The best and brightest from this week's Army Times

TAP out: Army takes steps to make outgoing soldiers career-ready
Major upgrades to the Transition Assistance Program are underway this year as the Army strives to make it easier for departing soldiers to find meaningful employment in a tough labor market.
The program is adding two major elements to the program: education and training tracks to help them meet their goals, and a check to make sure transitioning soldiers are ready to go.
Key elements of the re-engineered program, which has expanded its facilities and staff threefold in the past year, include pre-separation counseling; developing of a 12-month post-transition budget; a gap analysis between a soldier’s military skills and civilian employment preference; and making an individual transition plan.

Odierno: Budget cuts may save money but will cost lives
The Army has entered the age of uncertainty — about who your enemy might be, where you might fight and what tactics would be used.
Now the Army is uncertain about whether it will be trained and equipped to fight future conflicts at all.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno had planned on spending his time implementing a postwar strategy that included a shift in focus from the war in Afghanistan to other parts of the world.
That was to be accomplished through the regional alignment of units, assigning them to a variety of geographic regions to expose soldiers to languages and cultures in areas where they may end up in conflict. Soldiers would be trained to operate in those areas through home base training and participation in joint exercises around the globe.

JRTC chief of staff fired over ‘bullying’
A senior officer at the Joint Readiness Training Center was fired last month after investigators found he berated a foreign exchange officer and was a toxic, bullying leader toward subordinates.
Col. Marc D. Axelberg, JRTC’s former chief of staff, during a meeting in October, according to an investigator’s report, told another officer to shove a document up a third officer’s “fourth point of contact,” a euphemism for buttocks. The investigator deemed this “inappropriate and unprofessional.”
The third officer was a Canadian exchange officer, according to |a source familiar with the|investigation.
A follow-on command climate survey of Fort Polk, La., headquarters staff found Axelberg maintained a hostile work environment, belittling workers, cursing regularly and — in at least one instance — used racially inappropriate remarks.

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