7/27/2023 0 Comments Drill sergeant![]() “I know that if I go to basic training, I’m going to get yelled at, do a billion push-ups, and I know I’m going to be belittled,” McLean said. That means working together in teams, showing respect to others, policing their own, and behaving in a manner that brings honor to themselves and their service.īut under the shark attack model of training, the very first exposure new Soldiers get to NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) leadership came in the form of drill sergeants behaving in a way that would result in disciplinary action in any other military environment.Īccording to McLean, some of the Army’s modern woes can be attributed to the fact that Soldiers were immediately thrust into a situation that’s predicated on toxic leadership. With an unpopular war raging and creating a pressing need for warfighters, it was an approach based on painful pragmatism: abuse may not be the most effective training method, but when you need to instill the means to fight and survive within a limited amount of time, it seemed to be the quickest and most effective approach available.Īmerica’s service members are professional warfighters and they’re expected to carry themselves as such. “Once they submit, then we can teach them the Army’s way of doing things and send them out to be a Soldier.” “The drill sergeants came together and said, we’re going to essentially break them down, we’re going to verbally abuse them, we’re going to physically abuse them, and make them submit,” McLean explained to me. This was what McLean called the “pivot point” that brought the shark attack into common use. To maintain order and accomplish the mission, drill sergeants learned that they needed to quickly establish dominance and - in a real way - break the will of neighborhood tough guys who didn’t want to be there and had no qualms about punching their way out of a bad situation. The draft created an inherently antagonistic relationship between trainer and trainee, as drill sergeants sought to prepare recruits for combat, but those recruits saw their new drill sergeants as the embodiment of the system that drafted them. There are even stories of some who conspired to attack drill sergeants upon their arrival. The plain truth of the matter was that many of the new recruits arriving at basic training in this era simply didn’t want to be there. It’s because of my experiences, both in uniform and out, that I arrived at Fort Jackson believing the Army’s shift in training methodology might be more about managing Gen Z’s negative perceptions of service than truly about training recruits to become the most capable warfighters. But it’s similarly because of those experiences that my time in Fort Jackson, and subsequent research, have convinced me otherwise. Since I first stepped foot on the yellow footprints of Parris Island in 2006 - some 16 years ago now - I’ve lived and breathed America’s military in a variety of capacities: from recruit to Marine from Marine to veteran from veteran to defense contractor from defense contractor to journalist. The fact of the matter is, I’m not an outsider at all. In fact, it was that very bias that led to my decision to write this story in the first person. ![]() And I’ll acknowledge right up front that, like many veterans, I winced when the Army announced it was doing away with the longstanding (and sometimes abusive) training methodology we’ve come to refer to as the “shark attack” - a name derived from the way drill sergeants would swarm around fresh trainees, overwhelming them with verbal attacks. Over the span of a week, I observed as the Army trained its latest crop of drill sergeants to mold civilians into professional warfighters using a new and controversial approach that’s been called “soft, woke, and undisciplined” by critics… but that’s referred to by insiders simply as Dignity and Respect.Īs a Marine veteran turned journalist, taking stock of my own biases is an essential exercise when covering changes to America’s military. Army’s Drill Sergeant Academy in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Last month, Sandboxx News was given unprecedented access to the U.S. Army is undergoing some big changes for sure in how they train to fight the wars of the future:
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