Blue Book reinforces need for IamNCO

It feels like deja vu all over again

After a year in the making the IamNCO team got it's paws on a first run edition of the newest Blue Book during the AUSA annual meeting. Thanks to the connection of one of our Fellows, a few of us got a sneak peek ahead of Tuesday's unveiling. But yesterday, we held one of the first 300 paper copies in our hands for the first time right after SMA Weimer announced the released.

We must say, as soon as we heard the concept and saw the product(s), it was a fast reminder on how short our corps institutional memory is, and that previous generations of NCOs have plowed these fields at least once before. I asked myself, why do we keep finding ourselves backpedaling towards lessons we learned pre911 instead of advancing from what we already knew? It only took a moment to see that the answer was in the mission, vision and goals of IamNCO. Let me explain.

Before there was a Facebook, USAWTF or Reddit, the world was going digital and getting connected. Beginning in the mid-1990s there was a proliferation of a mishmash of websites, online conversation "forums," and portals of information that were disconnected and not easily accessible. Yahoo was king and people were just hearing about this thing called Google, and specialty sites like Armytimes.com and Military.com were not even a glimmer. Army digital content existed, but was too hard to find for the typical soldier, and we were not integrated.

Though Arny transformation was underway, it took a team of innovative NCOs and I who actually built the first generation of a "one stop shop" of resources of importance to Army NCOs through a grass roots project called Squadleader.com. like today Blue Book, it was more than just a website, this staffed multipurpose portal had interactive conversations, tools, SOPs, templates, PowerPoints, and checklists.

We built a community of practices of professional dialog that incorporated attributable dialog and conversation, TTPs, lessons learned, forums, link trees, and directories. It even innovated live chats with nominative CSMs who would provide mentoring sessions open to the entire force. That was if you registered and signed up to identify yourself, this was not anonymous feedback. It was revolutionary.

We operated on the fringes, self-guided and led by consensus. Though I was the "top sarge" of the team, my 2IC was a staff sergeant who helped establish a panel of "peer mentors" who moderated an online community of over 20,000 multi compo NCOs. We were the only game in town before social media and became ipso facto the unofficial "voice" of the NCO corps.

Monitored by junior and senior leaders of all cohorts alike, our community was turned to by many in the Army, private to colonel, for recent and relevant content.

Unaffiliated, but with parallel thought, a few years later three captains came up with a similar concept and formed companycommand com. Ironically, they became the "darlings" of Army digital communication of the era. Though we attempted a companion site to collaborate with theirs for company leaders called firstsergeant.com, it would not be until post 911 that we would finally be able to sync our efforts.

Weeks after one of the first major sustained battles in Afghanistan at Tora Bora, the newly redesigned NCOTeam.org had a 1SG from one of the 101st Division aviation assets who were in contact, host a live chat describing lessons learned and the emerging roles of his NCOs during that battle. By then we were discussing in the clear RSOI issue, prepping our units for future operations, and other TTPs well outside prudent OPSEC concerns. Look, it was the aughts and well before the threat we experienced today.

The Army Center for Lessons Learned (CALL) had kicked into high gear. They recognized that technology could close some of the knowledge gaps in ways to quickly get TTPs from CTCs and emerging battlefields to the force and saw professional forums like squadleader and companycommand as both an avenue, and a threat. Firewalls were a new defensive perimeter we were just considering and our adversaries were tuning in to our conversations.

These innovation centers were all the rage throughout the earliest days of the global war on terror, so much so that sergeant major of the Army Jack Tilley established a pilot program to institutionalize squadleader to morph into an official NCO.mil. After trials for almost a year, it became NCOTeam org, the official forum for the Army NCO Corps. The Army created the Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS) in an attempt to consolidate a number of likeminded professional communities under the direction of a professionals that consisted of Army leaders and their staff, and trained community facilitators and subject matter experts in how to moderate professional dialog.

In 2005 I formally donated squadleader to the Sergeants Major Academy, and handed the keys of arguably the most successful forum to be run by professionals, but under the Army umbrella. For almost 10 years the Army forums chugged along providing measured value to NCOs, but new shiny objects came along every year to compete. In typical fashion, a contractor bid a software platform to host NCOmil that was as bad as AKO, and NCOs lost trust in the new forums, by then run by contractors. Plus, the same NCO forums that we had successfully ran on a shoestring budget, struggled under the weight of million-dollar contracts. MILSuite, Reimer Library, and other training related platforms like DTMS and the like became higher priority.

In 2015 SMA Chandler announced the Army could no longer afford NCOmil, which still had a dashboard homepage with announcements, crosscut highlights from other sub sections, and consolidated links to important NCO focused resources that be had from the beginning, highlighting NCO job aids and tools. NCO.mil was defunded and soon after BCKS collapsed, and so did all professional forums. And so, online dialog went to the gutters, and now unprofessional and led by anonymous rabble rousers.

This is not an article about the Blue Book or today's priorities and innovations, we hail and support our SMAs efforts to make serving as a modern enlisted leader easier. This is a conversation about how we can better establish continuity and a long range strategy for an NCO corps that can endure more than two cycles of senior enlisted leaders.

Today, the senior enlisted councils who envision the strategy for the future NCO never seem to have the legs to see their ideas through. 36 months dwell can help, but reality still sets in. Most of today's SEC are unaware of this history and have no collective memory of these innovations. Therin lies our problem.

This week SMA Weiner spoke of the rollercoaster effect that today's NCOs endure, and this is another example of rows that were hoed by NCOs long before him. NCOs of the past were faced with similar problems, came up with innovative solutions like we always do, and then our initiatives are axed when budgets are cut, or nextgen leaders’ step into positions not seeing previous patterns.

IamNCO is an initiative to provide the same type of guided continuity from outside the institution by carefully vetted professionals in a similar manner that NCO.mil invented, for the good of the noncommissioned corps. If we don't do this now, two or three generations from later when the Blue Book will be long gone having been replaced by the shiny new autonomously automated ChatNCO augmented by virtual reality, that sounds like another community of practice. And so, there we will go again.

/topsarge

CSM (Ret.) Dan Elder, Chairman

IamNCO