This change sucks. Ruins outfit culture, fish buddies, wtf does the outfit do for the first two months. Who do we call, let's get this going.

BCOBQ98 said:

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This change sucks. Ruins outfit culture, fish buddies, wtf does the outfit do for the first two months. Who do we call, let's get this going.

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Not sure yet. Lots of things going on behind the scenes.

Apparently Commandant made this decision without Corps Advisory or CCA being informed and they are not happy. Also the BOR supposedly did not know and perhaps not even the Univ Pres.

I have heard there is a letter being drafted. I have requested a copy. When I hear more I will update this thread.

E Pluribus, Pluribus =/= Per Unitaten Vis

aggiez03 said:

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Dawnguard said:

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Devils advocate:

This isn't anywhere near as terrible as projected. Essentially, instead of being randomly placed by random, the fish will actually have the ability to chose an outfit and earn their logo. This means that recruiting the unit will be significantly less random, and outfit culture and reputation amongst the corps will have a bigger impact.

My immediate reaction was "this is a big change and is probably terrible". My undeveloped and uninformed thoughts are leading me to think that this might actually solve some major problems the corps is facing (drastic change in lifestyle).

I'd need more information on what the outfit selection process will be. If the fish get to choose in the spring after earning their corps brass, then this pushes outfit culture to the forefront. The military academies have low outfit loyalty because they swap out after sophomore year. I see 3.5 years as being way stronger loyalty - as the recruitment is way longer and the outfit selection is more of a mutual agreement than a random selection.

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This is not how it works.

Every Corps outfit has a recruiting chain and are actively recruiting Spend the Nighters starting in September till the end of the Spring. Each outfit brings in a ton of kids, determines if the kids fit what they are looking for and if the outfit and the kid both like each other, then they can put the kid on their reserved list and the kid can put down that outfit as their first choice.

Some outfits have OVER a HUNDRED kids that want to be in their outfit. Other outfits have to get kids given to them because they are so bad at recruiting.

By the spring there will be no culture of the outfit. This will kill outfit culture. Which I actually think is the goal in all of this.

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With spend the night with the Corp you only learn about 1 outfit. This new model would allow fish to learn about every outfit before choosing one. That's alot different than the current model.

aggiez03 said:

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Any CTs on here that are not aware...

New commandant has been rumored to do this, but this came down today...


He is trying to turn A&M into a service academy.

This will effectively kill the Corps.

Corps of Cadets Association and a bunch of high level CTs are working to quell this, but need CTs to call, write, and email and voice their displeasure.


How are politics involved?

They are trying to FORCE EQUITY and get rid of outfit culture.

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I can only imagine the blowback he's going to get from former Corps members. This is not going to go over well. The one thing you don't do at TAMU is mess with tradition in the Corps.

Question about the equity part, was that discussed somewhere else in the memo? I might be thinking of it as trying to push DEI type equity and not another form. I ask because I would think any mention of equity and DEI is a big no no right now.

Wildmen06 said:

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is there another source for this other than an Instagram screenshot

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My question as well.

But with that being said outfit culture is imperative to the corps experience. One of the main reasons I look back on my college Corps experience with fondness while my fellow USAFA grads often don't. They get mixed up after freshman year and lose all those bonds made by going through the suck together.

I'd be very disappointed if I didn't have the chance to get my sons into E-1 in the future.

The true brotherhood has always been the Unit. Your fish buddies go thru the trials and tribulations with you. I am still friends with my fish buddies and when we do get together, it is all about the first year or two hijinks and trials we went thru.

I hate this, but I'm amazed it didn't happen a long time ago.

Terrible. Individual unit identity is a positive aspect of the Corps. I know I wouldn't have had the same experience and great memories if I were forced to be buddies with some of those other dweebs.

Wow and WTF.

I would love to hear his side of the story, All i see is losses of culture, unity, leadership experience (at ALL levels), etc.

Perhaps the commandant will actually have balls to show up here to explain.

Does the new Commandant post on TexAgs?

It's like instituting a national police force versus local police.

There aren't really any outfits without the fish. This is horrible

Cromagnum said:

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Might be worse in some regards. Learning the upperclassmen in your unit and eventually major unit was bad enough. How many leaders will the fish be expected to keep track of under the new system?

I don't see how this would work at all in the Aggie Band. All the fish train as part of the full unit anyways.

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That would be a nightmare.

One thing that was clear in the Corps, you pretty much knew where you stood from early in your fish year. This would seem to muddy all that up.

Dawnguard said:

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Devils advocate:

This isn't anywhere near as terrible as projected. Essentially, instead of being randomly placed by random, the fish will actually have the ability to chose an outfit and earn their logo. This means that recruiting the unit will be significantly less random, and outfit culture and reputation amongst the corps will have a bigger impact.

My immediate reaction was "this is a big change and is probably terrible". My undeveloped and uninformed thoughts are leading me to think that this might actually solve some major problems the corps is facing (drastic change in lifestyle).

I'd need more information on what the outfit selection process will be. If the fish get to choose in the spring after earning their corps brass, then this pushes outfit culture to the forefront. The military academies have low outfit loyalty because they swap out after sophomore year. I see 3.5 years as being way stronger loyalty - as the recruitment is way longer and the outfit selection is more of a mutual agreement than a random selection.

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Back in the 70s, your field of study was a major part of assigning a fish into outfits. Science into one outfit. Engineering in another outfit. Premed in another outfit. Of course, the band had everything.

That said, you could choose a different outfit if you knew ahead of time. For example, my younger brother was an agriculture major in an engineering outfit.

I've been told that they did away with that structure some years ago, but I have no idea why they would do so. It doesn't make sense. For example, the premed outfit was more concerned with academics and was said to take it easier on their fish.

Start by calling the Corps of Cadets association (979-221-1998 )

AND

emailing:

bruce@corpsofcadets.org
Bruce Hamilton is CEO.

They will tell you they won't get involved, but they need to hear from members anyway.

Rapier108 said:

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Eliminating the Corps of Cadets has always been a goal.

It is one of the things the leftists in the administration hate the most because they see it as one of the things which makes A&M different from the rest of the universities in the country.

They want A&M to be Berkeley on the Brazos.

And as much as he is disliked, the person everyone should be contacting is John Sharp. Screwing up A&M history/traditions is the one thing he does not like and so far has managed to keep at bay.

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I was a CT and for all of its shortcomings most of A&M's leadership has bent over backwards to help preserve the Corps and support it through some tough times, including Sharp who was in Squadron 6. There were probably 2-3 times when I was a cadet in the 90s alone when A&M probably had a valid excuse to disband the Corps if they wanted, including the FDT mess.

I was D&C and as noted by others one of the great benefits of the Corps to me was the outfit friendships and "good bull", especially fish year, but at the end of the day the Corps primarily exists to commission officers along with the Academies. If the Commandant thinks that changes need to be made to stay competitive then I guess I get it, although like most of you I don't like it.

aggiez03 said:

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BluHorseShu said:

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aggiez03 said:

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Any CTs on here that are not aware...

New commandant has been rumored to do this, but this came down today...


He is trying to turn A&M into a service academy.

This will effectively kill the Corps.

Corps of Cadets Association and a bunch of high level CTs are working to quell this, but need CTs to call, write, and email and voice their displeasure.


How are politics involved?

They are trying to FORCE EQUITY and get rid of outfit culture.

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I can only imagine the blowback he's going to get from former Corps members. This is not going to go over well. The one thing you don't do at TAMU is mess with tradition in the Corps.

Question about the equity part, was that discussed somewhere else in the memo? I might be thinking of it as trying to push DEI type equity and not another form. I ask because I would think any mention of equity and DEI is a big no no right now.

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No, the DEI thing is not something that is being said outloud, but what they do not want it outfit culture.

There is lots of disparity between outfits and when you have outstanding outfits that lots of kids want to get into, they cannot put all the kids in that outfit. They get stuck in other outfits, some of which have poor culture.

If they knock out the outfit culture, they can put a kid anywhere and then they will have a unified experience across the Corps.

Sounds great, but then imagine your child having to do 7th grade math in 7th grade when they are capable of pre-Algebra.

It is forced equity.

There was a kid in my son's Air Science class that was arguing with a Bull last semester about how Outfit Culture is EVERYTHING, and the Bull's position was that Outfit Culture was a negative and needed to be eliminated.

This is NOT what Texas A&M Corps experience was EVER about....

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Thanks. And I agree. This will FUBAR the corps as people know/knew it.

Thanks for explaining this. I had no idea what OP was about.

Ag CPA said:

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Rapier108 said:

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Eliminating the Corps of Cadets has always been a goal.

It is one of the things the leftists in the administration hate the most because they see it as one of the things which makes A&M different from the rest of the universities in the country.

They want A&M to be Berkeley on the Brazos.

And as much as he is disliked, the person everyone should be contacting is John Sharp. Screwing up A&M history/traditions is the one thing he does not like and so far has managed to keep at bay.

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I was a CT and for all of its shortcomings most of A&M's leadership has bent over backwards to help preserve the Corps and support it through some tough times, including Sharp who was in Squadron 6. There were probably 2-3 times when I was a cadet in the 90s alone when A&M probably had a valid excuse to disband the Corps if they wanted, including the FDT mess.

I was D&C and as noted by others one of the great benefits of the Corps to me was the outfit friendships and "good bull", especially fish year, but at the end of the day the Corps primarily exists to commission officers along with the Academies. If the Commandant thinks that changes need to be made to stay competitive then I guess I get it, although like most of you I don't like it.

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Understand the sentiment vis--vis commissioning source, but don't we still commission the most folks outside of the service academies?

It'll be fine. They tried killing Bonfire culture by jacking with the dorms. Culture is much stronger than dills in suits.

The Kraken said:

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I'm going to withhold judgment until I hear from the Commandant, who is class of '93. There was lots of bellyaching when Gen Ramirez spearheaded many reforms, but IMO most of them were necessary and positive.

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G Ram was terrible.

aggiez03 said:

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There are outstanding outfits that have leaders all over campus. There are the jock outfits who are known to be good at athletics. There is E2 who is known for Reveille. All outfits have a culture that is passed down from class to class and that is bred through the interaction from Seniors to fish.

Why are outfits that were good 10 or 20 years ago, still the best outfits?

Why are bad outfits that were not good 10-20 years ago, still not great outfits?

Outfit culture.

Some outfits recruit and breed outfit culture, while other outfits don't care.

An outfit is setup to train fish in how they should act, fit in, and operate. Some outfits are great at this, some are not.

By removing the fish from the outfits, you are taking the main reason for an outfit to exist away.

A pissheads job is to train fish. No Fish, what are they gonna do?
Why would a pisshead want to go train a group of fish that he will not see the benefit of training?

How are fish gonna learn outfit culture, when they are not a part of an outfit, but in fact separated from the outfit?

Why would Jrs and Srs in the Corps care to stay engaged when they don't know the fish, they don't see the fish, and don't get the benefit of seeing the fish grow.

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Don't tell me Gator 2 has superior culture. lol

Get Off My Lawn said:

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I say "show me a superior product first."

The service academies drastically underperform when you the caliber of applicants they start with. They get to doorkeep while A&M's corps has little filter, and yet - I'd take the average Aggie officer over the average academy grad any day. This is in large part because they talk about leadership while at A&M immerses kids in it.

Being able to make early mistakes within your unit - where the impact is limited to a couple dozen folks - is part of the strength of this model. You don't get the maturation process without the autonomy. Taking fish away from individual units may be sold as a unifying experience but is clearly an effort to eliminate the privacy & control the training as to insulate bulls from cadets mistakes.

At first blush it smells like a risk averse officer infantilizing the whole organization as a hedge for his personal career and to the detriment of the next generation.

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"Give me army full of West Pointers, and I will win a battle. Give me a handful of Aggies, and I will win a war."

- Patton (allegedly)

Ok, I guess as a non-reg, I don't see the problem here. From what I am reading, this "basic training" period will be 8 weeks. After that, they will train with their unit, and beginning in the spring they will live with their unit in a dedicated hallway. So are y'all saying that unit training is so specific and different between units that missing September and most of October in the fall of their first year will irreparably harm the ability of an outfit to instill their own culture? So everything the outfit learns that makes them unique happens in the first 8 weeks of school? And if that is lost, the unit culture will be lost forever with no chance of recovery in the remaining weeks of the first fall or any of the seven semesters after that?

Sorry, I am just not buying it. If the idea is to train future military leaders, presumably the corps should have one training program that seeks to make the most out of every member. If there are "good units" and "mediocre" units, then the goal should be to bring more of the leadership from the good units into the mediocre ones until you can make them all good. What everybody seems to be arguing for is to preserve the system that results in some of the outfits being good at the expense of the rest of the outfits. When members of the corps go into one of the branches of the military, they don't get to pick their outfit and only go if they get the good one they want to be in. They need to be able to get along with and work well with the people they serve with regardless of how they got thrown together.

I am sure I am going to get hammered by a bunch of people telling me that I just can't understand how important the bond of the outfit is, but I want each of you to tell me while you do it whether you think the goal of the corps should be to produce the best college ROTC level outfit or the best future leader. The corps may be made up of outfits filled with individuals, but every one of those individuals is part of the same corps. The goal in my mind should be to give every one of them the best shot to be a leader, not to segregate some from the beginning into units that may not prepare them to be the best because they found their way into the wrong silo before they ever set foot on campus.

bobbranco said:

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Will this help with attrition and increase study time?

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Yes, and that is apparently a "Bad Thing."