Over. Finished. Done. Through. Curtain call.

We have all sorts of terms to use to signify that we've completed whatever it is we might be working on. In all reality, nobody is really and truly finished...we just move from one project to the next, constantly in motion. This is especially true in the Army. Today we came off of our second three week training period in the last three months. The intent was to prepare us all by reteaching us all the basic Soldier skills we're supposed to already know, document that particular fact in mind numbing detail and then further prepare us to move on to the next stage in training, which would be crew and section level training (this isn't anything classified - the Army is very structured with training, starting at individual level and moving through each organizational level up through brigade). I was placed in charge of tracking and validating the training documentation. Essentially I'm the Access Database guru in the battalion. Not only am I not done, I'm not even close. We're still taking the paper documentation and entering it into the database, so I can collate, structure, poke, prod, pull, stuff, shake, post and push it to whatever reporting form my headquarters wants. I'm not complaining - I like playing in Access, and I constantly have yet one more thing I can do to make it better. The tough part of this whole thing is the scope of the operation and what that means to things like, oh, Access databases that track training documentation for each and every Soldier. Normally we just send company level units to Iraq. Nothing bigger at once than 150 joes. Sometimes a battalion might go, which usually hits the 550 Soldier mark, on average. This time, we're kicking a brigade out the door, which is dragging over 3,000 souls with it. That's a lot of people. I don't think I know that many people. When I taught high school, I managed to know all 140 or so of my students, but never 3000. So we have a few hundred soldiers (maybe more, maybe less, that's something I can't say) in our organization. Each of us (yup..."us"....I don't get a Get Out of Jail Free card for this) have to train on three groups of tasks or briefings ranging from how to clean my rifle to the care and feeding of insurgents. Then, some of us have a fourth grouping. Oh, and some are legitimately on duty orders doing something that requires a specialized school (Electronic Warfare is a good one), which has to be tracked. Then, some of those extra duties are compatible with other extra duties, so those folks tend to get tagged with two or three or four schools on top of everything else. Oh, and all that needs to be tracked. Thankfully, my tracking responsibility ends with the first four sets of stuff.

So where am I going with all this? Basically this: there's never an end.

There's another point I need to make here. That is this: Mobilizing a military organization is a necessarily complex process, whose complexity increases exponentially for each level of command involved. Let's say, for example, that mobilizing a company has a difficulty rating of 2. That means a battalion's complexity might be on the level of 8 (which is 2 cubed), and that of a brigade might be 512 (which is 8 cubed). The scale is about right, but I think the exponent is more of a power or 6 or 7, not three. For you folks who aren't "math people", imagine organizing a trip to Europe for an entire high school, or just one class of juniors (assuming a high school of about 3000 kids, of which there are a couple in my area). Now, besides the itenerary, you get to plan and resource the lodging, transportation, ALL of the food, ALL of their clothes (this is simple for the military) and provide ALL of the luggage and ancillary equipment. I won't get in to weapons, ammo, legal issues, learning to drive in Europe (where nobody usually shoots at folks driving), etc. That's basically what Indiana is doing right now. It's a huge undertaking.

All that said, it's tough enough dealing with a battalion. I'm not alone in doing this, of course, but it's still a lot of work. A battalion of even just 300 souls brings with it a complexity of personal issues and needs that are challenging enough on their own, let alone the complex issues which arise from the daily tedium of preparing for military operations. It's a big job and I'm glad I'm not alone in working on this. To be honest, for all the tough training and conditions our soldiers have had to endure this last month, they're in pretty decent spirits. We have enough veterans, who know that this stage is very temporary and that living conditions actually improve in theater, which helps tons.

Still, I'm glad we're past the first training phase and can work on the documentation and prepare for the next part of this operation. We have a lot to do yet, and not a whole lot of time in which to do it.