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PART⚡TIME HITTER Newsletter
News and Entertainment for the Reservist Community by Friendly Forces and The Fratty Guard
Business, News, and Entertainment for the PART⚡TIME Hitters
a Friendly Forces and The Fratty Guard Joint
This Week
Friendly Forces Updates
New employers listed and stuff on the horizon.Silicon Valley Discovers the Army Reserve
Top Tech Executives Commissioned into the Army Reserve
Don’t Be This Guy
We hate this.
Kickstart Your Career with Shift
A refresher on this powerful transition resource and how to sign up.The Army’s Official Content Creators Are Here, and They’re Annoying
Is this Cringe or Genius?News Roundup: What Happened Last Week
This week’s top headlines affecting the Reserve and Guard community.
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Friendly Forces Updates
The Latest and Greatest from the Friendly Forces Team
Well, we’re getting this week’s newsletter out late on a Sunday afternoon likely ensuring nobody reads it, but we will not be deterred.
We have a number of new companies to add to the Friendlies List and updates to some of their policies. I actually did this last week, but apparently forgot to hit SAVE, so that’s fun.
We also have some new strategic partnerships on the horizon that will add value to the newsletter and the community in a big way.
Our team expects Friendly Forces to become much higher profile in the coming months, which is awesome. We can’t help if people don’t know about us and our mission.
Friendly Forces works with companies across industries to implement best of breed military leave programs, train leaders to support employees in the Guard and Reserve, and funnel Reservist talent to great employers . If your business wants to do more than say “thank you”—we can help.
And, as always, we want to get more companies added to the Friendlies List to best serve the Reservist community.
Good or bad, reach out and let us know your company’s policy. If it’s good—we want to add them to our list. If it’s bad, we want to partner and help them—and you.
Reach out to [email protected] to submit or visit Friendly Forces to learn more.
Silicon Valley Execs Discover the Army Reserve
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard that the Army Reserve commissioned four tech execs as lieutenant colonels in hopes of spurring tech transformation within the force—the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Palantir, the CTO at Meta, the Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, and an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer at OpenAI.
This was coordinated to align with the Army’s 250th Birthday this past weekend.
As yet, I am unsure how I feel about this development. Direct Commissions are not a new concept to the military and they do, in fact, add a ton of value to the force as subject matter experts in areas like law, medicine, cybersecurity, etc.
What IS new is commissioning C-Suite leaders from some of the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the world to act as advisors as their companies currently execute and pursue lucrative contracts with the DoD, IC, and Army.
On the one hand, the Army definitely needs to modernize its IT systems, make them easier to use, and give them more functionality while finding ways to incorporate AI and new tech into the way it does business and fights wars. In theory, these gentlemen can help with that—although I’m not sure what insights they’ll have that any random soldier who has been around for a minute wouldn’t.
On the other hand, it’s unclear exactly what these officers will be doing and if guardrails have been or will be established to prevent conflicts of interest. Most of the pushback I saw online was in response to that (very real) possibility.
Other points of contention I saw were that the executives will bypass most of the training that regular soldiers and officers go through to become part of the organization. Again, this is not new or surprising. The Direct Commission Course, also known as “Fork and Knife School” is a crash course in how to Army for officers who won’t ever find themselves behind a rifle. However, it’s hard to view and respect someone as a soldier (or probably even feel like one), if they haven’t endured what you have endured to be brought into the fold.
They are also being brough in as O-5’s or Lieutenant Colonels. This has also rubbed some the wrong way, as a typical O-5 has probably spent a minimum of 16 years serving to reach that rank, growing in experience and leadership.
Finally, and I think what bugs me most personally, is that we were engaged in the Global War on Terror for twenty years up to 2021. The urge to serve didn’t seem to arise until after that was over.
Time will tell how this shakes out, but I am cautiously optimistic and I hope these officers are able to make positive, ethical change that strengthens our force.
Don’t Be This Guy
It’s unclear if this guy is/was actually in the military at all, but this type of thing is what causes employers to rethink and pushback on supportive leave policies for Reservists. Screw this guy.
I know 99% of us don’t abuse the system, but a few bad apples can and will spoil the bunch.
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The Fratty Guard Updates
The Army’s Official Content Creators Are Here, and They’re Annoying: by CPT Steele Chadwick
The fuck?
Okay so the Army has come up with the idea (probably 10 years late) to leverage uniformed content creators from within the ranks to help promote Army propag…I mean messaging.
How we feeling about this?
In theory, this is a smart idea because, like or not, a lot of people, in the military and outside of it, get their news and information from influencer dipshits. So, this could be useful in getting relevant information down to the lowest level, because we know this doesn’t always happen.
However, I do have some issues with it.
Primarily, why wasn’t The Fratty Guard asked to participate?
Issue 1: Once someone just becomes a corporate mouthpiece, the content sucks. Granted, these pages were approached initially BECAUSE their content was vanilla and harmless.
Issue 2: Most of these pages gained their following posting in uniform, often during the duty day, on TikTok. I thought we didn’t like TikTok and there were reasons it was banned for official use?
Issue 3: Most of these pages sell brand merchandise using their platforms. The Army therefore is marketing their personal businesses for them. They link their stores and often wear their merch in their videos. Essentially, the Army is giving these pages even more followers, and followers equals money in terms of sales and partnerships.
I’m all about making that money, but why do they have the Army helping to scale them? At best it seems unethical and at worst, possibly illegal, but what the fuck do I know?
Issue 4: The whole thing is pretty cringe and I dislike how these service members are celebrated and treated as celebrities internally while Joe Snuffy pulls security in the rain in a patrol base.
Perhaps, I’m being a whiny little bitch. I don’t know.
-Thx, CPT Chadwick
BREAKING: Everybody hates everybody
Curated NEWS for the PART TIME Community
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That’s all for now. BIG THINGS COMING.