Subject: Instructors: is no combat better?
From: Howard Berkowitz
Date: 3/9/04 4:00 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

In article ,
(ArtKramr) wrote:

Subject: Instructors: is no combat better?
From: Howard Berkowitz
Date: 3/9/04 1:06 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

In article ,
(Ron) wrote:

Since I started this thread on instructors who have have combat
experience
versus those who have not, 100% of the replies were in favor of
instructors
who
have never been to combat. Many state that they would rather have an
instructor
who was skilled at instructing suggesting that once you have been to
combat
you were automatically a bad instructor. Hard to buy.

That is not what was said at all. What was being said, was that for
flight/nav
instruction, it isnt going to make a difference if you are taught by a
combat
vet, because you are still learning the very basics

Now once you get to where you are learning weapons, tactics, that is a
different story.

I certainly didn't say combat experience would make you a bad
instructor. I said that it wouldn't make you a good instructor, even in
WWII, if you also didn't have decent instructional skills.

Today, combat doesn't necessarily mean that someone is up to speed on
the latest systems. The need for systems improvement may very well mean
that the people who used them most effectively are assigned to doctrinal
development, battle laboratories, etc., where they can both make that
knowledge available to more people, and also to use it to improve
systems.

I understand Point well taken.

Thank you. Believe it or not, Art, I do listen and learn from many of
the things you write. I'd like to see this whole dialogue turn into one
from which everyone can learn.

WWII involved a huge number of techniques being tried for the first
time. The minuscule budgets of 1940 or so didn't allow more than the
most minimal training, and the press of combat didn't allow for much
experimentation. Things have changed. The Germans were a very credible
threat to what you had, but the 1991 Iraqis could at least have annoyed
them significantly. A lot of WWII lessons still were valid in Viet Nam,
until obsoleted.

I'd ask some of the people that went downtown during Viet Nam if they
can see some similarities to Art's bridge attacks and the attacks on the
Dragon's Jaw and Paul Doumer bridge BEFORE precision-guided weapons. But
once those early intelligent weapons were used, things started changing.


Excellant points all. But the marshalling yards were also fiercely defended.
And anything in the Ruhr Valley was defended to the death. But we really
didn't know very much. We just did what we were trained to do. And we just kept
doing it until the war ended. But I can honesrtly say that for us there were
very few surprises. It seemd as though we were trained to meet whatever
problems cropped up. And that is the way it was. And our instructors were all
combat vets which Iis why I brought the subject up in the first place.



Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer