonsense. It definitely was not a meritocracy–but I thought this was merely a problem with where I was stationed. Kane shows that it is clearly military-wide.

This is oddly the same talk that I’ve been hearing from Michael Yon. Is it so odd that we hear of General Officers committing rape, stealing, and all sorts of horrific acts when the military itself seems to be promoting mediocrity? (They say forcible sodomy–I wonder why they won’t put “General” and “Rape” in the same sentence…)

If a private sector company worked like this, they’d be burned and out before the next fiscal year. Companies just can’t operate this way. Internal entrepreneurs are like star running backs for big corporations. These same corporations have a holy glint in their eye when they talk about innovation.

And apparently the military just doesn’t care for innovation. Take the 5 billion dollar flub with the digital camouflage, problems with strykers, and making SEAL teams fight with their arms tied behind their backs for examples.

Before I entered the military I heard numerous accounts of the “enlisted brotherhood” and how “officers are only looking out for their careers.” I met just as many NCO’s who were concerned only with their careers–and in fact, I found more officers who I admired than I found NCO’s.

I’m not saying the whole thing is rotten, I’m merely agreeing with Tim Kane, Michael Yon, and who knows how many others–the military needs to foster the meritocracy sort of culture in order to continue fielding an amazing military force. Brash actions are not the sort of actions performed by a committee.

The Army’s XM25 Does What?

XM25 looks like a barrel of fun to a former infantryman. Just looking at it makes me wonder if I got out of there a bit too hastily.

What can you do with an XM25, I’m glad I asked that, because there’s a bunch of reasons to have one of these. Blow things up, blow up barriers, shoot air-bursts over enemies as they crouched behind cover, run your own fireworks for the 4th next year, scare the pants off potential threats, react to contact with a bang, all kinds of reasons… it wouldn’t be very easy to conceal carry though.

Military.com also gives us the following information about the Punisher’s inner-mechanics:

The futuristic looking XM25 fires a “smart” High Explosive Airburst round out to around 600 meters. The smart round is a “counter defilade” round, designed to blast enemy infantry taking cover behind walls, cars, in trenches as well as enemy fighters dumb enough to be standing out in the open. The Army calls the weapon a “leap ahead” technology.

The XM25 uses a laser rangefinder to target the enemy, then the weapon’s micro-computer accounts for air pressure, temperature and the 25mm round’s ballistics, feeds that information to a microchip in the round itself programming it to detonate directly over the target. With a 600 meter effective range, it would provide small teams greatly enhanced lethality well beyond that of rifles and machine guns. The Army claims that tests showed the XM25 with the high-explosive round is 300 percent more lethal than current squad level weapons.

Read more — Kit Up!

That means that small cover might not be cover anymore… out to 600 meters. That’s not just reaching out and touching someone–that’s reaching out and punching them in the face. With a grenade.

Thanks to Military.com’s other article on this, I’ve learned that this grew out of the XM29 (OICW) project. You might remember way back in the day seeing a picture that looked something like this. This is the weapon that later had the imaging system so the soldier (hypothetically) could put the weapon around a corner and look at the enemy from the screen jammed against his one eye.

You’ll notice there’s a wee little M4 carbine tucked under that arcade system of a weapon. They took that out on the XM25–running around with 14lbs of gun (what the XM25 weighs) is probably already pushing the limits of “comfort.”

And both of these, hopefully, will eventually lead to this guy.

Maybe not, in fact… I have no idea what this guy is doing, but that helmet looks kind of funny. I vaguely remember that the uniform administers first-aid, pain-killers, and is capable of tourniquet-ing any of the extremities all on its own. Nice try, future warrior project, but I think the XM25 wins the “cool” contest.

Federal Resumes vs. Private Sector Resumes

There’s a huge difference between the two. My padre works for an Air Force base on A-10s–yes, it’s cool. That’s what becoming an engineer can do. Anyway, I remember when he was writing up his resume and seeing two or three pages worth of experience and painstaking detail of his experience.

Years later I’ve been taught to squish my resume into a single page and get the facts out as fast as possible so that an HR dude can ask me to “elaborate on what you learned at your last position.” Well, according to Military.com’s article that can be found HERE says that the difference between the two is Federal vs. Private Sector requirements.

So don’t get tunnel vision when writing/designing your resume–look at what the position is and be sure to research into it. Nothing beats having someone to talk to within the organization itself. Use LinkedIn (research the most current way to break the ice before you go annoying people) and find someone who will talk to you about how they got the job. If you do find someone who’ll talk to you and answer your questions–buy them a beer. If that’s not possible, make sure you send them a thank you email.

I’m off, gotta go write an enormously detailed resume for my future government job.

Great Advertising: Utopolis Cinemas

 

The Utopolis advertisement is a rhetorically effective document because it successfully argues that movies are generally more fun than real life. It argues this in three ways:

• Your plan to reenact a romantic moment will never go the way you planned
• No one has a team of production assistants, artists, and tech experts to follow them around
• Seagulls are jerks

I know you’re particularly curious about how I’m going to prove that last one, but trust me; seagulls (minus the whole insect-eating thing) are jerks.

Utopolis knows that you want, at least at some time or another, to have a truly romantic experience. For the most part, we can blame Walt Disney for this; that, or give him credit. Let’s say that you decide to take your significant other out for a nice romantic getaway on a boat. You show up and it’s not trumpets and fanfare, it’s a middle-aged dock worker looking guy running a leaky boat and you think to yourself, “This doesn’t look anything like it did in the ad.” But you’re already there and you’ve already paid and so you sigh and get on the maybe-seaworthy vessel. You get out to sea and look up: it’s cloudy. It almost looks like it’s going to rain, and your hopes sink a little more. At this point you’re actually hoping the boat sinks because that’s the closest you’re going to get to having your romantic jaunt seem like a movie.

It’s at this point that you take a long, hard look at what your significant other is wearing. Now, I’m going to go ahead and say the other is a man. That’s just easier for me to work with. He made an effort; he’s wearing nice shoes, jeans without any holes in them, and a shirt that both matches and is clean. He even gets the whole romantic jaunt idea because you’ve been talking to him about it for a while now. But at this point you just don’t care anymore. No one is going to call “cut” and wait for the skies to clear up, your hair is ruined, and you didn’t wear warm enough clothing because you thought it’d be sunny and warm today. Unfortunately you don’t have a team of assistants to fix all this little errors for you, and Bob the middle-aged dock worker doesn’t care whether or not it’s “romantic” enough today. You give up on the whole idea and decide to just sit down, drink a whole bunch of shoddy wine that Bob put out, and try to just enjoy being on a boat.

Well, your significant other sees you throwing in the towel and decides to put some effort into making this a romantic outing. He walks over to Bob and asks him a question, but you’re too far away to hear and to apathetic to care. When they finish chatting Bob walks below deck and your one and only starts back toward you with a smirk. That’s when Barry Manilow comes over the speakers of the boat and the captain brings up some of those supremely dangerous tiki torches. Your best bud in all the world clears some room off the deck and convinces you that dancing is a good idea, and it is. Sort of. By now the crappy wine is starting to take hold, and hey—there are tiki torches and Barry Manilow—you start to feel better about this jaunt of yours. Your husband sees yet another romantic opportunity and starts leading you to the prow of the boat where there’s a railing and ropes—just like in Titanic. The wine is definitely kicking in and you’re letting yourself loose a little bit more. You both stand up at the prow and start doing the Titanic arms-out-flying-like-a-plane thing when BAM! You get hit in the face by a seagull. Your head rockets back and bashes your jeans-wearing romantic partner in the face.

As you’re lying there, on your back, staring up at the cloud-covered sky on a leaky boat with a grizzled pirate for a captain, you begin to wonder why you ever thought doing this was a good idea. Furthermore, you decide that your glad Walt Disney is dead, because if he wasn’t you’d want to kill him. You’re pretty sure that you could find James Cameron, but after Avatar you’d probably have to wait in a line. When you get up you realize that you just spent a couple hundred dollars on a complete and utter failure to have a truly romantic getaway when you could have rented a Bruce Lee movie, stayed at home, lounged in pajamas, and drank decent wine without having an overweight middle-aged guy standing a few feet away from you. And your significant other, yeah, he’d be there; except he’d be laughing and lounging right along with instead of trying to keep his nose from getting even more blood on his outfit that actually matched.

All of this is brought to light by Utopolis in their ad for their group of cinemas.

“Are our blades any good? No. Our blades are f***ing great.”

What an intro. It reminds me of Michael Yon explaining how a soldier had put up a sign saying, “Don’t stand up here. The last guy who did got shot.” That’s how corporate communications ought to be: straight and fast.

I was working at State Farm on one of their many communications teams when a request came for us to write a memo from a manager to his underlings. The memo was supposed to tell them to take the quiz that he’d just created. To their credit, (this team was excellent) they asked me, the intern, what my thoughts were. So, there I was, consulting on communications. Time to shine.

“How about we start out with ‘I need you  to take a 10-minute quiz’?”

That’s what we put at the beginning. I think it got mellowed out during the approval process–pushed back a bit from the front, but I was proud of the straight-forwardness I’d created. There was the “what does this mean for me?” right at the beginning.

There has to be a level of “what’s in it for me” in a training video. Mine was directed at interns, so I had all sorts of ideas because, well, I was one. I immediately started to draw from what I enjoyed watching. Things started taking shape. I turned in a copy to my manager. People got all sorts of impressed. And Bob’s your uncle.

Writing a training script for a corporation is a very involved process. You have to get approval, and go through legal, and blah, blah, blah… However, getting it through and then having a tech team take it over to make a real thing is quite the feeling.

The very first script I’d ever written was accepted and made into a video. At first I wondered if the tech team just didn’t know what they were doing. Honestly, I was that surprised, even skeptical. But it turns out I had stumbled onto corporate communications gold.

I didn’t have the corporate-speak mentality. I had not, in fact, drank the kool-aid.

“If you’re not being over-edited, you’re not doing your job as a writer.” –Guy I met with once.

I would stay here and lolligag, but that’s all I wanted to share. If you’re writing for corporate communications, remember to keep it short and swe

Corporate Communications

Up to this point in the internship I have written/created, co-written/co-edited the following:

-Awards research document
-Department meeting highlights article
-Template for team assignment reports
-Digital age information discretion article
-Assisted edit on memos, newsletter articles, leadership communications
-Leadership in the workplace training script for video production
-Moderated team book club meeting
-Screencast walkthrough of department newsletter site

I’ve never written scripts before, but it worked out really well. I’ll definitely be looking into instructional design.

Training

What an excellent opportunity this State Farm internship has been already. A big company that’s taking big strides and has an awesome set of values. I’m on a virtual team, and I’m getting some great experience.

Three semesters to go

I’ve learned a great deal this past year beginning with an introduction to Adobe’s Creative Suite. After that I drew up a brochure to showcase some of my InDesign skills. Once that was finished I went on to get an in-depth look at writing grant proposals, and after that I wrote a set of instructions for WikidPad and completed a usability study on it–which achieved some very good results! Lastly, I wrote a basic screencast for Adobe’s Widget Browser.

All of these items can be found in my Writing Samples page. My resume is up as well as my Writing Philosophy. If you’d like to know more about myself there’s also an About Me page to check out. I’m currently working on my own website and I hope to feature some of the fishing and outdoor fun I have, and some technical reviews as well.