A perennial topic of conversation in the barracks is, unsurprisingly, what's wrong with the Army and what could be done to fix it. I've argued for a while now that all our biggest frustrations have common roots in that top leadership is trying to be a wartime and a peacetime army at the same time. It's the mindset that has soldiers in Iraq returning from long patrols to get browbeaten because their pants are bloused below the 3rd eyelet of their boots. It's the mindset that has soldiers coming back from a year's deployment to an atmosphere not of "we're going to try not to waste your time so you can spend some more of it with your families", but rather "better buckle down, because we've got a year's worth of hoops to jump through and boxes to check". Well, leave to it Tom Ricks to have already given it a catchy name: The four deadly P's, the Persistence of Peacetime Personnel Processes.
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