Battle Rhythm in General

I first heard the term “Battle Rhythm” in ’94 when we were flying in Bosnia.

It, in Naval Aviation parlance refers to the fitting of all the requirements of fighting a war into a 24 hour day and meshing it with the human requirements and circadian rhythm.

Two hour brief to flight. Two-and-a-half-hour flight. Two hour debrief cycle. Chow. Four hours before the ATO (air tasking order) drop. Four hours of planning. Chow. Three hours of sleep. Shit-shower-shave-chow. Two-hour brief to flight…

And around the 24-hour clock it went. While we knew what time we were launching it was occasionally jarring to find the sun up or down. We walked from the inside of a metal box to the outside and were surprised the outside world still existed. Until we manned the jet, the world was a million little details.

A million years later in a far different galaxy I am starting to find a battle rhythm.

Alarm goes off at 445am. I snooze it until 5am when the across the room alarm goes off. I get up, already showered from the night before. Lunch is already made from the afternoon before. Coffee is ready because of the auto coffee pot that is set up the minute I walk through the door in the afternoon. Lunch, water, coffee packed into the work backpack.

Half an hour of news, mostly to check on the fickle Maine weather. Eight minutes to work.

I get paid again on Wednesday. Joke’s on them. I would do this job for half the pay.

I’ll take the money.
Unique job. Engineering planning. Thus far I have been working various project – already completed – so I can compare my results with what has been approved and ask a million questions.

Timing questions is my biggest challenge right now. Everyone in the office is working on projects and stopping to answer my new guy questions slows them down. So, I approach it tactically.

I went through all the steps of my first project. As practice. Including doing all the tasking vs manning analysis, and rescheduling. Steep learning curve. There is a lot of Access pulling from Oracle tables uploading to Deltek Open plan Professional shit I don’t understand just yet because I didn’t build it. And the people who maintain it didn’t build it.

Staff meeting just after lunch Hailey asks how the project is going. I declare it done. Just waiting her review and my upload of the GANTT and Resource leveling charts to Jira.

Next project in is mine.

This job is nothing but computer keyboard geekery, but every project is different and has its own issues to be fought. And I have a really cool desk (one button push to go from sitting to standing workstation, three empty file cabinets.) I bought my own Kensington trackball because I hate those meeces to pieces. Battle rhythm is comforting.

And that suits this old warrior well.