[ColdWarGrunt]

What happened to the KISS method?! Unless things have changed since I was active duty, give a knucklehead something and in time he will find a way to mess it up or break all together!

I agree with the need to spend more time teaching marksmanship, and we all know the Marine Corps is the best at trying to achieve this. However, sooner or later time is money and money is time, and the fact there is a schedule to adhere to as range time is allotted for only so much time and then it’s move on. Seems some never grasp it and are shuffled right along!

Kurt mentioned batteries and I remember the timeframe when the supply chain was always lacking, and someone mentioned better than Lithium batteries, that’s great. Guarantee at least one or two knuckleheads will have forgotten to bring them! I reckon his battle buddy could square him away until back inside the LOD.

Rob mentioned electronic signature and I agree they will be able to find them as they will look like a Christmas tree lit up! Always pros and cons to anything that is electronic.

When I got out there were no optics for anyone in a squad, and then if one had them it was NODs. Snipers had M14s equipped with optics (scope) of course no electronics. That was it!

When I got out they had just gotten the decent NVDs that you could actually see out of! Sluggers were Rangers or other Special Ops, good ol lensatic compass was all we had. Makes one wonder how much emphasis they place on Land Navagation now as well?! As a Squad Leader I had a platoon radio with mike, now all squad members have some way to communicate with one another. Amazing how the modern Infantryman is equipped compared to a few years after Vietnam had ended. I went in in 83, we were still being issued olive drab and the new woodland camo fatigues. Got out in 93, and seems shortly afterwards, especially after 9/11 everything went hi-tech.

 

[ColdWarGrunt]

ChiCom is developing tactical microwave weapons that will shut down pretty much everything a grunt is carrying nowadays.

I hope they are still teaching arm and hand signals, iron sights and how to read a map.

Exactly! When push comes to shove and all the electronic gizmos are toast if you can’t navigate you can’t find and engage the enemy, your useless as on a boar hog. Much less find your way back! And if ya can’t shoot effectively to take out enemy personnel with irons, well I reckon one can learn under fire to walk their rounds to a target I suppose! I never even thought about hand and arm signals!

 

[ColdWarGrunt]

I don’t necessarily think technology is a bad thing but once you become dependent upon it and you do not practice skills you once used before technology replaced it you become complacent and then that is when their is a problem.

Frighteningly- that's exactly what is happening. I have a friend who is a pilot and pilot trainer with JetBlue, and one of his main functions is conducting recently-required yearly "basic flying" requalification for pilots. He explained to me that due to cockpit automation pilots have become passengers whose job it is to keep an eye on the computers that are actually flying the planes.

He described how JetBlue has been forced to make changes relating specifically to the problem of "passenger pilots" and began requiring "basic flying" yearly requals and removing free Wi-Fi in the cockpit. He said that pilots basically go over checklists, communicate with tower/groundcrew/gate/passengers, monitor flight computers, and keep their hands "close" to the controls during takeoff/landing- otherwise they spend their time on their laptops watching movies/porn, playing games, and surfing the net. It became such an issue that JetBlue even took away their free internet in the cockpit.

He flies Internationally, and says he used to find it humorous thinking about how if only all the folks "back there" had any clue about what was actually going on "up here" in the cockpit- they'd never want to fly again... until he started to realize that the pilots were literally forgetting how to physically fly the aircraft.

After several loss-of-life incidents involving automated flight controls and widespread random basic competency pilot test failures, JetBlue began requiring yearly pilot "flight retraining" on the simulator. And that's what my friend does for them when he's not watching movies in the cockpit of a Caribbean-bound JetBlue Airbus.

It's no joke, and it's damn scary.

Just before I left the railroad, they began introducing technology that the train runs itself. And as the Engineer all you do is monitor it, overide only if needed. You are disciplined if you don’t let the technology do the running of the train. Worse case scenario is dismissal.

Bad thing is, running into the mountains of WV where you are in a valley along a river then climbing several thousand feet, not all at once mind you, and in and out of tunnels (almost 30), with longest almost 7000’ long. There is no possibility that nothing could go wrong! Right!

Or a train of 278 loads of coal, at two miles in length, and almost 40k tons in same scenario but not involved in the elevation but still in tunnels but only 7 this time, and nothing can happen there either.

We all know or should that a train running at speed just can’t stop on a dime. So, either train goes into emergency brake application and it is brought about say because of this technology, what about the community’s of people living near the railroad and this time we are hauling say 100 loads of shale oil, stuff that can go boom, then what?!

So we take an Engineer that gets training running a train. A LOT of running a train was by the seat of the pants so to speak. You can feel the train stretching out or running in, slack in or out. Part of an Engineer is to know how to manipulate that slack, because to much or to little can make the train go snap and that shale oil you are hauling that can go boom, could go boom. But now we have a new Engineer that won’t never learn how to run that train properly or learn where he is within a tenth of a mile all because technology is doing it for him.

Just like your Pilot friend is aware pilots are physically forgetting how to fly because of technology!

Scary, yea and so are those 18 wheeler rigs they have designed to drive themselves! We only can go so far until we loose ourselves along the way, yea it is scary!