One NCO Started It. Thousands Became Senior NCOs Because of It. Now It's Your Turn.

In 2014, the Sergeant Major of the Army issued a directive banning the outdated study guide site every unit had been pointing Soldiers to for years. Overnight, Soldiers were handed ADPs that ran 800+ pages each and told to figure it out. No guidance. No standard. Just pages.

I was a board member and a 1SG when this happened. I watched Soldiers get destroyed — not because they didn't study, but because there was no standardization. One board member would phrase a question one way, another would phrase it completely differently, and the Soldier had no idea what was being asked. To have a real chance, they would have needed to memorize every word of every paragraph of every publication.

So I sat down and went through every publication — line by line — and asked myself: what would a board member ask from this? I wrote each question in plain language so the Soldier could understand it, and I used the exact publication language for the answer because it had to be accurate. I built a battalion study guide for my Soldiers. Then I shared it. Then I realized: if my company has this problem, the entire Army has this problem. That's when I taught myself how to build a website.

For a while I kept it updated and it stayed free. Then the thieves showed up — people copy-pasting my work directly into paid apps and selling it back to Soldiers. I spent years issuing cease and desist letters. As fast as I shut one down, another appeared. By then Soldiers had moved to their phones, so I taught myself how to write and code Android APKs just to make sure the real, accurate, current version existed on the platforms where Soldiers were actually looking. Eventually I released paid apps too — not to profit off Soldiers, but because if those apps were going to exist on the app stores anyway, they were going to have correct information and come from the person who built this.

The cease and desist volume eventually got to a point where keeping up with it while also maintaining the site became impossible. It took getting AI tools in the mix to get everything back on track and rebuilt the right way. That's where we are now. If you were an E4 or E5 in 2014, you remember that mess. The senior NCOs sitting on boards today were those Soldiers. They know exactly why this site exists — and so do I.