Management roles in the military Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Management roles in the military - Essay Example After my high school, I joined the army and graduated as a junior training officer. During my days in the army, I not only learned how hard it is to be a military man but also discovered how mentally strong I had become. The army not only expects one to be just physically and mentally tough but also to discover sides of yourself you never knew. One such incident involved me supervising a platoon of medical aides in a war front. It was the onset of monsoons and our platoon was asked to provide logistic and medical support to the soldiers actually fighting the war in terrorist infested Sri Lanka. Since the M.I. room or the Medical Inspection room was situated at about three kms from the battle field, it was our duty to keep everything in the medical ready. The distance from the actual battle field is a diabolical affair. I say this because at such a distance we were not directly involved in the war and in a sense our lives were out of immediate danger. However, it also meant that the soldiers who returned back in critical conditions had lost out on precious time. Generally, the distance between the army camps and the actual war front is much lesser. However, in Sri Lanka, due to the slippery nature of the terrain and the fact that we were on the foot hills of our enemies, our seniors had taken a decision of maintaining the three kms distance. We were a group of forty-eight and I had strategically kept about ten of the aides, as what I termed as ‘free lancers’, meaning they were always on the move to protect our MI camp.... Since the M.I. room or the Medical Inspection room was situated at about three kms from the battle field, it was our duty to keep everything in the medical ready. The distance from the actual battle field is a diabolical affair. I say this because at such a distance we were not directly involved in the war and in a sense our lives were out of immediate danger. However, it also meant that the soldiers who returned back in critical conditions had lost out on precious time. Generally, the distance between the army camps and the actual war front is much lesser. However, in Sri Lanka, due to the slippery nature of the terrain and the fact that we were on the foot hills of our enemies, our seniors had taken a decision of maintaining the three kms distance. We were a group of forty eight and I had strategically kept about ten of the aides, as what I termed as 'free lancers', meaning they were always on the move to protect our MI camp. I know this may sound incredulous to many army professionals but in Sri Lanka, the enemy we were facing was of a different kind. It was more of a guerilla war rather than a conventional war, and I had to make sure that the MI remained intact from all enemy attacks. The strategic distancing from the enemy lines ruled out the range of the use of mortars by the enemy. What only remained was the use of stray fidayeen or suicide bombers who could manage to give our men at the front a slip. The freelancers had their jobs cut out. Since many villagers from the nearby villages generally collected wood from the nearby forests, it was our primary duty to keep them safe. It also meant that we had to be extra careful for the use of commoners as spies. Working in this sort of an environment I knew the