Everyone take a powder; we've been here before.
"There were a lot of people who thought this was a marketing thing – we're going to give you a cellphone if you enlist," says Mr. McCarthy, director of operations for the Army's Brigade Modernization Command.I was one of the first people to show up at their command with a laptop in the very early '90s.
But that was the furthest thing from his mind. Instead, he was hoping to recast how the Army thinks about technology.
It was a simple idea – allowing soldiers to use the smart phones they're familiar with to be more connected on the battlefield, whether to check maps or relay information. But it has profound implications for the military.
For the soldiers, the smart phones have already begun to unleash torrents of ingenuity, with some designing new soldier-friendly applications, such as links to the video feed of the base security camera.
I was one of the first people to show up with a Palm PDA later that decade. I had a YN1 who wrote programs. I get technology.
I remember all the hype especially about the PDA and how it would revolutionize how we did work on board a ship. I remember commands buying all their officers and Chiefs PDA ... etc ... etc.
Tools. Just tools. On the margins they can help - but just tools. Don't get excited - forget the fundamentals and you won't program your ships navigation computers properly and will run aground while the Commodore hold awards quarters ... or you will drift your just out of the dry dock CG on to a reef on a calm, clear, Pacific day.
Relax. None of them are EMP hardened anyway.
22 comments:
I really grow tired of the intoxication of technology. Increasingly, I see youngsters (both in the air and on the ocean) practically paralyzed when the toys fail. We would do well to return to training in all of the old methods and only unleashing the whiz-bang stuff when people have fully qualified.
And while not high tech, a good whiteboard remains an effective leadership tool.
I can ask any nephew or neice about their high school classes and their reply will go like this:
"We learned about California gold rush", or "we learned about linear regression", or "we learned about how electricity is generated" today.
Don't ask them anything in depth, because they are just learning ABOUT things. Like our sailors learn ABOUT coastal piloting navigation, but don't really LEARN it so that they still run their brand newly overhauled modern AEGIS cruiser aground right off Pearl Harbor for 3 days on a coral reef. Modern education is just learning ABOUT courses. The superficial modern age of attention deficit Americans. This is the opposite of progress, now we have so-called leaders who know ABOUT leadership, but that's all.
been there, already heard about leadership problems. already heard about navigation problems. so, what's new ? must hear about something new. please. learn about something exciting and cutting edge. who wants to learn about old fashioned, boring, basic stuff anyway ? refresh your screen. give some new topics to learn about. try to keep up, don't want to learn about old things. ;)
so in todays Navy, if we hear ABOUT something, that's the same as learning ABOUT something, right ? neither of which is really learning anything in depth. ADHD is rampant.
I was also one of the early adopters of personal computers and one of perhaps three or four people (out of a class of a couple hundred) who brought a laptop to SOS back in 1990. Came in really handy when papers were coming due, and I didn't have to stand in line for the one computer shared by the other 12 people in the seminar.
These days, not so much. They're just tools, and half the time they're more trouble than they're worth...including the never-ending assaults on what's left of privacy. Heard on the radio this morning that those Facebook twits are selling tracking information even if you don't have an account with them, but simply visit (purposely or accidentally) their site. Then there's the letter I just received from SAIC, documenting *yet another* security breach in Tricare information, thanks to sloppy policy enforcement.
My Android phone does some neat things, but if it fell into a lake this afternoon I could do without. The twentysomethings I work with would probably have some kind of seizure if that happened to them.
Time to go hug my KWM-2A. :)
I have no real issues with the introduction of technology such as this, with two caveats: That they truly become tools, and not crutches, and that we continue to teach the fundamentals so that we are not paralyzed when the tech fails. Which it will. At a most inoportune time.
White boards, flight deck plots, speed of sound equations, etc, are all important and MUST be retained.
As the good CDR alludes to, most of this will be non-functioning shortly after the balloon goes up. We need to be able to fight with iron sights, navigate with a sextant, and call in fire with a map and protractor....... just in case, because our enemies most certainly will have that ability.
By the by, any other old ASW types remember when we got the HP-67 programable calculaters issued to us? Those were neat, except that a lot of the time it was faster to do the math on the grams or the wall than it was to find the correct progamming tab, pull it out of the case, insert it, program, then enter all the data (which you needed to manually measure, regardless) and then you still needed to write down the data on your grams for the debrief.
It was a nice idea, and I guess it helped get folks ready for the upcoming digital age, but I'm not certain exactly how efficient those things really were.
High Tech for its day...
It's all fun and games till the iPhone with the apps for the base security cameras falls into the wrong hands. I try to tell my youngins that having their whole life on an easily loseable thing the size of a deck of cards probably isn't wise.
It's great for cutting corners when that's a good thing, but if it substitutes for the corners...well, not so good.
I was perfectly happy with my pocket size Daytimer. Thought it was a big jump over the green, standard issue wheel books. Then we started getting post-it notes and my productivity seriously improved. Gotta get a message done, hop on the on trusty Zenith 248. I still like rotary phones, too.
If they see the numbers on the screen they believe them, to all hands and the messcooks's peril.
Fortunately, soon enough they will lose it (over the side), break it (by dropping it down a deep trunk, or driving a vehicle/some yellow gear over it). Not much chance they can impregnate it, which is a blessing - but downloading a virus seems all too likely.
Nothing is Sailor Proof. Nothing.
Forgive me, Porch Denizens, for I have sinned. In one of my past lives, I actually helped write stuff for SPAWARS extolling the virtues of Bluetoothed/wireless PDA's for the harried Chief, LPO and DivO. I knew not what I was doing, and know I have been grevious in my misdeeds. :'(
I was on the Big E back in 2000 when the CNO Clark's plan was for everyone to have a Palm Pilot. The problem was in my division in AIMD alone we had a couple of kids who you could hand them a pencil turn back to your desk for paperwork and then turn back to these kids and they would have lost said pencil in that 10sec period. When the first round of Palm devices showed up there were a few guys who went through them at rates that caused SpaWar and IG's to show up wondering if they were selling them at pawn shops. Only to find out that nope, there are just some Clouseau types who couldn't be trusted around handle electronic devices. So they stopped the plan because trial budget started to be reached pretty early on in just replacement/repair of broken devices. Add in the IT21 system on the ship had a number of viral infections from the Palm devices and unauthorized downloads out in the world by people trying out Palm Apps from the internet. Only to run across malware out there in the world.
I'm sorry...
What were you saying?
I got distracted.....
Tim,
I met some B/Ns that were able to plot using the old school mechanical E6B a turn to IP and out on a bombing run faster then some of the kids using the newer calculator E6B. Most of these guys were old school B/N's from when the A-6A and EA-6B initally showed up to the fleet with thier tempremental early digital navigation computers. So they would have to dump it give it a dead reckon update and then turn around punch the numbers back into the nav computer while the aircraft was in flight. Remember this was the first round of digital computers, where some interesting design decisions were made to develop the computers. Then when the A-6E and EXCAP for the EA-6B showed up, the guys trained on those more "reliable" nav computers were totally lost when the computer got a hiccup while the old school guys were still doing DR either on their knee boards or a few were able to do it in thier head. In turn update the computer after reset so the plan could be found.
It is more then just that all the indepth learning can come from Computer Based Training, because it is [insert favorite buzz word bingo term here]. You just don't understand because your a dinosaur and don't understand the [insert buzz word] that can bring about a serious [insert buzz phrase] which has revoultionized our training pipeline and lead to cost-savings while [insert buzz word] to the fleet.
Tim,
I got so accustomed to doing offline ASW in the plane (because the CP901 never worked) that I began to find it easier and more effective. I became better tactically as well. Even when the computer was up, I only really used about 3 buttons.
SouthernAP, you owe me half of a Diet Coke and a new keyboard... :-P
Nude flogging on the quarterdeck! Punishment to be adminstered by Master Chief Bos'n Mate! 8-)
Why flog when he should pay the front porch fine of top shelf beer for the next 30 days and be forced to preform EMI for the next 40 hours at 2 hours a day, plus 45 days of extra duty. EMI should be shining and polishing all bright work on the front porch. Extra Duty should be to take all empty beer cans/bottles gluing them together to build a sailboat for the Cdr.
In 1976 I bought my first calculator at the Navy Excgange. It was a Casio, and came with a rubber slip case and a power supply for use if you didn't want to run down the 2 AA batteries. Cost me $45! I still have it somewhere. The neatest thing I still have is a circular slide rule I bought when in High School. Our math teacher in Sophmore math taught us all how to use a slide rule. I thought it was pretty neat, and when I saw the curcular one at the office supply store, I had to have it. :-D
What was neat was that later I discovered it fit perfectly into my flight suit pocket and so it was always there when I needed it.
Tim, *old ASW types*? And you were an AW? which is a specialty that still exists, innit? 'We had a few AXs in my day, and 10-pt dividers were the tool of choice, and hope they didn't slide off the analyzer bench when the ship rolled.
Yes, we used pencil to do the cals on the AQA-5 (and AQA-4) grams as you mentioned.
For determining (ahem) ratios, we all used our slide rules from high school and college physics.
Watch young eyes glaze over immediately when you try to train that to a young'un.
As they beat into me while teaching TMA...."plots are truth". The Geo Plot has all the answers to the TMA problem, you just have to be smart enough to figure them out!
As I tell my youngun's at work..."the system assumes an intelligent operator....how true that is is up to you"!
Even when I granduated off of Geo Plot to the archaic attack director on the ancient MK-113 fire control system, I had to use the same fundamentals to get a firing solution out of the attack director (especially since it had all of the computing power of a rock!!). Nothing like realizing that your range is 5,000 yards off and furiously turning the hand crank to (literally) dial down the range while you hope no one notices your mistake!!
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