We had a good one and then he moved on and was replaced by a vegan loudmouth ass. Went to Afghanistan with him causing trouble at every meeting volunteering more people than he had and wondering why we didn't complete our assigned duties.  Hard to do work in one area while we were on another part of the base.  Watched him get chewed out in front of the whole battalion by another SGM from 10th Mountain for not doing his job.  At one point he put his hand on me to prove a point I guess and he was very surprised when I slapped it off of my shoulder told him if he ever touched me again I would cut his head off.  We stared at each other for a minute and then I put my hand on my Gerber MK1 and I said try it again.  He walked away quickly.  Never had any problems in the field with him after that.

You must have had the greatest SGM/CSM experiences of any soldier on the planet!

But I gotta ask, when was the last time you SERVED under one? Because it seems that your expertise on literally everything is almost 20 years old. Which gives plenty of time for the dumbest of privates you saw to become our current CSMs.

Sir, you are marking this Marine too high, blah, blah, blah.

SgtMaj, do you know what my average is for that rank? No? Then STFU.

In this case is was an adverse report with like 4As, a few B's and one D.
Hey, the Marine was proficient. He rated a D. He just used his knowledge for evil instead of good. SgtMaj said I wasn't allowed to do that. What kind of bullshit in that?
I had to explain to him as either a boot Captain or senior 1stLt that Marines can get reports pulled for that and they get the markings they earned.

I had one awesome one, old crusty type: the smoke pit was his office.

Our sister BN had a living legend as CSM: shot 3 times, recovered, then literally snuck his way back to his unit and came back with them. I can’t remember his name but he was a badass and everyone loved him.

I had one decent one: his was good enough but he thought he knew stuff he really didn’t.  Liked to go around and lecture everyone that he was the smartest in the room.  We all smiled and nodded until he wandered off to hassle someone else.

All the rest of them were completely & totally useless empty uniforms. They were either consumed with apathy or borderline touched.  The worst ones are the type who presume they have authority that they don’t. If you get one of these and a weak BN CDR then watch out.

Ironically, I never had a bad 1SG.

My comments in red. Current officer management strategy mirrors what you are asking for very closely.

Retired CSM checking in

The extra money was nice, the extra aggravation wasn't. I did my best, most fulfilling work as a 1SG.

Oh, I forgot too, another point is to ridicule and belittle someone in a unit that the 10th MTN copied from and then tell that person that their unit actually copied the 10th MTN even though the 10th MTN was formed in WW2 and the other unit dates back to the early 1900s.  

At this stage of the game, anyone who identifies strongly with any specific Army unit is probably victim of some form of delusional insanity. We've done so much damage to unit cohesion, unit identity, and history that it would be impossible to really even identify any potential linear descent for the vast majority of them. 3 ID used to be 24 ID, the various and sundry reflaggings of 2 ACR, and all the rest. You say "Yeah, I'm a proud Rock of the Marne soldier...", and the first thing I'm gonna have to ask you is "Which one of the various 3 ID units do you identify with? The WWII one, the Cold War one, or the one they shipped the flags back to Fort Stewart to hand over to 24 ID?".

There are really only a couple of units left that have any real lineal history left, internally. The rest are unfortunately just going through the motions with props, because the connection to anything organic has been summarily severed for the sake of convenience, mostly because the idiots running the show do not, at a fundamental level, understand what makes soldiers tick.

They've done so much damage to the whole thing that we might as well just shut the whole idea down and start handing out generic white guidons and colors, with black lettering and bar codes on them.

Seriously--When they can't even be bothered to send the former CSM and commander back to the states on TDY to do a hand-off of the colors, the question has to be asked "Why did you bother with this BS, in the first damn place? Nobody identifies with something they got shipped in by FedEx...".

Good, because 10 years ago it was 12 mos Plt Ldr, 36 mos to CPT, straight to command. It did not work well.

And its still bullshit. You come onto the FOB to grab fuel and a quick bite to eat. Walk into to a defac and get told CSM so and so has banned the wear of combat shirts, flight suits etc in the DFAC and here is a to go container. Fuck off, people have been outside the wire and you force them to eat on the hood of a truck, because they dont like the way they look in non-standard uniforms.

Which was always fun because my PL was a captain and simply said sit down and enjoy your meal. They would always drop the CSM name, like he gave a shit.

You missed my point, which was that if that particular Sergeant Major did something seemingly so meaningless and arbitrary...? He'd have had a good, solid reason for doing it, explained it clearly, and then would have done whatever it took to actually take care of the troops.

Being as he retired long before 9/11, I'm not sure how he would have handled something like dirty troops coming in from convoy ops to eat in the DFAC on a FOB. I doubt that he'd have enforced a rule like that, but if he had, like I say... It would be justified, explained, and then the troops would have been fed, period.

Too many of the guys we've entrusted with the rank of Sergeant Major are merely authoritarian power-mad blowhards, lost in delusions of their own importance. The few who recognize their place in the scheme of things are drowned out in a sea of incompetence, ignorance, and men who think they and their jobs are the only things that matter.

Which is why I'd argue that the whole program needs to be shut down. It's like awards--You're not actually fulfilling the stated purpose of it all, when you say stupid sh*t like "Only E7 and above are authorized Bronze Stars for service on this deployment...", and the young men who're actually doing the lion's share of the work outside the wire aren't even considered for awards unless they do something that's damn near MOH-class in terms of getting noticed by higher or the media. Honestly, I think that we need to strongly re-evaluate where we're at with a bunch of this stuff, CSM program, awards, ratings systems, and then examine if they're really working and doing what they should be. In all too many cases, I'm pretty sure they are actually not doing what we need them to, and have become actual detractors and distractors from function and actual effect in the ranks. I know most of my guys were not "positively influenced or motivated" by the awards system, because they knew that no matter what, they weren't getting sh*t out of the deployment in terms of awards.

Good grief... I had a Sergeant running a gun truck on the PSD convoys who actually saved civilian lives on several occasions, at great risk to his own, and because he was a mere Sergeant, the chain of command he was working for at the time was told not to bother with submitting him. In actual fact, the Sergeant First Class and 1st Lieutenant who were running the convoys when those incidents happened were written up for and received Bronze Stars for the deployment, which I thought was particularly egregious bullsh*ttery of the highest order. They gave my guy a unit-generated "Certificate of Merit" for what he did, and I still think he should have been written up for something a hell of a lot higher, like a Soldier's Medal. Dude had big brass balls, carrying women and kids away from an IED strike where EOD hadn't gotten in to clear for secondaries yet. Medics were pretty sure that if he hadn't done what he did, several of the kids would have bled out.

So, yeah... Different, but allied issue to the whole CSM thing. The guys that keep people out of the DFAC for being dirty during a convoy op are just symptoms of the overall rot

All of my Sergeant Majors (Marines) were pretty chill. Stern, but not assholes.
Thats what Corporals are for....to be the asshole. Sometimes the Gunnery Sergeant too. Because there's nothing gunnery about being a Gunny . Just the guy who make sure the counts are right on company gear, and ensures the Company Office's grass gets mowed

This hasn't been posted yet?

"Those of you who don't know me are in for a great, big, fuckin', surprise. Those of you who do, are in for an infinitely more miserable time than you care to remember. Let's try for our first heart attack, shall we?".

Heads and beds

One thing that really chaps my ass is that the Corps has voluntarily put a bunch of stuff in the SgtMaj's wheelhouse that really doesn't belong.

The SgtMaj should be advising the CO on enlisted matters (which of course also means utilizing his expertise in how the officers are viewed), but I hate that things like uniform of the day are just tossed to him. I occasionally got surprised by showing up in utilities, only to find my Marines were in Charlies, because it was a class pickup day, and the smadge decided we should be in Charlies for that (while conducting piss tests and doing the seabag drag), since that's what they do at MCRD.

Or how he could schedule events without going through the S-3.

My training NCO: Sir, here's a change request for four companies to alter the schedule for the next 5 days.
Me: what the fuck?
NCO: SgtMaj wanted an all-enlisted meeting.
Me: *blood pressure skyrockets*

Luckily, the boss backed me up in refusing the changes.

Yup.

me: where the fuck are you guys going? We're in the middle of a maintenance stand down
Marines:... SgtMaj said we had to do are beautification sir...
me:........ go back and do maintenance, I'll deal with SgtMaj

Seriously?

Wife (unit S-4) came in to work one day, and saw her Marines nailing blue tarps onto the roof of their office building after a hurricane.

After her initial shit flipping for them violating...well, just about everything, they said "SgtMaj told us to". Unfortunately, the CO backed him up. So after that egregious safety violation, and destruction of the event tarps, the base was there to repair it two days later, WHICH HAD BEEN BRIEFED AT THE STAFF MEETING DAYS PRIOR.

Stuff like that stems from the nature of the whole program, which serve to illustrate the insanity inherent to the CSM concept. You cannot maintain unit cohesiveness of purpose and direction when you have two authority figures within it that are operating in near-total lack of coordination.

I'm a big fan of having senior enlisted embedded in the process, but I think that should be at the staff level only; no CSM trying to play "wife wearing her husband's rank" at the command level. A staff Sergeant Major working the S3 gives plenty of "enlisted input", and since he's working for the S3, then there's no need to worry about CSM Loose Cannon doing stupid sh*t that's not in accordance with the commander's will.

I was a career senior NCO; I've got no problem staying in my lane, and I think that there's an unspoken problem with the CSM program, in that the CSMs are doing things that aren't in the senior NCO lane; they're actually usurping command authority, and because of their seniority, all too many commanders defer to them improperly.

Personally, I want officers out of NCO business down at the lower levels, and the senior enlisted need to get the hell out of the officer's lanes up at the top. If it were up to me, I'd put a lot of power back into the commander's hands, and let them deal with things themselves, instead of the infantilizing BS we're doing right now.

I'm of the opinion that the whole of TRADOC needs to be shut down, and the authority/power/money for IET needs to be put back into the hands of the commanders. Specialized technical training can all be contracted out, which is about what it is these days, anyway. Every single tech I've talked to has told me that the actual Army-run training courses are woefully out of date, and just about completely irrelevant. For which you can blame the straight-jacket that TRADOC created for running these things...

This guy gets it.

CSM Bobby Moore was the toughest cocksucker I knew he was our battalion then brigade CSM, motherfucker looked like cotton hill. First day we did battalion PT we went on a sprit de corp run and he ran the fuck out of the whole battalion. Imagine someone who is barely 5 feet tall who kept a 7 minute mile pace for 8 fucking miles! He was a good SNCO he looked after the soldiers, we had NCOPD that was actually good and where we actually learned to be better leaders. I will always remember the example he set and my legs never worked the same. Oh yeah if you went to the E5 or E6 board you had to run with him the morning of the board if you didnt finish within earshot of him ...see you next month