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How Do Militaries Treat Their Nerds?
An anonymous reader writes "Cyber Warfare is a hot topic these days. A major reorganization may be looming, but a critical component is a culture where technologists can thrive. Two recent articles address this subject. Lieutenant Colonel Greg Conti and Colonel Buck Surdu recently published an article in the latest DoD IA Newsletter stating that 'The Army, Navy, and Air Force all maintain cyberwarfare components, but these organizations exist as ill-fitting appendages (PDF, pg. 14) that attempt to operate in inhospitable cultures where technical expertise is not recognized, cultivated, or completely understood.' In his TaoSecurity Blog Richard Bejtlich added 'When I left the Air Force in early 2001, I was the 31st of the last 32 eligible company grade officers in the Air Force Information Warfare Center to separate from the Air Force rather than take a new nontechnical assignment.' So, Slashdot, how has the military treated you and your technical friends? What changes are needed?"
Of maybe 400 enlisted programmers at my base...
STOP... Bullshit alert.
If there were 400 enlisted people the CS squadronyour base, that would be more realistic. Of those 400, only a handful might have jobs relating to programming, but most might be things like LAN support or phone guys or misc. admin wonks. But 400 programmers? What 'ch been smoking, dude?
- Friendly Computer Nerd from McChord AFB
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm writing in from the medical side, so I hope that my comments can be useful, too. The military lures medical students and doctors with all sorts of promises such as "You'll be able to practice whatever specialty you want. You can practice medicine where you want. There are lots of research opportunities. You can't be sued for malpractice. You won't have to deal with insurance companies and other civilian paperwork nightmares..." And the list goes on.
In reality, only a few physicians get to practice the type of medicine they want. You want to be a radiologist? Too bad. Become a general practitioner instead. Docs have no say in where they practice. And the paperwork is worse in the military because (1) we do indeed have to fill out insurance forms and cover-your-ass medical notes, and (2) we have loads of performance evals and fits reps due to our status as officers. We can indeed be sued. The research is slim at major hospitals to non-existent at smaller ones. Thanks to the Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC), Walter Reed and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology are set for closure. And on top of all of that, the pay is much less than the civilian side. I once calculated my long-term difference in income by joining the military and saw that in just five years of active duty, I will rack up a net lifetime loss of over $700,000.
The end result is that the majority of military physicians leave the armed forces as soon as they are eligible to do so and we're left with a bunch of young docs who are certainly competent at their job, but are largely inexperienced.
If you want to spend an afternoon reading horror stories, see the Student Doctor Network.
I was in the Army for about 7 years (including a stint in the Persian Gulf in late 2003). The Army has deep, fundamental problems with how they treat techs.
I could go on for pages, but I'll just give one quick example. Promotions in the Army are based mostly on the amount of time you've been in your job. There are also "schools" that are for the most part mandatory to be promoted to the ranks of Sergeant and above. Attending one of these military schools, requires that you leave your unit for about a month. So within my job (74B) it was typical that 75% or more of the soldiers knew absolutely nothing technical. The problem was that there might only be 1 or 2 really savvy people in a unit and they couldn't afford to lose them for any point of time. So a friend of mine who ran the mail server for a large base, wasn't able to go to a military school so he got promoted much later than his non-tech savvy counterparts despite the fact he was a really good soldier as well.
This is a very common practice for the Army. The good techies (like my friend) leave the military instead of reenlisting because they have make 10x as much. Almost all of the high ranking enlisted people used to be infantry or medics or other non-technical fields who switched because they would get promoted faster in this job classification. For the most part they don't know or care about tech.
Sorry, there were probably 400 enlisted on my base (ok, annex, Gunter). And software was practically all it's there for. So practically everyone there is a programmer or there to support programmers. Regardless, I bet at least 2 dozen of them will read this because they don't have a single god damn piece of work to do.
Whale
I was about to say much the same thing - most of of the highly technical jobs in the [US] Submarine Service were filled by nerds and geeks of various stripes when I was in (1981-1991) and we did just fine. The currently serving ones I've seem to be doing fine as well.
Slashdot needs to keep in mind that their stereotype of the nerd/geek as a highly strung prima donna is just that, a stereotype. They seem to be prevalent in the Hivemind because most Slashdotters 'came of age' during the unusual conditions of the Dot Com/Bomb era when briefly they (nerds/geeks) were treated as such because of the high and competitive demand, as well as because the Hivemind seems to self select for that kind of personality.
Speaking as someone who is (a) a technical person, (b) a noncommissioned officer in the Air Force, and (c) a Pagan, I must say that your statement couldn't be more wrong.
Are evangelicals making a mess of things? Well, they certainly try, but the problem is nowhere near as bad in the Air Force as it is in the Army and Navy, at least from what I've gathered during my tenure. And people both inside and outside the military -- from NCOs to MEO officers to agencies like Mikey Weinstein's Military Religiouis Freedom Foundation -- do everything they can to make sure evangelicals inside the military don't violate servicemembers' First Amendment rights.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Go there after dark. At the base I visit frequently, they've got rent-a-cops doing gate guard duty during the day (presumably backed by some sort of military rapid-reaction force), but they've got full-out military handling the duties at night.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Good post! I spent 20 years in the AF as an electronic warfare technician. I retired in 1999 but I got out exactly what I put into it. I came in a high school graduate. I came out with 3 college degrees, paid for by the Air force. I have lived in or visited about 15 different countries, married and raised 2 kids. I walked directly into a job working as a software engineer for nasa as a contractor making twice the pay even with benefits. Not to mention an additional retirement check every month. If I were still in Michigan I would probably be working for the auto companies or some factory as my father, two uncles and grandfather did. All in all, the Air Force did right by me. This doesn't mean I didn't have to deal with some real a-holes along the way. But really, aren't everywhere?
Speaking about things as a former USAF Programmer (3C0X2), there are a couple major problems with being in a highly technical area in the military, even if you are in a good unit that works with the technical fields.
One of the first issues that pops in to mind is culture, as at the end of the day, you are still military personnel and are expected to behave a certain way. For the most part this isn't as big of a personnel problem as you might think, as long as people know what they are getting into when they enlist, they typically don't have any problems. However, the bigger issue arises in part because the military likes to rotate people around to different bases and this can result in the loss of a knowledge base in a unit. So unless there are competent civilian employees (i.e. GS series, not contractors) that will be around for awhile, as people are transferred in and out of a unit, there is an overall loss of knowledge and productivity as people learn what they need know about the system they will be working on. For some of the larger applications it can take upwards of six months to a year to know everything about the application - and that is assuming that you know what you are doing as a programmer before you get there.
This leads to the second problem, namely, the majority of programmers in the USAF where young people that enlisted right out of high school. This means that a great deal of them either didn't know what they were doing when they arrived at tech school - which means that you have to spend more time teaching the basics - or they where self taught and had bad habits they needed to unlearn. This means that as a whole, the USAF was spending a lot of time and money training someone to be a programmer, but by the time they knew enough to do their job well, they were at the end of their enlistment and you don't know if someone is going to reenlist or not.
This brings us back to the military culture again as the USAF would likely be better off is getting into the AFSC required you to have advanced training of some sort outside of the military, but if that was the case then they would make you an officer and if that where the case, odds are you wouldn't be writing software. Due to this I always wondered if it might be a better idea to just bring back the warrant officer in the USAF and make the AFSC fall under that. Highly unlikely that such a suggestion would even be discussed at the higher levels though.
So the bottom line, in the USAF programmers and other technical fields, always took a bit of a back seat to the more "bombs on target" and medicine oriented fields and as far as I could tell when I was in and there was always a bit of an issue with retaining people with good technical talent when they came up for reenlistment. A couple ideas where kicked around in regards to how to solve these issues, but when I was in it seemed like the USAF was solving the problem by hiring more civilian contractors to do the jobs.
When I was in the Marine Corps as a 4067 (Computer Programmer), I lived the life of a Marine. I went to the range, I did my field training, I stood watch, I PTed, my life was almost identical to any other other POG on the base.
That said, as a Corporal in the Marine Corps in 2000, gross salary was about $14,400 a year. We had the barracks to live in, which was effectively a studio apartment with 3 guys crammed into it. The chow hall, which was operated by the lowest bidder, "shoe-leather steak" is not an exaggeration. And Navy Corpsmen for our medical needs, and I had only once seen a Corpsmen bend a needle while it was in someone's arm.
Compared to grunts and a lot of the menial labor guys, we had it easy in the office. AC, computers, internet access...
But sitting right along side of us were civilian contractors, often with bill rates about a factor of 10 larger than our pay rates, doing the exact same job.
We had one guy, an absolute wiz with Unix and Oracle. He got out as a Corporal making his 14.4k a year. The next day after his EAS he started working for the Marine Corps as a contractor, billing $125k/year. He did the exact same job, sat in the exact same seat. He had to do none of the extra military related work, no uniform, no risk of being sent off to war, and his pay-rate had over quintupled.
So anyway, not a whole lot of incentive for people to stay in the military as a nerd unless they are getting into one of these new programs.
There is an incentive to the military IMO of having long term personnel in these programs instead of short term contractors though. Trust, control, and tons of screening. You'll never have the level of control over a civilian contractor that you have over an active duty member of the military.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Aliens
It's in reference to the line in the movie where Hudson makes fun of the Actress Jenette Goldstein playing the Marine Pvt. Vasquez.
Right, right. Somebody said "alien" she thought they said "illegal alien" and signed up!
When Jenette Goldstein showed up to read for the movie she only knew the title "Aliens" and thought it was a movie about illegal border crossers. She showed up in costume as an illegal border crosser. The line that made it into the movie was an ad-lib that was in reference to this slip-up.
I called and mentioned this to my dad, an Air Force veteran (vietnam, Panama, Gulf War I) and he just chuckled.
Basically, he said part of basic training, at least when he was in, was to teach you how to beg, borrow and steal. He can't count the times he was given a "mission" with no tools (for example: Mop this floor, but with no bucket, mop or cleaning agents.. or more nefariously "We need a new $PART for that truck over there, today" with no $PART in stock with a 6 week procurement time.. With some clever bartering with the Canteen and then with the Army base down the road (Air Force has better food), he'd "procure" 6 starters and get the job done.) and part of your "training" was to figure out how to locate, negotiate, or steal what you needed from someone else. They don't hand you everything in a war, some times you gotta figure it out yourself. If your buddy was truly not given any ammo in Camp Victory, a place filled with ammo, and couldn't figure out how to barter for it, well, according to my dad, maybe he's not cut out for military life. Then again, maybe things have changed since then.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Yep. Right here up the road from me they have DoD rent-a-cops manning the base gates. But there's a shitload of Marines on alert 24/7, Marines regularly sweeping the perimeter, and the Marines and sailors man the inner gates to the important stuff. (Not to mention a shitload of electronic monitoring.) Anytime something is going on that requires real security, like a weapons move, it's Marines in full battle gear, locked and loaded providing the security.
Even if they had military guys on the gates, the gate force is too small to stop any serious assault. Having rent-a-cops on the gates is no big deal, they're expendable tripwires (a honeypot if you will) to alert the real defenses further inside.
Actually I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few came back with glow plugs. After all you couldn't have possibly meant spark plugs, diesels don't have those, but glow plugs don't look all that different, maybe the butterbar just never worked on trucks? At lest that's how I'd think the thought process might go with the mechanically inclined.
Initially I was going to just dismiss this, but then it struck me: yeah, they do. The latest Secretary of the Air Force had this dumbass idea that he would try to make the Air Force tougher. It basically consisted of sending horribly, horribly undertrained airmen out with Marines and Army to do things they weren't good at. A good friend of mine took a 2 week crash course before being sent to Afghanistan where he had to beg Marines to show him how to do things like install the IED countermeasures on the Hummer he was issued. Another friend was sent to Camp Victory in Baghdad without a weapon, and when he finally got one, no ammo.
It had nothing to do with making USAF personnel tougher. It had everything to do with a temporary shortage of ground personnel in the fields because the Army and Marines are fighting a two front war. They need every one they can to be shooting at bad guys. The Navy did this too. Both services were asked to by the SecDef because of troop shortages. The Navy and Air Force "infantrymen" were basically sent TDY to do things like camp security and combat logistics, so the Army and USMC could send every warm body to combat. Its not like the Secratary of the Air Force woke up one morning and went "We're not tough enough. I know! We'll make our own infantry divisions!".
I think the "picking on geeks" thing here is way overblown, especially considering that both the Navy and USAF are manned largely by technocrats in the enlisted ranks. Maybe if a geek joined the Marines he'd get some heat, but the Air Force? I think someone got their feelings hurt. You joined a military force, not the Boy Scouts.
There is one caveat here, and that's the officer corps in USAF, which is a fighter pilot culture, and thus tends to go off the macho scale. I can easily see where, say, a comp sci grad in charge of computer networks would be given the nasty eye by his fellow officers. In USAF's officer corps, if you don't turn and burn for a living, you're somewhat less than a man.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I've got a better example for you. In the early years of WW2, Russia had an abundance of soldiers, but a shortage of weapons. So infantry attacks would sometimes happen in two waves: the first with weapons, and the second with instructions to pick up the weapons of their fallen brothers from the first wave.