Old Missiles

[Gatordev]

Not disagreeing Lumpy, but on the other hand I never got a good brief or was told what boards "Want to see" until I was a retread in Kingsville. I had 3 of 4 COs in HSL land who had been BUPERS guys as senior LTs/LCDRs, and not once do I remember an AOM/Training on "this is what is good, this is what is bad, and why".. Maybe a 4-5 minute part of the FITREP debrief if you were even there (for the non HSL familiar, your CO does not deploy, so if you are deployed during periodics, you get what your OIC fights for mostly)

Not a new revelation, but you were short-changed and your experience isn't necessarily the norm. I remember some sort of training as both a JO and as a DH.

For the record, the only periodic #1 EP I had was written by a member of this board, and when I went to turn my self written FITREP in, he told me "it's taken care of". A prime example of a leader knowing his people, and knowing what the board needed to see. No fluff, no BS, because I had done enough to warrant a good FITREP with no filler.

Admirable, and I'm not knocking you or the person that you speak of, but as a MO (or OpsO), having the time to write multiple JO's FITREPS, and I mean from scratch, becomes problematic (especially when you have a non-flying QAO). In my experience (which may not be the same for everyone), what Lumpy says was what I saw. Not only was writing my own (which I loath/loathed), but writing others FITREPs, along the with whatever formalized training I got, greatly helped in my writing better FITREP/Evals later for others.

A big part of the training is also looking at what got chopped and seeing how the front office wanted to write things.

Learning/practicing how to write them also helps when you're submitting something to someone higher up, like a Commodore, be it as a JO or higher. Once you crack the code, it's amazing how little the input gets changed.