I agree with most of what you wrote, but I will say that "I'm just a dumb grunt" is better than senior leaders who just spew buzzwords like "Big Data, AI, Cloud, 5G, Zero Trust, etc." as if they know what they are talking about, and convincing everyone above them that they are technical wizards.
Yeah, when I read a white paper for the next Combat Operations Center and saw they wanted to "run AI applications on a local server at the tactical edge" I knew the document wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. You can tell some O-6 or GS-15 who read a Popular Science article insisted on that being in there.
Then I ask people who the fuck is gonna tune the models when the "AI app" spits out garbage at a battalion CP? Are we gonna train Marines on linear algebra, tensors, and adversarial neural networks? Or even bother to run them through an AI code bootcamp? Are we gonna be shocked when our Lance Corporal AI technicians leave the Marine Corps to 10x their salaries in Silicon Valley?.... I get blank stares in return.
It's stuff like this that tempts me to send up a trial balloon when landing in management at new companies.
Find someone at the bottom of the totem pole, ask them to include a bullshit, non-sensical, or actually harmful slide in a presentation as a favor to you, then see how far it percolates back up before someone challenges it.
