Army Announces Implementation of the Expert Soldier Badge
Here comes another badge for U.S. Army soldiers to train for:
Soldiers outside the infantry, combat medic and Special Forces fields will soon have the opportunity to earn a badge acknowledging their experience at critical skills, the Army announced Friday on the service’s 244th birthday.
The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command recent approved the long-anticipated Expert Soldier’s Badge, which will be awarded to top performing soldiers who pass a test demonstrating their prowess in physical fitness, marksmanship, land navigation and warfighting, the command said in a statement. The badge will be the equivalent of the Expert Infantryman Badge and the Expert Field Medal Badge, and it is expected to be introduced in early fiscal year 2020, according tothe command.
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link.
From what i have seen, these days army majority of its time in SHARP and gender relations training. Almost no combat training go on these days.
Every field grade officer who has managed to avoid deployment will be wearing this badge within six months of the first course…I saw the same thing in the medical field, MSC staff officers who only wore out the seat of their uniform trousers warming a chair suddenly sprouted EFMB badges like dandelions in the spring…
In one of my early assignments in 2ID, out of the entire Infantry brigade, only two soldiers passed the Expert Infantry Badge test. At my next assignment in the States, 600 soldiers in my brigade passed the test. I quickly learned that some people truly earned it, and others just showed up and were given the badge.