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When people ask me if I miss the Marine Corps.... Login/Join 
in the end karma
always catches up
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I retired from the Marine Corps after 21 years, with almost 17 of that being in 1st Mar Div and this is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. I have a couple of Marines that worked for me who are now MGySgts (E9) and they didn’t seem overly impressed with this guy, I believe this is the same guy that wouldn’t let the Marines leave ahead of the hurricane last year. You cannot lead by policy letters! I would love to hear what the Div Ops chief’s take on this is.


" The people shall have a right to bear arms, for the defense of themselves and the State" Art 1 Sec 32 Indiana State Constitution

YAT-YAS
 
Posts: 3685 | Location: Northwest, In | Registered: December 03, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not
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I'm not prior military but this reeks of a general that wants to promote so he has to make a spectacle of it. Otherwise he could have issued verbal commands to his senior NCO's and this would have been rectified yesterday
 
Posts: 7791 | Location: Bismarck ND | Registered: February 19, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Nothing new, life as a Marine.

SSgt USMC 77-85
 
Posts: 1949 | Location: Northern Virginia/Buggs Island, Boydton Va. | Registered: July 13, 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Glorious SPAM!
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Posts: 10635 | Registered: June 13, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
A day late, and
a dollar short
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^^HAH!^^

Seriously, a Commander has to issue a written order for this, in todays Marine Corp?

It is just how we were taught to do things when I was a Marine in the 70's.


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Posts: 13668 | Location: Michigan | Registered: July 10, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Seems like leadership of the unit has faltered if the General and CSM have to get involved to this level.


CMSGT USAF (Retired)
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Posts: 4358 | Location: Florida Panhandle | Registered: September 27, 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
semi-reformed sailor
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Those poor bastards...



"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.” Robert A. Heinlein

“You may beat me, but you will never win.” sigmonkey-2020

“A single round of buckshot to the torso almost always results in an immediate change of behavior.” Chris Baker
 
Posts: 11246 | Location: Temple, Texas! | Registered: October 07, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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quote:
Originally posted by FN in MT:
And...bend EVERYONE over and shoot them in the ass.

Why not address the violators, not everyone. Unless the entire unit has gone to hell.


That's not how the Marine Corps works.
One or two Marines fuck up and catch the eye of something wearing a Star....
EVERYONEs life becomes miserable!

If it's a Bird, about 4000 Marines and Sailors are in for a world of "Suck"

Silver Leaf, +/- 1000 lives sucking.

Railroad Tracks, 200 or so.

Silver Bar, you're about 50 miserable SOB's.


______________________________________________________________________
"When its time to shoot, shoot. Dont talk!"

“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.” —Author Tom Clancy
 
Posts: 8320 | Location: Attempting to keep the noise down around Midway Airport | Registered: February 14, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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quote:
Originally posted by Ronin101:
I'm not prior military but this reeks of a general that wants to promote so he has to make a spectacle of it. Otherwise he could have issued verbal commands to his senior NCO's and this would have been rectified yesterday


I don't think so. Unless anyone here has been on that base recently...we don't have the critical info to judge. Are there weeds around the barracks, trash everywhere and Marines with sloppy uniforms, lax discipline, and grooming standards? If so, I'd be rightly pissed as well. He didn't write that schedule anyway, his staff did, it just has his signature for the weight of his authority. Heck, he may have just verbally told his senior NCOs to fix it and this is a part of that.

As a field grade officer, I wouldn't write a memo or micromanage a schedule, I'd just turn to my CSM and tell him this better get f%^@&g fixed ASAP.

The most angry I have ever been as an officer is when I felt I had to yell about something to make a point because the NCOs failed to maintain the standard. Thankfully that has been rare in my career. I typically get to delegate all the yelling to the NCOs and be the "good guy." I prefer that, but yelling is fun sometimes too. Wink




“People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.” –Chuck Palahnuik

Be harder to kill: https://preparefit.ck.page
 
Posts: 5043 | Location: Oregon | Registered: October 02, 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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IF.....if it's true.

Everyone pretty much takes it at face value. However, anyone who was an NCO for more that 10 minutes, and deployed here or there, has worked for that one CG who was a dick head and put out memos like this that weren't warranted or needed. Maybe the wife cut him off, maybe he wasn't getting enough fiber, whatever. I worked for such a dick in Iwakuni Japan in the late 80s. He was a two star that lived in a world in a galaxy far, far away. The only reason he got away with the rants, and "motivational" letters was the fact that he was a two star. Well, that and Corps had no where else to stick him because he was such a shitbird. Couldn't run from here to there without falling over. His SRB didn't show rifle expert, but he wore it. The man was so clueless that he never saw the ball after kick off. Our Sergeant Major was a former force guy, and he wanted him dead.

You have a shitbird Staff Sergeant, you can exact a certain amount of revenge that make it into his fitreps. The CG not so much.

Like I said, if this is warranted, sure. But, something tells me that this is likely what the Corps sees after ever conflict is dialed back. Brilliant ideas shit out of the good idea fairy. Like after Vietnam, you know, when they cancelled and disbanded the scout/sniper program because it was no longer needed and all that hard earned knowledge vaporized.

All we have on this is a CGs memo, which goes against the chain of command, and sounds like a petulant child crying. He has a chain of command, and instead of using it, he decided to update his FB status base wide.

He may be a hard charger. However, without inside information to say that it is true, I'll just have to go with six years in the suck to tell me that it likely isn't as bad as he's making it, or it doesn't exist.




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"It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it works out for them"



 
Posts: 37081 | Location: Logical | Registered: September 12, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
in the end karma
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The fact that the CG feels that leading by policy letter is the answer is what is shocking. How about leading by example and getting out to your units and "leading"! How about calling your Rgt and Bn CO's and SgtMaj's on the carpet. This isn't something that happened over night.

When you make the USMC PC and take away the ability of SNCO's and NCO's to discipline this is what happens.


" The people shall have a right to bear arms, for the defense of themselves and the State" Art 1 Sec 32 Indiana State Constitution

YAT-YAS
 
Posts: 3685 | Location: Northwest, In | Registered: December 03, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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https://www.military.com/daily...Early%20Bird%20Brief

2nd Marine Division CO Regrets How He Rolled Out Stringent New Routine. But He's Not Backing Down

30 Apr 2019
Military.com | By Hope Hodge Seck

In a recent editorial in Task and Purpose, an anonymous writer described as a junior Marine officer in the combat arms castigates Maj. Gen. David Furness, the commander of 2nd Marine Division, out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, saying his rigid new basic daily routine for Marines "violates the core tenets of Marine Corps doctrine" and should be repealed.

Furness was less than impressed.

"I haven't seen it; I probably won't look at it," he said, when asked about the open letter. "I would love for that Marine officer to have the intestinal fortitude to come and talk to me about it. I can explain myself to anyone in the division at any time."

In an interview with Military.com this month about his decision to crack down on what he sees as failures of discipline in the ranks by instituting 5:30 a.m. reveilles, mandatory daily formations, and cleaning and hygiene time across the division, Furness said he did not anticipate the rapid -- and largely critical -- response that ripped across social media pages and military internet communities.

"We sent [the April 16 policy letter] out to commanders and sergeants major. They printed it and put it in duty huts, and somebody took a screenshot. I did not anticipate that," Furness said. "That's a failure on my part."

In retrospect, he said, he would have involved public affairs in the rollout plan earlier and gotten in front of some of the controversy.

"If I were to grade myself for product, on why I'm doing this, I think it's an A. I don't think anyone can question better combat performance," he said. "How I rolled it out, if I'm being kind to myself, I'd probably give myself a D-minus."

Since his policy letter dropped, Furness has been called a micromanager, obsessed with the minutiae of personal grooming rather than larger questions of combat effectiveness. He has been taken to task online for describing the majority of casualties during a 2010 deployment to Afghanistan as the fault of the Marine who died, and for an anecdote he shared in an All Marine Radio interview about how wearing a seatbelt could have saved the life of a Marine driver who rolled over an improvised explosive device.

Blaming those who gave all for their fate might be seen as a rhetorical third rail. But Furness is not backing down or walking back any of it.

"That particular vignette, the importance of it is to highlight the unforgiving environment, the enormous consequences of not doing the right thing in combat," he said. "Doing the right thing in combat and doing the right thing in garrison are not mutually exclusive."

The anecdote he gave about a Marine fatally colliding with his steering column after hitting an IED, he described as a tragic event that he remembered vividly.

"I used it to gain [the Marines'] attention and to shock them a little bit," he said.

Furness said he hasn't been in touch with the commanders of 1st Marine Division, on the West Coast, or 3rd Marine Division, in Japan and the Pacific, to learn if they plan to institute similar standards with their units. He did get a call from Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller earlier this month, though.

"The commandant called me a week ago to ask me if I was doing OK," Furness said. "He was supportive. He was just checking up on one of his Marines."

Though Furness allows that not all Marines in 2nd Marine Division are thrilled about having Reveille blasted in the barracks at the crack of dawn, he maintains that most of the blowback on the policy is from an "external audience" of those outside the division. The basic daily routine policy, he said, was developed by a "council of sergeants" he assembled soon after taking command of the division.

"Marines in the division ... I think they understand, there is an issue here. We may have slipped a little bit; we need to do a better job," he said. "The sergeants remain supportive; they believe we're doing the right thing for the right reason."

Furness wouldn't point to any specific events that had triggered his decision to issue the policy letter. But he noted the problem was not just Marines' sloppy habits and appearances, but an unwillingness on the part of small-unit leaders to correct them.

As Furness sees it, what he observes at the division is a devolution 10 years in the making. The Marine leaders who trained him in the 1980s, he said, had vivid memories of the wild disarray of the post-Vietnam Marine Corps. Drug use then was rampant, racial tension was hot, and officers feared patrolling Marine barracks without a sidearm for their own protection.

The Corps implemented some zero-tolerance policies and cleaned up its act, but then came war and the frenetic operational tempo of the era following Sept. 11, 2001. Now, he said, Marines are no longer spending as much time deployed as they do at home, but some of the time and focus on professionalization has disappeared.

Some Marines don't believe personal grooming has much to do with combat effectiveness. Furness simply disagrees.

"One of the key attributes of a well-trained combat Marine or sailor is what I'll call vigilance-slash-attention to detail," he said. "That is not a skill one is born with; it's developed over much time. Grid coordinates for fire mission, or the nine-line process for an air mission -- all these requirements are very precise for how they're done and how they're executed."

Furness will kick off this new era of attention to detail in 2nd Marine Division with a stand-down event June 3-7, in which all Marines in the unit will participate. That will be followed by quarterly check-ins -- the next one is tentatively planned for September -- to dedicate time to the topics of leadership and discipline.

In his original policy letter, Furness offered Marines who couldn't get with his new program the opportunity to request a transfer out of the unit. So far, he said, nobody has taken him up on the offer. But he said he'll be paying attention to how junior leaders get in line with maintaining and enforcing the standard, particularly the officers.

"Those people that are not as courageous as we might like don't suddenly become courageous under fire," he said. "They probably need to find other employment."



-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.
 
Posts: 15898 | Location: Eastern Iowa | Registered: May 21, 2000Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Fighting the good fight
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quote:
Originally posted by Sigmund:
Since his policy letter dropped, Furness has been called a micromanager, obsessed with the minutiae of personal grooming rather than larger questions of combat effectiveness.




(Before you say it, I know that's a Senior NCO, not a Commanding Officer, and that policing the minutiae of stuff like grooming standards is SGM Sixta's job as a NCO. I just love that quote, and bust it out as often as possible. Big Grin )
 
Posts: 32421 | Location: Northwest Arkansas | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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quote:
Originally posted by Strambo:
As a field grade officer, I wouldn't write a memo or micromanage a schedule, I'd just turn to my CSM and tell him this better get f%^@&g fixed ASAP.

The most angry I have ever been as an officer is when I felt I had to yell about something to make a point because the NCOs failed to maintain the standard.

I think the crux of this is the NCO's have failed...or the CG is just an ass looking to make a peacock of himself.

As we've seen in the Surface Navy, NCO or, CPO leadership has been a contributor to some of the problems that were revealed in the two destroyer collisions in 7th Fleet.
 
Posts: 14571 | Location: Wine Country | Registered: September 20, 2000Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Semper Fi - 1775
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- Updated Article -

Crackdown at Lejeune: Inside the 2nd Marine Division commander’s controversial call for discipline


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Posts: 12304 | Location: Belly of the Beast | Registered: January 02, 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Go ahead punk, make my day
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quote:
Like I said, if this is warranted, sure. But, something tells me that this is likely what the Corps sees after ever conflict is dialed back. Brilliant ideas shit out of the good idea fairy. Like after Vietnam, you know, when they cancelled and disbanded the scout/sniper program because it was no longer needed and all that hard earned knowledge vaporized.

Agreed, the difference between wartime / peacetime operations.

All the chickshit stuff that was pushed out of the way for warfighting comes back.
 
Posts: 45798 | Registered: July 12, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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Would love an hour for lunch and 2 hrs daily to work out!
 
Posts: 1373 | Location: New Hampshire | Registered: December 05, 1999Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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quote:
Originally posted by FN in MT:
Why not address the violators, not everyone.


Why make one person's life a living hell when you can have dozens of people making that person's life a living hell?

Or as Voltaire (inventor of the electric guillotine) said "Pour encourager les autres."





Nice is overrated

"It's every freedom-loving individual's duty to lie to the government."
Airsoftguy, June 29, 2018
 
Posts: 31376 | Location: Loudoun County, Virginia | Registered: May 17, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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The statements made about the lack of discipline are difficult to believe, but the sources are about as legit as it gets.

Marines in uniform sitting around while on their phones and not acknowledging a two star general in their presence? Dude didn't even stand up to salute? Well fuck it, get rid of them.

They don't want to be GI Joe anymore. The easier the divorce process is the better for all involved IMO.

Spend my tax dollars on the ones that make me feel like my money is well spent.
 
Posts: 7486 | Registered: May 12, 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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I HATE micro-managers so I was pre-disposed to rant on the general when this thread started. But, I've read every article in this thread and I can't blame the general one bit.

As to the notion that these "killers" shouldn't be worried about haircuts. 1st of all, the privates that are showing the least discipline, in chow hall in PJs, not saluting or even acknowledging a MG, throwing trash on the ground, they aren't "killers," they haven't been anywhere or done shit yet.

The NCO "killers" aren't instilling discipline anymore so what good are they and what good would a unit comprised of this pairing be in combat?




“People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love.” –Chuck Palahnuik

Be harder to kill: https://preparefit.ck.page
 
Posts: 5043 | Location: Oregon | Registered: October 02, 2005Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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