I was browsing the Army University Press (AUP) listing of subject matter experts across the Army University and was wowed by the knowledge and capability we have that is just a phone call away. The many names of experts are soldiers and Department of the Army civilians entrenched in places like the Command and General Staff School, the School for Advanced Military Studies, the Army Management Staff College, and the Army University, among others.
AUP is a component of the Army University, and both are the result of consolidation and was a “capability grab” that centralized many PME and academic resources at the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. One of those capabilities was the NCO Journal, which unlike the branch journals, was redirected away from the institution it had supported since its founding, NCOLCoE and the Sergeants Major Academy. At one time it was a job of a lifetime for aspiring public affairs sergeants major to serve as the editor, our own journal by sergeants, for sergeants. Now it only exists in digits, far from its center of gravity, and without the same level of NCO involvement as before.
The SGM-A has been a branch campus of CGSC and a part of Army University when portions of the capstone school formerly known as the Sergeants Major Academy was also scooped up (for academics mostly). It shares its regional accreditation, or more accurate flows through, and allows the SGM-A students to matriculate from the course and be conferred baccalaureate degrees upon SGM-A graduation. So, the consolidation was not all bad.
But as I searched what surely is not an all-inclusive list it is glaringly apparent that the AUP has yet to identify and declare one enlisted soldier or NCO as a subject matter expert as part of the greater institution we call Army University. I get most of the Army experts in the institutional assignments on the topics listed that they have all the right faces in all the right places, but who is the expert on NCO PME? What about the academic departments of the SGM-A, the directorates that create the policy or curriculum that underpin NCOPDS. Hell, even our NCO Historian Dr. Ev Daugue is excluded from this esteemed list of subject matter experts. Why?
The oversight can be fixed with the stroke of a pen, or a VOCO from the Beags, but that is not the point. Again, and consistently, and no matter how many Years of the NCO we have, the NCO corps gets short shrift in the eyes of the professionals. C’mon AUP and Army University, it is high time you increase enlisted leader involvement in all functions at CAC in places other than the top, until you do these oversights will continue. And this is just the symptom, not what ails us. Since before Ike’s time Fortress Leavenworth and all that happens at CAC remains officer centric, and often myopic to the NCO corps. It is too important of an institution to not have a healthy mix of enlisted leader perspectives, and in more important areas than vanity labels on a webpage. It may be high time to blow the dust off the restationing plan for NCOLCoE, and BRAC the starship Enterprise from El Paso to Leavenworth once and for all.
/Topsarge
Opinions are my own. Spelling, punctuation and typing errors are mine too and should be enjoyed as the easter eggs that they are.