In another classic example of wasting everyone's time, the Army has outdone itself again.

The latest culprit? EES / Evals. We have an entire system dedicated to this, but for whatever reason, it's not rolling into IPPSA, meaning that we have to manually input the status. What in tarnation?! What is the point of these systems?!? None of them actually work as advertised, and all this really achieves is eating up more time, our most valuable, limited resource. I have 14 open evals in my Company, 9 of which are accepted by HRC. Care to guess how many are accurately reflected in IPPSA? ONE!! Now I have to waste someone's time by tasking them with updating this, while I update my slides like the good little powerpoint sharecropper I am. Yeh, this is definitely the epitome of "readiness." Remind me again how much this would matter in a firefight? Or how it increases 10 level skills? You know, the thing we learned day-in day-out the last 20 years saves the most lives. If my Soldiers aren't proficient on their equipment and confident in their abilities, remind me again how my updating another meaningless metric helps my Company? Because, BN and BDE, if the slide was green, we all know you wouldn't look twice at it, if at all.

I can focus on training my Company, you know, legitimate, meaningful readiness.... or I can keep every slide up to date because the system that's supposed to work doesn't do the 1 thing it's supposed to do. I can't do both, because the latter is a 12 hour a day job. For the record, the first option is my preference, and far more fulfilling, as well as important. But the reaction of field grades to anything less than perfection of the latter makes it clear what the priorities are.

On the flip side, this is practically encouragement to lie. If you don't know who Dr / COL Leonard Wong is, look him up. He's my hero.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUhNIOGhPus

Everyone knows the system is wrong, and it takes an excessive amount of effort to actually check if I were to report incorrectly. So what's to stop me from just making all the boxes green anyway, and telling my NCOs and LTs to just go home and do this on their couch with a beer? At least that way they can see their families. "Go-home criteria?" Get the fuck out. Higher will never know the difference, because even if they check and catch the discrepancy, I'll just say the system was wrong, and we all know that BN/BDE will accept that answer, because its more effort than it's worth to actually get to the bottom of it, and by the time they did, it would have changed anyway, because the systems don't interface correctly enough for them to catch me.

People first, mission firster, powerpoints most firstest! HOOAH?

I'll take a coffee, plain black with nothing in it, like my soul