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We know we encouraged you, dear reader, to write. Seriously, it’s a good idea.

But that doesn’t mean we want you to shoot yourself in the foot.

Young 1LT (PROMOTABLE!) Max Lujan actually wrote as a guest author at Foreign Policy. That’s a pretty big audience. Unfortunately, it seems he might have benefited from some time in the minor leagues of the blogging world.

Gary Owen (a psuedonym, of course) at Medium has some helpful pointers on how Lietuenant Lujan, and his peers, might better approach the subject.

A promotable first lieutenant in the US Army, presumably a functioning adult who doesn’t require a caretaker, wrote a guest column in Foreign Policy. Beyond the fact that lieutenants, even promotable ones, know little and should talk less, this one gets comical early and often. I don’t normally recommend this, but do read the comments. Lujan’s digging himself deeper with each engagement there, and it’s a little sad to see.

But like all good trainwrecks, there are lessons to be learned: things to sustain, and things to improve. In the interest of all things Army, then, here’s a few lessons learned, a hot wash of five things to learn, or at least understand, about Lujan’s masterpiece.

Let me just address one of GO’s points, innovative training.

https://twitter.com/ElSnarkistani/status/543100794795741184

Here’s the thing about “innovation” for junior leaders. Before you can think outside the box (successfully, anyway) you have to know what’s inside the box. The Army has been around for a couple hundred years. Your platoon sergeant has been around for 15-20 years.  There’s a good chance that they’ve seen your innovative approach before, and know why it wasn’t adopted.

It’s a lot easier to borrow someone’s proven good idea, than come up with a new idea and then set about proving it is actually good.

For anyone in the Palm Springs area the first week of this coming February, you’ll may see what looks like a gathering of exceptionally old people at the local American Legion hall.

Not an unusual sight in Palm Springs, but you may notice something a bit different about this group. Maybe more baseball hats than usual, or a smattering of brown leather, what look like flight jackets.

via CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday.

Go read the whole thing. It’s a heck of a story.

Downtown Los Angeles might look like a scene out of “Call of Duty” next week, but military officials say don’t be alarmed. It’s a drill.

Military helicopters will be buzzing over the downtown skyline. Marines and sailors from Camp Pendleton armed with chalk-firing nonlethal rifles will converge at undisclosed locations in Los Angeles — all in an effort to get “urban realism” training.

Military officials will not disclose exactly when the training will occur in Los Angeles, hoping to dissuade potential spectators. But they don’t want people to panic.

“The last thing we want is for people to see Marines in Ospreys and think that World War III has begun,” said Capt. Brian Block, spokesman for the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

via Marines to invade LA, but don’t panic – Marine Corps – Stripes.

Sounds like fun. The more realistic a training scenario is, generally the more enthusiastic the troops are. Not surprisingly, that tends to result in better retention of the training objectives.

And I don’t suppose it hurts any for the taxpayer to see what their dollar is buying.

Man, it’s almost straight out of the USSR 1955 playbook.

Three South Carolina National Guard helicopter pilots walked away from a harrowing Dec. 3 emergency landing in which their UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter reportedly plummeted 6,000 feet in less than a minute after a main rotor failure.

The two pilots (the third pilot was a passenger) managed to land the helicopter in a field not far from a water treatment plant, a school and residences near I-77 just a couple miles southeast of Columbia, South Carolina, not far from Fort Jackson.

Four days later a CH-47 Chinook helicopter sling-loaded the downed aircraft to McEntire Joint National Guard Base in Eastover, South Carolina.

via Black Hawk rotor fails more than a mile high; pilots land safely.

Main rotor blades shouldn’t look like that, fyi.

It’s amazing the imbalance didn’t cause the hub to fail.

The big news today is the Senate report on CIA interrogation programs. The report among other things claims “The CIA’s interrogation of suspected terrorists after the 9/11 attacks was far more brutal than the agency disclosed and failed to elicit information about any imminent threats to the USA…”

WSJ offers an interesting counterpoint to the Senate Report:

• It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, thereby removing them from the battlefield.

• It led to the disruption of terrorist plots and prevented mass casualty attacks, saving American and Allied lives.

• It added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an organization and therefore informed our approaches on how best to attack, thwart and degrade it.

So why the discrepancy in the Senate Report? The Senate Select Commitee on Intelligence is run by a majority of Democrats. You have a majority of their staffers putting together this reports. These staffers pick and chose some information while ignoring other information that didn’t fit their agenda:

The excuse given by majority senators is that CIA officers were under investigation by the Justice Department and therefore could not be made available. This is nonsense. The investigations referred to were completed in 2011 and 2012 and applied only to certain officers. They never applied to six former CIA directors and deputy directors, all of whom could have added firsthand truth to the study. Yet a press account indicates that the committee staff did see fit to interview at least one attorney for a terrorist at Guantanamo Bay.

We can only conclude that the committee members or staff did not want to risk having to deal with data that did not fit their construct. Which is another reason why the study is so flawed. What went on in preparing the report is clear: The staff picked up the signal at the outset that this study was to have a certain outcome, especially with respect to the question of whether the interrogation program produced intelligence that helped stop terrorists. The staff members then “cherry picked” their way through six million pages of documents, ignoring some data and highlighting others, to construct their argument against the program’s effectiveness.

Like Ferguson, if the facts don’t fit your political agenda just make up your own. Go read the rest of the WSJ article and the Senate Report.

Update: I mean it’s not like we have anything to worry about.