The Skinny

I get a lot of quizzical looks when I answer the question "What do you do for a living?"

I work for the Army, but I'm not a soldier. No, I'm not a contractor either. I'm a government civilian. No, I'm not making this up.

It only gets worse when I try and explain my job. I rarely say I work in Operations Research, because hardly anyone knows what it is. I don't blame them. I didn't know what it was until I applied for a job in the field. Usually I just end up saying that I do "math stuff". The people who hate math are happy to nod, smile, and move on.

For those still curious, I elaborate. I work for the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Analysis Center, aka TRAC, at Ft. Leavenworth, KS. My job consists of statistics, optimization math, and wargame simulations, or what we call combat modeling. We apply these techniques, and many, many others, to all sorts of problems the Army decides it needs investigated. Currently TRAC is studying what vehicle will be commissioned to replace the Humvee, the number and type of UAVs the Army needs to operate optimally, and the cost-effectiveness of a new type of ground attack missile. We aren't the experts on any of these systems. Rather we go find the experts, coordinate meeting with them to pick their brains, analyze the data we receive from these meetings, and report our findings to decision makers at all levels of Army leadership, up to and including the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Chief of Staff of the Army.

That sounds grandiose. In reality, it's usually pretty tame, though interesting work.

That's what I do for my day job. When I get asked about what I'll be doing in Afghanistan, I answer that I'll be doing the same work, just for different people. The truth is, I really don't have any idea.

I know who I'll be working for: the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, or CSTC-A (pronounced See-Stick-Ah - the military has funny sounding acronyms for everything.) It is the sister organization of NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, NTM-A. CSTC-A concerns itself with the training and equiping of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the various flavors of the Afghan National Police (ANP). In the past, people in my soon-to-be position have studied things such as the optimal police training class size, minimum literacy level required for new recruits, and the best way to mobilize and equip new ANA units. Often the questions are being asked are not hard to answer, but finding the data needed to get GOOD answers is extremely difficult.

While I know the work I'll be doing will be the same flavor, the immediacy of the work and the pace of operations are such that I won't know exactly what I'm working on until I get there. Everything is needed yesterday. What I am assigned today my be examined tomorrow for 10 minutes by my boss before being briefed to a two star general. Projects are short and plenty, with very little downtime.

The quick pace and immediate impact of the work is a large part of why I volunteered for this assignment. The work I do for TRAC is interesting, but often the impact of these studies won't be felt for 5-7 years. The projects I'll be assigned at CSTC-A will often have results that are felt within weeks, if not days. This will be the dirtiest my hands can get in my current profession.

There are other reasons for volunteering as well. The quick pace of the work leads to long hours, often 80+ per week. In my six month rotation, I will gain a year of experience. That does good things for the career, and looks good on a resume. Long hours while in a combat zone and away from my family also translates into LOTS of money. And while that wasn't the reason I decided to sign up, it certainly was a factor in my wife and kids allowing me to go. I also wanted to get a better feel for the soldier. My prime customer in all the work I do is someone I get to spend very little time with. For the next six months, I will be surrounded by soldiers, able to soak up the culture and mindset of the military in a way not possible in Leavenworth. I'll also be dealing with being separated from my family, an all-too-common occurrence for our uniformed forces in the current conflicts. It is my hope that being in this environment will help make me a better analyst through an improved understanding of our armed forces.

So there it is, the what and the why of my deployment. I'll be back soon with words on the process and the timeline.

Thanks for reading. Out here.