My philosophy has always been that awards are made to be given.

They are made to honor a soldier, to bestow praise, and to congratulate and reward an outstanding act or period of service.

Most in the Army understand this. There a few, however, that just don’t seem to get this and have made the awards process a complicated mess of latency and nonsensical over justification to ad nauseam levels.

These few believe in some nonexistent regulation requiring more and more justification, and they seem to know this regulation to perfection, completely understanding the nonexistent text explaining exactly how an award must be written and the specific, exact amount of justification for each level of award.

This unwarranted amount of more justification unfortunately causes those writing awards to MSU (make sh-t up). The finished product is an inflated bunch of embellishment, late no doubt, that can be written more concisely in a tenth of the space.

In the end, this back and forth ad nauseam process does little more than make the award late, in some cases having the award mailed to a soldier to catch up with him at his next duty station or home of record long after leaving service. What a disservice! Let’s emphasize that this back and forth justification nonsense does little more than make an award late!

All because of a nonexistent regulation, in the brain of a single point of failure who believes they are doing the Lord’s work by bottlenecking awards and requiring quantity of white space filled as being more important than the quality of what is written. And by the way, after the award is signed, in 99.9% of the cases, the justification will never be read or seen again. We’ve all dealt with these types who believe they are doing the Lord’s work by editing over and over and over and over these awards, the fruit of their work being lateness and an inflated, wordy bunch of nonsense.

Now, I’m not suggesting that every troop gets a Legion of Merit for picking up a piece of trash, but this nonsense of justification ad nauseam is doing nothing but making our award system something that writers loath doing when it should be a pleasure for supervisors to write and give to those who deserve them!

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