Planes, Trains and T110s
Дата: 24.04.2019 19:00:00
Beausabre, on Apr 23 2019 - 22:53, said: Question for Chieftain. How is morale in Armor Branch these days?
Here's what I hear through my contacts. Armor officers are not
being selected by promotion and command boards in as great a rate
as their Artillery and (especially) Infantry contemporaries. Even
assignments to Mechanized Infantry formations is not regarded as
career enhancing, (get your Ranger tab but forget about becoming
a Bradley Master Gunner), cadets (USMA and ROTC) are not
being encouraged to join Armor and the quality (class standing and
order of merit list) of those that do is declining, limited to no
updates to the M1A2 - which is now ancient technology compared
to say, the Leo II updates, the Armor School becoming the defacto
Armor Department of the Infantry School - Go the annual Maneuver
Conference at Benning (no more annual gathering of the Armor and
Cavalry clan as a separate event). For those of us who remember Ft
Knox being the Home of Armor and Cavalry, a drive around Benning
shows that you are at the Home of Infantry (and I don't blame 'em)
and oh, yeah, the second class citizen tankers are back over in
that corner/ And that's my point, morale is a delicate thing and it
seems to this ole Treadhead that the US Army isn't nurturing it in
its Mounted Arm.The_Chieftain: Mmm... As far as I know, it's still fairly reasonable,
especially now that armor is experiencing a bit of a resurgence. A
note crossed my feed last week saying that 1st Armored in Ft Bliss
just shipped out its last Strykers to convert to an all-heavy
division. Similarly, I think the pendulum has started to
swing back a bit from the "generalist" viewpoint of armor officers
which had permeated the Army the last few years. Instead of
expecting an armor officer to go from tanks to airborne cav to
strykers, there is a recent push back again towards excellence in
one specialty. I have personally considered that there is far too
much of an emphasis on the Ranger Tab, and I think that's starting
to be de-emphasized as well, at least as long as you're not going
to one of the airborne/airmobile units. The M1A2 Sep v3 has
just come out, which has some reasonable upgrades, and also
the Trophy APS is being finally fitted, so the Abrams has some life
in it yet. I cannot speak to how the commissioning sources
are pushing or not pushing the various branches.
Planes, Trains and T110s