Coming out of one's bubble...

...and seeing the world through different lenses.

Sometimes change is so incremental you don't notice it.  Sometimes it slaps you in the face.  Sometimes it's both.  I've been walking around, running, working in, Army simulation centers since 1993.  At first, everybody wore a uniform except for a few government civilians.  Then the contractors started showing up, most of whom were retired military combat arms types, mostly officers. 

Then, as things matured, people realized that we were paying an awful lot for those officers, and those retired officers could oft times forget they were retired...  but mostly, we found out you could get retired NCOs who would do just as good a job, and in some ways a better job, for less. 

After I retired at Fort Leavenworth, I was working with a bunch of guys who were just like me - retired combat arms types.  And the contractors we worked with at Fort Leavenworth were that type, too - with a sprinkling of logistiticians, intel types, etc.  Almost, but not exclusively, retired officers.

As I got sucked into the analysis, vice the training side of the house, that paradigm held.  So it was interesting to come to Fort Knox, to a facility that has wildly varying requirements for "workstation operators," in the vernacular, "pucksters."   Varying needs as in, one event needs 15, another event needs 85, and there's two weeks in between where you don't need any.

That's not a sustainable cost picture, if you are talking about maintaining people full-time, which is the default stance. 

So, they don't do that anymore.  What they do is hire part-timers, on a per-event basis.  And, they've discovered, you don't need a former brigade commander at the workstation.  You need a competent workstation operator who can pick up the lingo quickly, and will do what they're told to do (and, not being a FBC, they probably won't argue with you about doing it your way, either).

Fort Knox is into this in a big way.  How did  I notice?  When I was wandering through one of the bays, going to check on some on-going testing, a very southern, patrician, *grandmother* looked up at me from her workstation, where she was busily emplacing soldiers into fighting positions.  That caused me to look around, to find out I was surrounded by blue hairs and balding heads, most of whom, by their speech, not retired military.  On the way back out, I paid attention to who was manning the workstations - a whole bevy of people, with long hair, with a mohawk, with tattoos and piercings, and you could pick out the retired military guys among 'em... but this was a diverse group.  And they all hold Secret clearances.

The military is a risk-averse culture (you can argue it shouldn't be, but, generally, it is) and we tend to over-engineer things to reduce risk (or, just as likely, maintain our comfort level).  And just as it took manpower pressures and outside political pressure to cause the services to integrate (ahead of society in general, I would note, however) and the same thing to get the services to admit women in large numbers, and will probably result in changes in how we view gays in service - it took manpower pressures and *cost* to get us to take the risk of not hiring guys like me to operate workstations, but to hire the smart kid with computer savvy or the grandmother with some time on her hands who has some computer savvy, to do the work we used to hire guys like me to do.  And get just as good a result for a lot less money.

Interesting, how our bubbles shape our outlooks.  We should get out of our bubbles more often.