New Perspectives

Came back from a COIN T3 (Counterinsurgency Train the Trainer) Conference out in Hohenfels, Germany. The conference went through the weekend, which sucks, but it was definitely worthwhile. The audience was mainly Majors-Colonels from respective allied armies (very few Americans there).

Couple of qucik points about the conference:

-If you put a bunch of high ranking officers in a room together, especially from different countries, it can easily become a cluster-fuck of non-intelligible sharp shooting of the briefer, or a series of individuals standing on their soap box to make a mediocre point... luckily, it did not go in this direction- the briefer was shit hot and put out any potential fires.

-Despite the amount of time we have been in Afghanistan, we have yet to standardize the application of COIN (Counter-insurgency) as well as standardizing a teaching program- the course I took is a draft to the Basic COIN class that should be coming out soon.

-The army has been teaching too much theory and not enough application- seems like we are finally headed in the right direction as far as applying theory.

-The environment shapes your operations, not the other way around. Simple, yet as an organization, we still stick to the conventional mentality of Operations shaping the environment.

Whoops, lunch time is over... OUT!

Life is about Choices

Life is about choices, and it is nice to know that even though I am in the Army, I can still make some of my own decisions and soak up as much life as I can (To the left is Saint Michaels Cathedral in Hamburg, Germany). Some things, of course, are completely out of my control and some of the decisions are made for me. But those times I do have control, I realize how great a feeling it is.

(A Castle in Copenhagen, Denmark at sundown at the bottom)

Nothing in particular spurred this realization, but everytime I get into a long training event (the last 2 months) or even a long prison sentence (West Point), the feeling you get when your cut loose is always a nice one and you begin to revel in all of the simple things- Good Food, Traveling, and making some of your own decisions in your free time. Life is good.