, however, he was extremely not happy with the way things were going at knox. He said chaos is everywhere. He can't believe that the Army is lowering their standards (and becoming soft) for the cadets by not scoring land nav, pft. Said they are going by peer evals and leader evals.
When asked about environmental conditions, he stated that the reason he feels cadets are having problems is because of lack of hydration. We live in Louisiana, so the conditions did not affect him. He is used to humidity, but he said it was not bad at all.
So much different info floating around. AND it seems to be constantly changing. Next years will definitely be interesting.
The female cadet that required CPR and was in a coma at the hospital due to being a heat casualty among others, was the biggest reason for the changes. I have a feeling they did not want a repeat and have leaned hard toward caution for the rest of camp.
One of the big issues with LDAC being at Ft. Knox is that the base is mainly a training center and headquarters for CC now. In contrast Ft. Lewis has a very large population of Army personal. Ft. Knox has had to bring soldiers from other bases around the country to fill training positions, Ft. Lewis could do this in house. Ft. Knox was not ready, not all of the training sections were complete in time for LDAC. All of this led to a real mess. It seems that they didn't even have enough space for all the cadets in either the tents or the barracks. Cadets in transition to other training after they graduate have been left to find a place to crash for the night on their own because they had no place to put them.
They have been planning the change from LDAC to other training for a while, what surprises me is that they decided to move the entire LDAC that has been running fine for over 40 years at Ft. Lewis, to Ft. Knox for it's last year. Sounds like it would have been much better to leave it at Ft. Lewis for it's last year then move to Ft. Knox to start the new program. I'm sure there are a lot of leadership at Ft. Knox that are thinking the same thing right about now.
The whole thing is a mess, one that is not a surprise to most logical thinking people. This will have a big effect on these cadets that are going through this last LDAC, Branching, Active Duty will all be a real mess to figure out. While they have come up with new scoring for this year's LDAC as it progresses, it's not over yet and things could easily change again.
These cadets would normally be putting the final touches on their accession packets as soon as they get back to school. With this LDAC mess the whole process will be fluid for a while until they sort it all out. Meaning it could take a long time before these cadets know whats in their future.
Lack of hydration is only one of the issues, from what's coming out of LDAC hydration is a big priority, even those that hydrate properly are falling from the heat. Being from the PNW, that humidity can be a killer for someone not used to it. Granted, this will not be the last time they will have to be in this type of heat for training, Benning in the summer is no picnic.
It seems they could do the APFT very early to mitigate the heat, though humidity doesn't have a clock. Word is the track they had for the run was so quickly and poorly constructed that it became so bad that cadets were getting injured, a few broken ankles, they had no resources to make another course, I'm sure this added to the decision to scrap the APFT. These cadets are not off the hook, sounds like they may have to take the APFT when they return to their battalions.
I really hope they do not remove Land Nav from ROTC training. Some cadets go to summer training where knowledge of Land Nav is a requirement of the school. If not for the Land Nav training my son had he would have never passed Mountain Warfare School.
I don't fully understand getting away from tactical training, it sounds like they want to cover this at the extra summer training for cadets the summer after their freshman year. The thing that doesn't make sense is it sounds like the MS3's will be doing most of the training, how will they do this if tactics are not taught at the battalion level.
The cadets following this class of 2015 will be in for a lot of changes, some will stick and some will change again. I do not envy these young people, be patient and try and just go with the flow I guess.