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2026-08-21 Home Front: Politix

'They should learn to write.' The US Army is forced to recruit a horde of backward officers

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Posted by badanov 2026-08-21 00:00|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| [508 views ] Top

1 Lies with truth sprinkled in. Classic Russian psyop. Still works well to this day for the liver lilied

Posted by DarthVader 2026-08-21 00:30|| 2026-08-21 00:30|| Front Page Top

TLDR maybe but I’m so glad you brought this up! Here’s why we can’t have iconoclast generals in the U.S. anymore:

1947: Officer Personnel Act. We standardized “up-or-out.” Officers increasingly advanced through centralized boards and prescribed career timing instead of being… https://t.co/Og5M2Zk2jG
— InfantryDort (@infantrydort) August 19, 2026

Posted by Grom the Reflective 2026-08-21 01:32|| 2026-08-21 01:32|| Front Page Top

3 Sounds to me like Obadala has his head up his ass.

Posted by Whiskey Mike 2026-08-21 03:40|| 2026-08-21 03:40|| Front Page Top

4 ROTC is a college program, if they don’t have those basic skills, they shouldn’t be in college. Not to mention that the majority of colleges require SAT scores or the equivalent as part of the college application.

Suffering the harvest of entitlement are we? STEM-focused education a bit too prohibitive was it? All of this downward spiral began long before the popular term DEI, I can assure you.

Enrollment numbers were never going to be enough. Classroom success and graduation became the goal.

Nothing that cannot be repaired, but it will take a willingness and much time.

Posted by Besoeker 2026-08-21 07:18|| 2026-08-21 07:18|| Front Page Top

5 Nothing new. We had required training in 'effective writing' in the 70s in the officer ranks. It wasn't like the late years of the Vietnam war was attracting the best and brightest in campus based ROTC. Given how the secondary school systems today are now below even those years standards of performance, the feeder system isn't delivering either.

Posted by Procopius2k 2026-08-21 07:49|| 2026-08-21 07:49|| Front Page Top

Posted by Heriberto Wholunter1733 2026-08-21 08:06|| 2026-08-21 08:06|| Front Page Top

7 I'm not surprised at any of this, since we have high school GRADUATES that cannot read at sixth-grade level, and who cannot do math at fourth-grade level. A large percentage of these are admitted to college. Our education (or lack thereof) problem affects every aspect of our lives, as knowledge and skills are growing in complexity on a daily basis. Schools are not just not keeping up, they're regressing. It's called "progress" by the education "establishment" - commie to the core.

Posted by Old Patriot 2026-08-21 08:23|| 2026-08-21 08:23|| Front Page Top

8 To be fair, one of the standard new hire training units when I was hired as a baby lab technician by P&G was a one day writing unit: How to Write the P&G One Page Memo. This is the thing that Harvard Business School has drooled over for decades, because the standardization — and required brevity — speeds information sharing immensely. It is hard to compress everything to fit into the standard format on one page without shrinking it to 5 point print, which also isn’t allowed.

I remember reading in the Horatio Hornblower books how he sweated writing after action reports and such. Is there a US Army Way of writing reports that would need to be trained, irrespective of previous writing ability?

Posted by trailing wife 2026-08-21 09:27|| 2026-08-21 09:27|| Front Page Top

9 ...unfortunately, the Army like all institutions suffers from periodic fits of babble and buzzwords. However, the small space for comments (on the old) efficiency reports forced the writer to be short and distinct in composition. Although I'll always treasure "God only knows how the poor creature ever got a commission" - Winfield Scot, Fort Niagara, 1814.

Posted by Procopius2k 2026-08-21 10:34|| 2026-08-21 10:34|| Front Page Top

10 ^^^^ OER bullet:

"This officer consistently met or exceeded the goals of the Army Energy Conservation Program."

Posted by Besoeker 2026-08-21 11:18|| 2026-08-21 11:18|| Front Page Top

11 Just have to say I had the best creative writing teacher in high school. Each week we had to turn in one paper. Each paper had 6 paragraphs, each paragraph had 4 sentences and each sentence had 12 words. You could write about any topic but the sentences had to be grammatically correct. If you can write 10 papers like that you can write anything!

Posted by Dopey Photch2701 2026-08-21 13:43|| 2026-08-21 13:43|| Front Page Top

12 Oh, and there's McNamara's 100,000. Which given today's kids, makes the effective qualified recruiting pool even smaller.

Posted by Procopius2k 2026-08-21 15:23|| 2026-08-21 15:23|| Front Page Top

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