Tag: RECRUITING

The US Army Field Band sent its many chamber group components all across the nation during the last week in February. These mini-tours allowed members of the concert band to perform and interact in a more intimate setting than our large venues generally allow. Since the euphonium is not traditionally an instrument found in common chamber groups, (brass quintets, woodwind quintets, trios), I took the opportunity to strike out on my own and do some solo teaching and performing. 

I was assigned an area near and dear to me heart- TEXAS! My parents house was less than two hours away from all the places I performed, so I was able to stay with them and take advantage of some home cooking as an added bonus! 

My first visit on Monday, February 26th, was to Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX. The tuba, euphonium and trumpet students gathered for an afternoon master class. Several of the students played for me, and I was able to demonstrate ideas and give them some pointers. 

Here I am addressing the group. Hopefully, saying something wise! 

Later that evening I performed an hour-long solo recital with piano. I played this program a total of four times. It was a wonderful experience for me to go out and take my own one-woman show on the road. Doing gigs night after night sure was a great way to work on endurance! My fabulous accompanist here is Ms. Ilonka Rus, faculty at SHSU. 

I get my love of cooking  from my Dad. He is the best Cajun cook I know, and also does a mean breakfast. Here is one of the amazing morning feasts, (french toast), I enjoyed while home. PT test is coming up, so I'm working off those calories now that I'm back in Maryland! 

I was pretty busy while in Texas, but managed to catch some quality time with family in between gigs. Here is Grandma, enjoying the morning paper while the cat takes a cat nap behind her. 

My second stop was in Brenham, TX at Blinn College. For those of you from the South, you might have heard of Brenham as the famous home of Blue Bell Homemade Ice Cream. It is the best ice cream on the planet, and one drawback to being stationed in Washington D.C. is the fact that you can't get it up here. I made a point to show up early on the day of my gig so that I had time to tour the Blue Bell Creamery. No cameras allowed inside, but here I am outside, near a model of one of the original refrigerated trucks they used to carry all that good ice cream around in. 

After indulging in a little ice cream, I was back to work, hosting a clinic at Blinn College. This is a fantastic 2-year junior college that has a very strong music program. These students had lots of great questions about the Army and the many opportunities available for musicians in the Armed Forces. It was a good opportunity for dialogue and for these young people to hear and meet a representative who has decided to make a career in military music. 

Here I am giving some advice after hearing one of the Blinn students perform a solo for me. 

Can you believe that it actually snowed in Texas while I was there! After all the powdery stuff that we've been getting in Maryland, I was NOT pleased. It was somewhat of an anomaly for Brenham, and they ended up canceling classes that evening. Luckily, my recital went on as planned and there was a good turnout, despite the nasty weather. 

I loved having my family there to hear me play. You always get great applause when you bring your audience with you! Here are members of the Veronie clan that made it out for the concert! These two brothers, two sis-in-laws, two nieces, mom & Dad are only a small sampling of my huge Cajun family. :) 

The third stop on the hit parade was Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, TX. I showed up early in the morning on Wednesday, February 24th, for a rehearsal with the pianist I would perform with that evening. After the rehearsal, I had a chance to walk around the College of Music. 

Here I am admiring my recital advertisement on a digital marquee that was in the music building lobby. 

As with the other universities, I gave an afternoon master class for brass students. Here is a pic of a student playing for me.  The evening recital went very well and I was officially done with the solo recital gigs. That meant my next two engagements were less pressure, playing-wise. They did end up being challenging in a different way.

On Thursday I went to The Woodlands High School and worked all day listening to their tuba and euphonium kids one-on-one. In addition, I ran a sectional and held a clinic at one of the middle schools. This was very unique, and gave the high school students a chance to ask very specific questions about music and the military.

Friday was my last day in Texas and I saved the most fun for last. I returned to my hometown of Willis, TX and interacted with students who sat in the very same chairs I did back in the day! Going to my middle and high school alma maters was such a treat; in particular, seeing two of my former teachers. The kids really enjoyed hearing the pieces I played for them, and had SO many questions. 

I think my favorite questions were, "What is your favorite gun to shoot?," How loud can you play?," and "how much money do you make?" Haha! It was fun to field so many Army questions. In the band-arena, I don't deal with weapons and deployment on a daily basis, as do some units. However, being in touch with what is going on in the Army and having the training and background in those areas helps us be more effective ambassadors. I did my best to answer every question I could, and hopefully those kids came away with a much better understanding of not just the Army Bands Program, but the Army in general. 

This last picture is with my middle school band director, Dr. Jim Hill, who is still teaching in Willis. It was great to catch up with so many wonderful people, from teachers to family. The entire week was a wonderful musical experience. It was nice to know that I made some difference in my small way as a soldier-euphoniumist. 

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These are President George Bush’s words, not mine. I wish they were mine. They are from his acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention in 2004. The point he was making concerned the sorry state of public education resulting in a high rate of failure. He believed American educators had set the achievement bar too low due to the mistaken belief that some students simply could not perform.

The same can be said about our present situation in Afghanistan. We have set the performance bar for the government here very low and the expectations are what one would expect which are very low indeed. As a result, we are seeing a self-fulfilling prophecy-if you are will to settle for so little success, that is precisely what you will see.

At the recently concluded London Conference, the international community pledged additional support to the Afghan government. The Afghan National Police will grow to 109,000 this year and the Afghan Army will grow to 134,000. Added together, this will require Afghanistan to add some 30,000 additional police and soldiers to the nation’s defense forces. For a nation of 33 million, on a war footing, struggling for survival, this should be relatively easy, considering that the international community is paying the total bill for salary, training, equipment, everything.

If you believe this you would be wrong because Afghanistan is decidedly not on a war footing. After eight years of war, the Afghan government has not gotten around to passing any legislation that remotely resembles a draft or compulsory national service. As a result, recruiters must scour the countryside looking for new recruits. This is not an easy job in Afghanistan and recruiting 30,000 in a single year is a tall order.

Even assuming a very good year and the recruiters actually recruit 30,000, only about half this number will be added to the force; 20% will fail drug testing, another 10% will not show up at the training centers and another 20% will simply walk away after drawing a couple of paychecks. The abnormally high attrition rate is due, in large part, to the fact that there is no retribution for leaving the force. No Afghan is ever punished for desertion. So to add 30,000 to the force, the recruiters need to actually recruit 45,000 and this will be a bridge too far in a single year. However, none of these troubling details were fully examined during the London Conference.

To be fair, not everything could have been discussed at London. The diplomats there had important business to discuss such as making overtures to the Taliban to come down from the Hindu Kush and join the Afghan government. President Karzai offered the Taliban jobs and money to lure them out of the mountains. He called these offers an incentive; others called them a bribe. In any event, the Taliban were having none of it, waiting, no doubt, for a better offer. As a result, there were no great expectations for resolutions to be found for every problem or for everything to be covered in great detail. A prime example of issues not resolved at the London Conference is the poppy problem. Right now down south, in Kandahar, Helmand and Nimroz provinces, a half a million acres of poppies are sprouting in the fields. They will be ready for harvest in late May and it looks like another bumper crop in the making.

Without question, the poppies represent Afghanistan’s major export. The country produces 97% of the world’s supply of opium. The poppies are the single biggest source of corruption in the country and represent some 90% of the Taliban’s funding. They could easily be eradicated by aerial spraying, thereby ending the cancer of corruption on Afghanistan and dealing the Taliban a crippling blow at the same time. However, aerial eradication is not even being discussed. Rather, the United States is following a policy of interdiction rather than eradication, opting to somehow intercept the processed drugs along an endless number of smuggling routes, rather than destroying them at the source, in the fields. Such a policy is the intellectual equivalent of attempting to destroy a missile in flight rather than blow it up on the launch pad.

To the surprise of no one, President Karzai agrees wholeheartedly with this strategy. He claims that he has encouraged the poppy farmers to give up growing poppies and grow legal crops instead. However, he says the farmers will not listen to his pleas and there is nothing he can do. The fact that growing poppies is illegal under the Afghan constitution is conveniently forgotten whenever this issue is discussed. In fact, the Afghan constitution elaborates in detail as to the illegality of the drug trade. So the American policy is to engage in interdiction and the Afghan government’s policy is to somehow convince the poppy growers to voluntarily stop growing the most rewarding crop known to man, a crop that can bring the farmer a tenfold greater profit than wheat or cotton. As long as the poppies are here, there will be money for the terrorists – terrorists that threaten the lives of our soldiers and our nation. This fact should be obvious to all parties but it is not. Maybe Keats had it right when he wrote, “Autumn slumber – all drowsed with the fume of the poppies.”

No doubt, the 30,000 man surge pledged by President Obama will help in the war on terror. Neither can there be any doubt about the performance of our magnificent military on the ground here, clearing areas that were once Taliban strongholds and showing the Afghan security forces how to both fight the enemy and win the hearts and minds of the population. These points were never open to debate. However, as America begins the ninth year of combat in Afghanistan, no one knows for certain how it will all end. The questionable commitment of the Afghan government, coupled with the American strategy of demanding so little from it, is troubling. At some point, the Afghans are going to have to want to succeed at least as much as America wants them to succeed. Unfortunately, we have not yet reached this point nor can we see it anywhere on the horizon. In the meantime, this year’s crop of poppies is doing quite well in the south and the soft bigotry of low expectations is alive and well in Afghanistan and the great halls of the coalition forces.

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The first high school presentation of the 2009-10 school year was a very memorable one for a couple of reasons. One, is that this presentation was conducted out of my area, and by out of my area I mean on the other side of this great country, in California. Two, my brother SGT Raymond Lucero was with me. Raymond plays the trumpet in the Army Band and just left the 76th Army Band and is now stationed at the mighty 62nd Army Band at Ft. Bliss Texas. Finally, this presentation was at my old high school where I played my audition for an Army Band liaison 9 years earlier. This was the same room my brother also took an audition almost 11 years ago. We were back to tell the young musicians that they could be standing here in 2019 telling young musicians that they can do it too. This was one of my most important goals I have been thinking about ever since I have been in the Army Bands and when I was hired as a band recruiter I knew that it was within reach. Having my brother there was the icing on the cake.

The school year hasn’t officially started yet, band camp was running (yes, we do go to band camp). I told the students about the opportunities and benefits of being in the Army and played a bit of the tuba for them. It being early in the school year I knew that some of the kids would just dismiss all of the information I was putting out and just think about text messaging, but that’s OK. I explained that the Army is not for everyone, but there is one or two of them out there that will really take what I said to heart. Between my brother and I we have visited and been stationed all over the world and have experienced things that your everyday musician right out of high school would not experience. All I can hope is that I set off a spark in some of these young musicians’ minds and they realize that they can do it too.

As we finished for the day we got in the car and drove away from our high school much like we did 11 years earlier when I was a freshman and my brother was a junior in the band. It really goes to show how much can change and at the same time stay the same.

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Who would have thought visiting a camp for a recruiting assignment would turn out to be one of the most thought-provoking and moving weeks I've ever experienced?

Two weeks ago, I traveled up to Hubbardston, Mass. to go to the Ron Burton Training Village. It's an all boy camp that targets troubled youth--about 120 guys every year. RBTV is kind of a sports/Bible/motivational camp run by the Burton family.

The camp was founded in the 80s by Ron Burton (a former Patriots player) who passed a few years ago. Some come from as far as California and Ohio, but most are from Mass. For some of the guys it was their first year, but others have been coming back to the camp for a number of years. For some high school seniors, it was their seventh year. Every morning these guys wake up and run 7 miles for 5 weeks straight.  It was pretty impressive.   I ran the first day I got there.  I consider myself to be in pretty good shape.  This run was quite a challenge.  Through the woods, up a mountain, down a straight road.  The run was pretty representative of life, if you ask me. 

The camp challenges these young men physically, mentally, and spiritually.  It challenges them to look beyond their current situation and to develop goals for the future.  I heard a few of them say "when you write a dream down it becomes a goal"...I believe they will all obtain their goals.  Hopefully, we were able to help them make one of those dreams serving in the United States Army. 

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Wow!  Yesterday was a whirlwind of events.  It's hard to believe how much actually fit into a 24 hour period.  I apologize for not getting this out sooner, but there just wasn't any time. 

3 July was the first day of the Essence Music Festival, and what a day it was.  The day started off with a WCAP/Drill Sergeant PT session that got a lot of people's attention at the entrance.  As visitors walked further they saw the huge Army display.  The Army team came out strong with our interactive exhibit area.  If anyone is in town or close by, you should come out and visit us! The activities on and off the stage don't stop.  Push-up contests, the Army Steppers, rock wall climbing, the Buffalo Soldiers, the Army Jazz Band, health screenings cooking exhibitions, how to join the Army, and of course information provided on how to have college fully funded through West Point or ROTC. I'm sure I left out a lot.  Come experience it for yourself!   I was amazed at how the energy kept going. 

We had people come up to our booth (West Point) representing every age group and demographic you can think of.  From a 15 month old to grandmothers and grandfathers, everyone was there.  It's never too early to learn about it and it's never too late to help spread the word.  I had such a great time talking with people and getting to know them and what they're interested in.  I realize not everyone is interested in going to West Point, and that's fine, but I also realize that a lot of people aren't aware of that opportunity, and that's what my job is...making people aware of the opportunity and helping the pursue the dream if that's what they want.  As a member of the greater Army force and outreach effort, I walked some prospects over to the AMEDD and ROTC booths to get them more information. 

After all the festivities in the exhibit area, I got myself ready for the VIP reception dinner at the Superdome.  What a beautiful event.  Some of the attendees of the dinner included:  GEN Ward the highest ranking African-American in the Army as a 4 Star General and the AFRICOM Commander, MG Bartell, BG Bray, BG Pinckney, CSM King, CSM Jones (the highest ranking female African-American NCO) CSM Turner, CSM Lacy.  Broadcaster Merri Dee, Editor-in-Chief of Essence Magazine Angela Burt-Murray, and several other distinguished guests.  It was amazing and it was definitely an honor to be there!  

When the dinner was over, we made our way to the live performances by Nee-yo, John Legend and Beyonce...or should I say Sasha Fierce?  All great performances!

I can't believe that was all just day 1.  Day 2 has just begun and I can't wait to experience all that it may have in store! 

I'll be in touch!

~Kirsten (CPT Rowe)

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So this is my first blog and it's a good time to start.  I'm down at the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans, LA for a recruiting event.  As an Outreach Officer for the United States Military Academy (West Point), this is a great place to meet candidates and prospects to attend the Academy.  Today we got the "lay of the land" as we prepped the "battlefield."  One of the best parts of the day so far has been meeting all of the other recruiters representing different parts of the Army:   USAREC, ROTC, WCAP, USACC, AMEDD.  One team.  I'm looking forward to getting started tomorrow.  Planning is good, but everything in the Army always comes back to the most important thing...working with and for people. 

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This past week I had the pleasure of performing with the Army Material Command Band out of Aberdeen Proving grounds Maryland. This was their spring musical and recruiting tour that spanned across four states and many great venues. I was there as a representative from recruiting command linking up with local recruiters and telling the Army Story but also at a Tuba player.

SSG Gilbert and one the Army’s Newest Soldiers Private Hatfield

Since I have become an Army Band Liaison my tuba playing days have been very few, except for the occasional Carnival of Venice at a high school presentation. It was nice to be back on the horn for a week and play with a fine group of musician such as the AMC band. The program consisted of many different genres of music from patriotic to Rock; Sousa marches to classical and always ended with our national march ‘The Stars and Stripes forever”, which always got the audience out of there seats to clap along with the music. One of the best moments in the concert is when the band performs the Armed forces Service song and all retired veterans had the chance to stand and be recognized for their service to the nation. This shows the effect that an Army Band can have on an audience. We also honored our active duty soldiers from the local communities returning from overseas publicly during our performance of the song American Visions. This gave the community a chance to say thank you to their local heroes.

Our performance at the Albany Tulip Festival was the first performance where the Rock band and Brass band were featured on the concert. The rock band which has appropriately been name Raw Material has been performing at local high schools during the course of the tour, and showed young inspiring musicians that they could do this too for a living.

Raw Material singing The Jason Maraz hit “I’m yours”

The Brass Band” fire for effect” getting the crowd pumped up

Army Material Command Band, Aberdeen Proving Grounds Maryland.

AMC’s OWN

The command Team of CW4 Frederick Ellwein and SGM Wendy Thompson put together a fantastic concert program and represented the Army with professionalism and will be in people’s thoughts for years to come. I’m glad I was part of the AMC band even if it was only for a week. Life is good…

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Friday I had a chance to work with 2 recruiters in New York. Staff Sergeants DiBartola and Stuckey at New York University School of Dentistry. We had 2 events that day. The first was a presentation to current and future HPSP students; the second was a residency fair at the school for all the juniors. Both events went well, we spoke with many students – hopefully the recruiters will have some leads from that.

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As an Army Band recruiter one of my responsibilities is to audition and inform musicians about the Army Bands. I have given dozens of auditions and enlisted many fine musicians into our program. This past week at our annual Army Bands Leadership Training I had a chance to speak to my first applicant who made it through basic training and arrived to the School of Music. A crowd of basic music course students were around our Army Bands recruiting booth and I was hoping that the trumpet player was there. As he emerged from the crowd of new soldiers I was proud to see that the civilian I gave an audition to in November 2008 with the long hair and dozens of questions was standing there in ACU’s with a fresh hair cut. I asked the big question, how has it been. He said it was great and told me about basic training using Army terms like team and leaders. I wished him the best and told him to email me to tell me more. The four other Army Bands Liaisons also spoke to the new musicians. I think we were the most popular group of people with the new soldiers because in most cases we were the first Army Musicians that they interacted with. I am very excited to be in this position of Army Band Liaison. When the job gets hard and you look down at the government cell and see 27 new voice mails and the inbox is maxed out from questions from applicants and recruiters, seeing that you have an effect on the future of the Army Bands makes me feel privileged to be in the position I am in. Life is good……..

SSG Derrick Reed, SSG Dan Engel, SFC Adrian Ramon, SSG Mark Lucero, SGT Ryan Westbrook. The Army Band Liaisons at the Army Band Leaders Training

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Marketing Research & Analysis Team Accessions Command
Many people I meet ask me what I do and I have difficulty sometimes describing my current field and duties. So let me try to break down each word and relate it to my duties now and in the past. OPERATIONS is the most important word in the 4-block acronym, in that all we do I must relate it to current or future operations, put it in the context of the warfighter and the recommended actions that I am proposing so he/she can make a decision. There are many academic exercises that I do but I must address the “So what” and related to our operations or the meaning is lost. The one think that will happen with an ORSA analysis product is a leader (decision maker) will make a decision or a group of decisions related to our work. Some of the decisions adjust resources, adjust policies, and modify how we conduct business (recruit, fight, etc.), what we are equipped with or how to improve friction points within a system to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Sometimes the impact is immediate as in my current job with Accessions Command. I am the Marketing Research and Analysis Division Chief and the analysts in the division are responsible for research and analysis critical for recruiting enlisted and officers in the US Army. Key questions come up daily on how should we spend a dollar of marketing and on who, when and using what advertising media. The environment is very fluid because it involves people and the human dimension. Hard to keep up with the environment. In my world, I always say to my analysts, as I look out my window we need to answer these questions: 1) who is out there, 2) how far are they away are they (age), 3) how much information do they know about Army service, 4) how should I engage them and how do they receive information, 5) are they already very interested in Army service where marketing will have very little effect on them and 6) how eligible for service are they.

RESEARCH is the long-range actions of this specialty to either conduct, coordinate, lead or synergize projects to effectively in the near-term address the commanders’ questions and attempt to underpin critical decisions. If RESEARCH is the long-term then ANALYSIS is the short-term that takes the research and discretely and collectively packages a composite product that looks at the problem from multiple angles, venues and with multiple stakeholders then compensates for the constraints and limitations of the research and forms a set of recommendations that address the problem.

The SYSTEMS portion is what makes the ORSA community a little different than most other staff Officers. When we see a problem, we see a system of systems in which the problem is contained. We see flow, path and methodology which typically connect on multiple layers. Everything is part of a system and each system is part of a larger system. We would like to understand how it fits into the larger construct and the interdependencies so we can describe the impacts of our recommendations to the decision maker and provide synergistic problem solving (two or more birds, one stone concept).

Lastly, ANALYST is the descriptor that brings it all together by conducting analysis which mentioned before is the looking at the big picture by looking at adjacent activities, looking at the entire system and the effects of the decision on sub-systems, people and the organization and looking spatial and temporal considerations (actions down the road).

ORSA as a specialty has been around since World War II where it was born and the original ORSAs had to solve very difficult problems ranging from protecting aircraft, getting troops on shores, improving communication effectiveness and even solving enemy cryptographic ciphers. The ORSA community has since been militarized and imbedded in organizational staffs at the Corps, Divisions and Brigade levels to provide the commander the problem-solving capabilities necessary to be responsiveness and address critical combat related issues. Along with a set of civilian counter parts at the strategic and operational levels, the ORSA community makes an impact everyday at every level of the Army. The appetite for analysis has grown substantially in the last 5 years. Research and analysis drives decisions; data drives research an analysis ? ORSAs have the unique skills to produce the data, research and analysis. ORSA skills and tools have been refined over the past 50 years and each problem requires different skill and tools.

ORSA as a functionality for Officers may be assigned as a Captain but as branch identifier will be assigned as a Major. I was originally a Signal Officer and re-classed as an ORSA, which is functional area 49, as it is called. ORSAs are a small branch and managed with other operational branches such as Signal and Military Intelligence, all which provide operational support to the commander. The skills of ORSAs are so desired by commanders and staffs that recent force manpower requirements have assigned them to almost every level in the Army. My previous ORSA job was working on the 2017 Future Force concept from White Sands Missile Range as an analyst with projects ranging from munition composition, communication capability assessment, tactical procedures employment assessment and asset configuration evaluation for a force that doesn’t exist yet. However, the analysis allowed for these future concepts to be spun-out to the current force in Iraq to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and protection of current operations. My wife, also an ORSA, worked convoy procedures and weapon configurations while traveling, which increased the overall survivability and lethality of a convoy as these convoys were typically attacked because of their vulnerabilities.

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