Don't be so hard on yourself. Everything that military folk do is a grossly imperfect simulation of the real thing. Even the last real thing will bear little resemblance to the last real thing. We are all, to quote the immortal words of Mr. Springsteen, dancing in the dark.
"We train to fight with capabilities we don’t have, supported by units that don’t exist."
On my junior NCO course in the late 70s, we were assigned topics to teach to our fellow students ("mutuals"). One of my assigned topics was the organization of the infantry battalion in combat ... and the table of organization was 90% fiction in our case. We were an infantry "battalion" with not quite enough troops to fill out a company. Some of our equipment was Korean War-vintage (they still had a few Bren guns in the weapons lockup at my company armoury), and we even got some instruction on a 1950s "super bazooka" that I don't think had been in active service for at least 15 years. We were told all about the cool equipment we'd be getting soon ... like actual armoured personnel carriers to replace the slightly militarized Dodge pickup trucks we used for most purposes.
I'd fainly hoped that all that was an artifact of the first Trudeau government's noted aversion to spending money on military equipment, but it sounds like things really haven't improved much in all these years.
Don't be so hard on yourself. Everything that military folk do is a grossly imperfect simulation of the real thing. Even the last real thing will bear little resemblance to the last real thing. We are all, to quote the immortal words of Mr. Springsteen, dancing in the dark.
"We train to fight with capabilities we don’t have, supported by units that don’t exist."
On my junior NCO course in the late 70s, we were assigned topics to teach to our fellow students ("mutuals"). One of my assigned topics was the organization of the infantry battalion in combat ... and the table of organization was 90% fiction in our case. We were an infantry "battalion" with not quite enough troops to fill out a company. Some of our equipment was Korean War-vintage (they still had a few Bren guns in the weapons lockup at my company armoury), and we even got some instruction on a 1950s "super bazooka" that I don't think had been in active service for at least 15 years. We were told all about the cool equipment we'd be getting soon ... like actual armoured personnel carriers to replace the slightly militarized Dodge pickup trucks we used for most purposes.
I'd fainly hoped that all that was an artifact of the first Trudeau government's noted aversion to spending money on military equipment, but it sounds like things really haven't improved much in all these years.