Army Addressing Challenges

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Every leader, regardless their rank or position, faces challenges of some sort in today’s modern military. Those challenges range from tasks such as executing a combined arms breaching exercise to motivating today’s young Soldier to meeting the minimum standards on the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT). One task may seem more complex than the other but these two tasks could be as equally complex depending on the leader. Leaders today face a daunting task of transitioning from a deployment rotational cycle to a garrison cycle.
Many NCOs have deployed at least once but there is a difference between leadership in a theater of operation and leadership in garrison. I believe we have developed some operationally intelligent NCOs where it comes to operating in theater but our challenges now lie in a garrison setting. The garrison setting is the most difficult and challenging setting to conquer due to the external influencers excessively available to …show more content…

Due to the large number of personnel who have deployed over the course of 17 years the use of illicit and prescription drugs has risen even though the Department of Defense (DoD) has a zero tolerance for illicit drug use. Prescription drug use is authorized but misuse of prescription drugs is not tolerated. Shortly after the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a 2008 survey reported “2.3 percent of military personnel were past-month users of an illicit drug”, (NIDA, 2013) but the more alarming increase of prescription drug abuse of “11 percent of service members reported misusing prescription drugs, up from 2 percent in 2002 and 4 percent in 2005”, (NIDA, 2013). The use of illicit drugs in conjunction with service members abusing prescription medication poses yet another challenge for today’s leader. Whether you lose two percent or four percent your operational strength, depending on the size of your unit, was just reduced by one to two qualified

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