While written for another purpose, this article can easily be translated to understand the need for training over toys and reality over fantasy.

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Abstract

Training gaps and the accompanied skill deficiency are not due to a lack of commitment to learning. Leaders and Managers tend to genuinely want to help their organizations by learning from failure to improve future performance. Failure, deficiency, or shortcomings are often looked at incorrectly. Viewed as an attack on the individual, this misplaced idea feeds the subconscious defense to protect oneself, idea, product, or group. Properly introduced for consumption such principles can be addressed appropriately by the experienced and inexperienced, where the desire to improve outweighs ego.

Observation and Suggestion

Our forces are not as well trained as the opposition. This premise remains true regardless of how the opposition is defined. We do not have the equipment or firepower to overpower and overwhelm. We can only defeat the opposition tactically. Assimilation of opposing tactics is essential to a comprehensive training methodology. Our first fault is the belief we already have these abilities.

Being enamored with our own wisdom demonstrates a lack of decision-making experience and the will to alter foreseeable outcomes. Individuals and societies follow the pattern of professing to be good at something that they are not while trying to bridge the gap with semantics. There exists a natural subconscious drive to look good where we have shortcomings. This drive leads to the proclamation that preaching a good game is no different from playing one.

Throughout history, primitive (or low-tech) forces defeat technologically advanced armies not because of faith, attitude, or circumstance. It is because they must rely on carefully formulated and design training methods that focus on the necessary skills to fight, survive and win. This premise is three-dimensional training that blends emotional, psychological, and physical rationale. These groups are successful because they don’t fall prey to the notion that technology reduces conflict. Simply manning equipment, or having superior gear, is a failed strategy of training. An infection that is often difficult to cure.

Achieving tangible and measurable progress requires a new direction, a new vision. Only by seeking and accepting the guidance of proven professionals can this be achieved. Just as expending dollars for tacti-cool doesn’t increase skill or knowledge neither does paying for an experience we perceive to be superior to current standards of training. Looking better does not mean it always is. Time after time these painstaking efforts lead to no real change. By virtue of instinctive thought, coupled with applied research, equitable and often superior instructors and teachers can be identified and employed.