Google trains Army's information Top Guns in data skills
DeDupe, log off! You'll crash the system
Posted in Management, 5th October 2012 19:03 GMT
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The US Navy may have its Top Gun training school, but now the Army is sending its best of the best at systems management to a similar program at Google, to get training in industrial management tactics, techniques, and procedures.
Just like its flashier aviation counterpart, places at the Google program had to be earned competitively, and the chosen recruits will spend a year at the Chocolate Factory studying up on analyzing workflow data, specialized data science skills, and picking up the latest tricks of the trade from people in industry.
"I want to have a different perspective on decision making, theory, manufacturing, and problem solving," said one of the first-draft pick Major Matthew Bisswurm, plans and operations officer with the 903rd Contingency Contracting Battalion. "I think the Army gains ten-fold on this program. The experience and insight are immeasurable."
As with the Top Gun school, the Army's top systems analysts aren’t just there to learn the latest cutting-edge data management skills. They have to be able to teach other people about them, too, when they go back to the Army. It's hoped that one year of deep geekery will pay dividends in terms of keeping troops supported in the field.
"We want our guys to benchmark lessons learned and effect positive change in the Army Acquisition Corps," said Scott Green, acquisition education and training branch chief of the Army Acquisition Support Center.
The 903rd Contingency Contracting Battalion (Motto: Paratus et Certus – Prepared and true) is never going to be mentioned in dispatches, but it does keep large sections of the Army in food, weapons, and communications contact. Besides stateside operations, it sends out roving teams of "expeditionary" specialists to sort out supply situations overseas, either internally or by dealing with local contractors.
It's not all paperclips and pen-pushing at the 903rd Contingency Contracting Battalion.
Lest you think that the men and women of the battalion are a bunch of lily-livered panty-waisters who spend their time pushing papers in the rear, nothing could be further from the truth. Major Bisswurm has served two combat tours in Iraq before transferring in, and the battalion's own Staff Sergeant Shults came runner-up in the divisional "Best Warrior" competition last year, a trial of endurance marching, marksmanship, and battle drills, proving that a degree in accountancy doesn’t make you a wimp.
"I love the expeditionary side of contingency contracting," Bisswurm said. "I love doing missions. Being in a combat deployment, I saw the direct impact contracting had on the warfighter." ®
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COMMENTS
Re: Google taking over the military...
Who? Google or the Military?
Google taking over the military...
If they could be turned, they would be a powerful ally... :)
"one year of deep geekery"
Superbtastic use of lingo! Anyway - I hadn't even learned how to avoid daylight after one lowly year of training?
Re: Google taking over the military...
Google taking over the military... If they could be turned, they would be a powerful ally... :) .... C Yates Posted Friday 5th October 2012 20:35 GMT
And almighty anonymous and invisible intangible and invincible foe, too, C. Whom would one supply that algorithm to, for their turning?
And do not for one second think that that is not a valid and quite specific question, seriously asked, in order to identify an organisational being, and even beings if you can think of a number and collection of them, whom you, the members of supposedly intelligent races and masses, might consider to be worthy enough to be SMARTR enabled and made capable of drivering the servering of such a colossus of an enigmatic quest ...... JSON and ARGonaut Task?
Or perhaps IT should be left to Internet Controllers wielding the Power of Novel Ideas and Global Operating Devices in Live Operational Virtual Environments building Future Worlds with Communicating Machinery, as touched upon and revealed to El Reg in the NEUKlearer Future GCHQ Problem Solver post, for Google may not be well enough intellectually equipped to make the transition from specific search engine to creative reality driver, and one mustn't forget that the Exotic and Erotic East has the likes of a Yandex and Baidu who most probably also would benefit greatly from the shared wisdom of Internet Controllers wielding the Power of Novel Ideas and Global Operating Devices in Live Operational Virtual Environments building Future Worlds with Communicating Machinery
Well, be honest with yourself, you don't actually think that the likes of Bletchley Park Research and Development of Systems Analysis for Presentation of Facts to Create via Virtual Means and IT Memes, Reality with a Grand Universal and AIMagical Mystery Turing Machine ©™ Providing Leads which IT Follows, would ever have been abandoned and dismantled over half a century ago, whenever it had proven itself so spectacularly effective against and in the field of madness that is the planning and waging of wars and destructive conflict, do you? Are you mad, for that would have been a certifiable madness indeed?
And there you all were, probably not thinking at all about what GCHQ are now doing with Internet Controllers and enterprising dot orgs and ARGonauts ....... Heavy MetaDataBase JSONic Pioneers who would be Virtual Machinery Pathfinder Drivers ............. and Creative Source Loded Nodes/Spaces of CyberIntelAIgent Information Exchange for Internet Explorers who would be AI and SMARTR Browser Systems Programmers/Programs/Projects.
Good to know.
It means a great many things. For example, this is partly a morale boosting thing, of course. And the US military has always had a fetish for gadgets including computers. Like how they trucked IBM machinery to the battlefield as far back as the 50s.
Amazing really how their rhetoric pervades bloody everything. Now it's "warfighter" and "warrior", when but a few years back they'd've tried and convince you that no, soldiers are not warriors, there's an important difference. Apparently the difference is no longer important. Buncha barbarians. Their "thinking" is a bit too simplistic and shallow for my taste. The blather sounds like it could come out of a standard propaganda generator, no AI required, but amazingly it doesn't. That's real people writing all that down.
It also implies that google very much is a USoA company. And they're big in dissecting data. And they're sitting on biiiig data. Your data. Other governments should take note here, as well as anyone who for whatever reason finds themselves on various USoA shitlists-of-badness. Implications left as an exercise.
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