My experience was two, six-week, summers in Quantico, Virginia at Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. Officer Candidate School is a Marine Corps training command that trains, screens, and evaluates college educated, or current college students to become Marine Corps Officers. Upon completion of the training you commission as a second lieutenant in the marines, or you go back to school to complete your senior year, and then commission, which is the path I took. Strict, structured, and controlled would be the best words to describe the operation of the USMC's training environment. The military has a very strict chain of command operation, in which any issues, orders, changes, either from the bottom up, or top down, have to be carried out through the chain of command. Jumping levels in the chain of command, that is reporting anything to a superior that is not in the direct level above you, is unacceptable and will result in disciplinary actions. I observed that often times this led to inefficiencies when conducting day-to-day operations as this process can cause communication to move slow as it has to go through each level of the chain of command.
It is also interesting to analyze the transaction costs incurred by the USMC during this training process. Often times many organizations have internship programs, in which an inexperienced worker would gain experience through paid, or unpaid, work, to better understand the day-today operations of a company. Many of these organizations incur transaction costs in searching for these potential interns, training them, and possibly paying them to learn the operational "ins and outs" of that particular organization.
The USMC experiences incredibly high transaction costs through this process. They incur transaction costs through the recruiting of potential applicants by renting out offices in numerous locations throughout the U.S, staffing these offices with 3-4 recruiters. The recruiters sole purpose is to find people eligible for this training. Their is countless transaction costs in the actual process of determining whether and applicant is eligible for training including, but not limited to, medical testing (paid for by the USMC), dental screening, and physical fitness evaluations. Once at the actual training the USMC incurs transaction costs by paying the candidates in training a monthly salary, providing food, housing, clothing, and essentially all aspects of daily life. Along with a full training staff, and training base.
I had a unique experience going through this training as the Marine Corps experienced significant changes in between my first increment of training and the second increment. When I had first gone to officer candidate school, females were trained almost entirely separate from the males, and had different standards for almost all evaluated events. Upon completion of the first increment of training I returned to school for my Junior year. The military received serious scrutiny about the training environment and were eventually forced to begin implementing integrated training between men and women. So during the second increment of training that I attended last summer, many of the events that had previously been separated between male and female were now integrated. Many of the standards that had been different for men and women were now the same across the board. While their were still obvious aspects of training that were necessary to keep male and females separated, it had a noticeable impact on the organizational structure of how the training command operated.
Let me take on some economics labeling first and say that you used transaction costs as a term somewhat incorrectly from the perspective of our course. Recruiting is obviously a very important activity for the marines. Recruiting requires space for the recruiters. The renting of rooms for that purpose is a production cost not a transaction cost. Likewise the salary paid to the recruits is a production cost. In contrast, the medical testing, dental screen and physical fitness evaluations are all a kind of monitoring. Monitoring is considered a transaction cost rather than a production cost. (And on this I wonder whether the Marines would accept this activity coming from outside - say by a doctor and dentist in the home town of the potential recruit - or if it is necessary to be done on site by people the Marines have commissioned for the purpose.
ReplyDeleteOn the changes that you talked about - gender separation or not in the training - it would have been interesting to get your perspective as to whether it mattered to you. You were very arms length about this. People who have no experience with this, such as me, are interested in the perspective of someone who has been through it. You may feel uncomfortable drawing conclusions about this, especially in a public blog, but you are entitled to your opinion and taxpayers would be interested in that. So I would encourage you to be more forthcoming about that.
As to respecting the chain of command, I wonder if in the training there is much about why that is insisted upon. What problems would occur if the chain of command were violated? In our class, unlike in your Marine training, I want to minimize student doing things because I tell them that's what they should do. I want student to think this through for themselves. I recognize the cultures in the different settings are different, but you would know far better than I would just how different they are.
On the topic of changing gender standards in training, my opinion is very similar to the others that I trained with, and the marine corps general population as a whole. While many of the aspects of training remained separate, in order to respect the privacy of us candidates, the aspects that changed had little to no effect on the overall training environment, other than immediate inefficiencies that occurred from the need to adapt to a different training environment by the training staff. By this I mean that many of the drill instructors often times acted in a manor that had been acceptable in the past, but had to change their ways of working that led to some confusion and somewhat hindered their ability to do their job effectively. I think, over time, the process will run significantly smoother once everyone has fully adapted to the new standards.
ReplyDeleteThe repercussions of violating the chain of command, during training, were harsh punishments and physical discipline. This is an obvious difference from the classroom environment and is completely impractical in a school environment. The main ways we would be disciplined was essays (minimum 300 words), candidate review forms (too many of these would result in removal from training), and physical discipline (as simple as holding your rifle straight out in front of you for a designated period of time).