It is true; ask any E-4 in any of the services, and I guarantee you they will have some sort of plan to make things better in some manner.

“Better” of course, is frequently subjective. I’ve heard ideas to make the Army better that run the gamut from the “practical” to “sensible but unlikely”, into the realm of “personal and limited interest” to the “way out there” stuff that will never get out of the gate.

A somewhat practical idea I heard when I was on Active Duty was for troops to not do PT in the morning, but wait until around 1300 or 1400 (1 or 2 pm), then do teambuilding sports Friday afternoon followed by early release. The rationale was that no one was really getting real work done anyway after lunch on Friday, and people were just riding out the clock. I can see a potentially coherent argument being made.

A “sensible but unlikely” idea was to bring back the Army Air Corps with fixed-wing close-air support assets like the A-10 Warthog. A lot of people like this idea and I agree with it, but while this has traction it is unlikely to go anywhere (although the Army may instead get an impressive fleet of fixed-wing CAS drones instead, so some chapters of this book may end up being written in a way).

“Personal and of limited interest” is the ever-present push to allow men to sport beards in uniform. Personally I am fine with this even though I would not grow a beard myself (my beard is patchy and scraggly and I look like a radiation victim) but there’s not enough people behind this to gather sufficient momentum.

Another idea I heard was to allow for “weekend marijuana use” provided troops were sober by the duty day. Yeah. A stewardess during formations is flawless logic compared to that one.

Of course, it isn’t just E-4s that agree with these ideas, but it is from E-4s that I hear the most plans for “how to make this better”. Who knows? Maybe someday. Until then, dream a little dream for me.