Instructors: is no combat better?

Since I started this thread on instructors who have have combat experience
versus those who have not, 100% of the replies were in favor of instructors who
have never been to combat. Many state that they would rather have an instructor
who was skilled at instructing suggesting that once you have been to combat
you were automatically a bad instructor. Hard to buy.

There is another factor. when you have an instructor who has never fought and
probably never will, and you know that you damn well will, he goes down a notch
in respect because he is in a job that "protects": him from combat while you
will soon be sent into the thick of it.. So when we all talk of combat
experiences and one among us says " well I wasn't there, I was an instructor
in the states" he is now out of the loop.. Not that his job wasn't
critically important. It sure was. . At any rate things sure have changed since
WW II. We considered a combat veteran as an instructor a gift from the gods.
Your mileage may vary.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

On 09 Mar 2004 14:46:26 GMT, (ArtKramr) wrote:

Since I started this thread on instructors who have have combat experience
versus those who have not, 100% of the replies were in favor of instructors who
have never been to combat. Many state that they would rather have an instructor
who was skilled at instructing suggesting that once you have been to combat
you were automatically a bad instructor. Hard to buy.

That isn't what has been said. No one has suggested that having been
to combat made you a bad instructor. Some points that have been made
include:

1. Some course (such as UPT) are taught at a level that doesn't
require operational experience, let alone combat. Take-offs and
landings, basic formation, and instrument flying skills can be taught
by almost any graduate.

2. While combat experience might be good at the operational training
courses it isn't always available--long periods between wars have
often left a shortage of combat experienced folks.

3. Combat survival does not equate with instructional skill. Some
folks make good teachers and some make good warriors. Sometimes both
skills exist in the same person, but not always.

4. A mix of some combat vets and some non-combat experienced
instructors is more than adequate to inculcate the necessary combat
skills.

5. Technology has advanced since WW II. I know that is hard to
believe, but sixty years has resulted in some increased complexity in
war-fighting beyond the Browning .50 and the Norden bombsight. In some
training courses, the instructors are civilian contractors rather than
operational military.

There is another factor. when you have an instructor who has never fought and
probably never will, and you know that you damn well will, he goes down a notch
in respect because he is in a job that "protects": him from combat while you
will soon be sent into the thick of it.. So when we all talk of combat
experiences and one among us says " well I wasn't there, I was an instructor
in the states" he is now out of the loop.. Not that his job wasn't
critically important. It sure was. . At any rate things sure have changed since
WW II. We considered a combat veteran as an instructor a gift from the gods.
Your mileage may vary.

Tactics are today. Doctrine is yesterday. Do the same thing more than
twice in combat and you are stereotyped and predictable. Survival
depends upon unpredictability and tactical creativity. Quite often
training by combat experienced instructors from last year or last war
might be counter-productive.

The intangible of demonstrated courage lends credibility, but it
doesn't equate with best training.

My mileage has most definitely varied--and there's been a lot more of
it.


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8

Subject: Instructors: is no combat better?
From: Ed Rasimus
Date: 3/9/04 7:00 AM Pac

The intangible of demonstrated courage lends credibility, but it
doesn't equate with best training.

My mileage has most definitely varied--and there's been a lot more of
it.

Yes. You point that out at every opportuniity and I have gotten the point
every time.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

I think the position of most posters is that instructional skill is what
really matters.

If the instructor also has relevant combat experience so much the
better.

But being able to tell "war stories" has little relevance to
instructional ability.


Dave

Art,
If I had to do it all over again, I would prefer the leavening of experience in
the instructors that I had in the 60's.

Learning it all the ATC way or the SAC way or the MAC way or the TAC way was
not conducive to gaining general knowledge and learning "why" something needed
to be done.
The "how" came in crew training under the specific command that you were going
to after initial training.
It was nice to recall something that an instructor from another command had
given you as a"tip" when you were lost for 14 hours with nothing working and
about to bust an ADIZ or a miss an important item.
The Air Training Command system of the 60's (You WILL do it this way!) wasn't
always the best way, or easiest way or smartest way.
An old B-47 Nav/Bomb taught me things about the radar set that no C-124 flight
lunch inspector ever thought about trying. An old C-47 nav taught me how to
repair a sextant that probably saved my rear at least once over the pond.
A navy CPO nav taught me noon day fix proceedures that worked more than once.
The main thing I got out of Air Teaining Command was accuracy and pacing.
Experienced people from other places taught me how to improvement my
"judgement" and smooth out the rough edges.

Rick Clark
GRID still sucks!

Subject: Instructors: is no combat better?
From: (OXMORON1)
Date: 3/9/04 7:40 AM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

Art,
If I had to do it all over again, I would prefer the leavening of experience
in
the instructors that I had in the 60's.

Learning it all the ATC way or the SAC way or the MAC way or the TAC way was
not conducive to gaining general knowledge and learning "why" something
needed
to be done.
The "how" came in crew training under the specific command that you were
going
to after initial training.
It was nice to recall something that an instructor from another command had
given you as a"tip" when you were lost for 14 hours with nothing working and
about to bust an ADIZ or a miss an important item.
The Air Training Command system of the 60's (You WILL do it this way!) wasn't
always the best way, or easiest way or smartest way.
An old B-47 Nav/Bomb taught me things about the radar set that no C-124
flight
lunch inspector ever thought about trying. An old C-47 nav taught me how to
repair a sextant that probably saved my rear at least once over the pond.
A navy CPO nav taught me noon day fix proceedures that worked more than once.
The main thing I got out of Air Teaining Command was accuracy and pacing.
Experienced people from other places taught me how to improvement my
"judgement" and smooth out the rough edges.

Rick Clark
GRID still sucks!


Of course you are correct. We learn from everyone wherever and whenever we can.
I remember one gunner telling me how to tell in advance whether an enemy
fighter coming in at you will pass over or under you. It makes a difference
because if he will pass over he belongs to our top turret gunner and if he will
pass under he is the waist gunners meat. Anyway, he said that if the fighter
starts his fighter approach and has dropped his inside wing and is swinging h s
nose toward you. then rolls over on his back and makes his attack firing
inverted, he will pass under you. But if he comes in straight, he will pass
over you. And you know, that guy was right. Bless those who have walked the
walk and lived to tell us about it before we found it out the hard way..


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

In article ,
(ArtKramr) wrote:

Since I started this thread on instructors who have have combat
experience
versus those who have not, 100% of the replies were in favor of
instructors who
have never been to combat. Many state that they would rather have an
instructor
who was skilled at instructing suggesting that once you have been to
combat
you were automatically a bad instructor. Hard to buy.

Being in combat teaches you, as an individual, how to survive in combat.
It doesn't necessarily give you the skills or temperament to teach it to
others.

One of the differences between your experience and present training may
be the amount of technical detail that is constantly changing, and MUST
be understood well enough to teach it. Another factor is that most
combat aircraft are multirole. An F-15E driver may have done nothing but
attack, although lots of it and have been shot at thoroughly in the
process.

What special credentials does that give him to teach air combat
maneuvering, perhaps in contrast to someone who was a FAIP, was assigned
to a combat-ready unit in Korea, and then was assigned to Red Flag and
does NOTHING but practice air combat maneuvering and study doctrine from
EVERY known air force? Does that air-to-mud pilot know every trick of
getting performance out of the air-to-air radar, NCTR mechanisms, etc.?
Does the air-to-air specialist know every trick of lob-toss bombing?


There is another factor. when you have an instructor who has never
fought and
probably never will, and you know that you damn well will, he goes down a
notch
in respect because he is in a job that "protects": him from combat while
you
will soon be sent into the thick of it.. So when we all talk of combat
experiences and one among us says " well I wasn't there, I was an
instructor
in the states" he is now out of the loop.. Not that his job wasn't
critically important. It sure was. . At any rate things sure have changed
since
WW II. We considered a combat veteran as an instructor a gift from the
gods.
Your mileage may vary.

Look at it another way. In the "grand old days", SAC had lots of pilots
and aircrew, many of which might have WWII or Korea or Viet Nam combat
experience. Let's say someone survived Linebacker and is now teaching.
How does that qualify them to teach a low-altitude nuclear delivery run
against the fUSSR?

Subject: Instructors: is no combat better?
From: Howard Berkowitz
Date: 3/9/04 8:32 AM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

Look at it another way. In the "grand old days", SAC had lots of pilots
and aircrew, many of which might have WWII or Korea or Viet Nam combat
experience. Let's say someone survived Linebacker and is now teaching.
How does that qualify them to teach a low-altitude nuclear delivery run
against the fUSSR?


How does anyone who hasn't done it teach it?



Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

(ArtKramr) wrote:

Since I started this thread on instructors who have have combat experience
versus those who have not, 100% of the replies were in favor of instructors who
have never been to combat.

Wrong. Favored instructors who have "never been to combat" are YOUR
words, not of those who replied. Go back and re-read the replies and
try to focus on the black parts (e.g: the words) and ignore the white
parts in between.

Many state that they would rather have an instructor who was skilled at
instructing suggesting that once you have been to combat you were
automatically a bad instructor. Hard to buy.

Wrong again. "Once you've been to combat you were automatically a
bad instructor" are YOUR words, not of those who replied. Go back and
re-read the replies and try to focus on the black parts (the words,
just the words) and ignore the white spaces in between the black
parts.

There is another factor. when you have an instructor who has never fought
and probably never will, and you know that you damn well will, he goes down
a notch in respect because he is in a job that "protects": him from combat while
you will soon be sent into the thick of it..

And once again, your simplistic, immature thought processes are all
wrong. I understand the urgency of the situation back in your day, but
your lack of a college education coupled with the hurried and
inadequate training you received in OTS is glaringly obvious still
to this day. The Army obviously allowed many marginal,
unteachable, snot-nosed, naive, "save-the-world-for-democracy"
idealistic 19-year old kids like you to slide on through the cracks
because as you're so fond of saying; "there was a war going on."
The unfortunate result of the Army rushing you off to war armed with
nothing but your contrived syllogisms, impaired logic and inability to
think critically is the pitiable and worsening case of Narcissistic
Personality Disorder from which you suffer.

So when we all talk of combat experiences and one among us
says " well I wasn't there, I was an instructor in the states" he is now
out of the loop..

Wrong again. Your consistently screwy logic shows that you're the
one whose "out of the loop," whether you realize it or not.

Not that his job wasn't critically important. It sure was. .

Congrats. The first CORRECT statement you've managed to say
in months, if not years....

At any rate things sure have changed since WW II.

Amazing. You're on a roll...the second CORRECT statement you've
managed to say in months if not years!

We considered a combat veteran as an instructor a gift from the gods.
Your mileage may vary.

Aren't you the squeeze ballsack who just the other day was sucking
up to Dudley, a NON-combat veteran? One of the many "facts of life"
lectures that you apparently missed during your inadequate and
abbreviated training back in the Dark Ages is that being trained by a
combat veteran is no guarantee of survival, and being trained by the
worst instructor in the squadron is no guarantee of death. It's called
it the "Golden BB" Rule. That's the one that gets you. Just ask the
unlucky ******* in the "high-tech" Apache who takes a stinkin' rocket
propelled grenade right up the snot locker.

As others have tried (in vain, I might add) to explain to you, when
talking about combat the variables are many and you don't specify
turn radius, climb rate, etc. and even if you did, there's always the
background...night or day, sun angle and umpteen other factors and
distractions that make the whole thing a crap shoot.

The bottom line is that simply because you happened to survive
combat that doesn't necessarily mean that you were GOOD in
combat. After all, we've only heard YOUR side of the story -- your
self-aggrandizing, mittyesque war stories constantly bragging about
how "good" you were and how "cowardly" everyone else was. But
until some other credible person steps forward and definitively backs
up all your boasts about how "good" Art Kramer was, taking anything
you say as the truth is at best, a leap of faith. And from where I'm
sitting, it appears that very few people are willing to take that
leap.

"ArtKramr" wrote in message
...

Of course you are correct. We learn from everyone wherever and whenever we
can.
I remember one gunner telling me how to tell in advance whether an enemy
fighter coming in at you will pass over or under you. It makes a
difference
because if he will pass over he belongs to our top turret gunner and if he
will
pass under he is the waist gunners meat. Anyway, he said that if the
fighter
starts his fighter approach and has dropped his inside wing and is
swinging h s
nose toward you. then rolls over on his back and makes his attack firing
inverted, he will pass under you. But if he comes in straight, he will
pass
over you. And you know, that guy was right. Bless those who have walked
the
walk and lived to tell us about it before we found it out the hard way..


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer


In conjunction with your comment about the gunner's remarks to you; if
simple aerodynamics wasn't a part of every gunner's training during the war,
it most surely should have been. What this gunner was telling you might have
been from his training knowledge base or simply as the observed result of
his personal experience. The end result would be the same for recognizing
what the fighter was about to do, but the big difference would have been the
advantage to gunners having this knowledge up front going into combat as
opposed to finding it out through operational experience.
Every gunner out there should have had at least some basic knowledge of
positive and negative g as that knowledge relates to a firing pass by a
fighter. Those who didn't had to learn the hard way. Gunners being taught a
few simple facts about g and vectors would have saved many lives........ and
as this knowledge relates to a firing pass, could have been taught in just a
few minutes during training.
The simple truth of it is that if the fighter rolled inverted during the
pass, in order to pass over you he would have to bunt the airplane into
negative g, and the odds of this happening vs going the positive g route
under you would have all but been a sure bet that he would go positive under
you; hence the lead would become predictable based on the odds.
I should add that there were a few German fighter pilots who routinely would
go negative, but never offensively, only defensively.
Erich Hartmann was one of them, and he was not in the theatre.
I've always wanted to ask a gunner from the period if simple aerodynamics
was indeed taught in gunnery training to help with prediction lead solution,
but somehow I've always forgotten to ask
:-) If there are any gunners out there who can answer this, perhaps they
will post.
Dudley