Quote Originally Posted by Uboat509 View Post
And CA guys also do that, but there is world of difference between picking up some unpleasant duties at the unit level and moving to to a place where you ONLY do those duties.
Well, the model need not be so absolute. Furthermore, returning to such a way of doing things might argue for a lighter logistical footprint that did not require a level of work such as you described. Maybe you could make it part of a rotation out of the line for some period, to give a unit a rest while they do some easy work for a while. Since it's obvious that the troops can live on well less than what is found on the average FOB, such a reduction ought not be a problem.

"- Live among the people. You can’t commute to this fight. Position Joint Security Stations, Combat Outposts, and Patrol Bases in the neighborhoods we intend to secure. Living among the people is essential to securing them and defeating the insurgents."

One might also infer from this that the FOB-centric model is not going to work for a significant portion of the deployed population. Thus, a change is going to have to come in CSS.

How recent are you talking? Units have had sepparate mess sections at least since the '40s. In any case that does not solve the problem of all the other support activites that CSS takes care of.
Well, I'm an historian -- "recently" is last century, especially when there's several thousand years of military history against which the comparison is being made. Many of my colleagues call me a "wonk," because I do 20th century history. So I apologize for the confusion -- you and I just have a way different sense of time.

True. Many of them would simply not enlist.
You can be as inclusive or exclusive as you wish to be in defining the infantryman's job. And throughout history, how that was done never really stopped men from joining the armies of the world. The Roman Legions dug ditches and build roadways when they weren't fighting. You might get a slightly different enlistment mix. That may be a good thing right now -- I could imagine that an enlistment profile that included a degree of increase in interest in such matters might be useful in COIN.

Furthermore, this is what we are asking the Iraqis to do -- all the CSS comes out the battalions. It seems like we are making a pretty significant mistake in not providing a working model for how the job gets done. The IA can't just throw money at the problems. I would say we could make a lot of headway getting the IA on track with American units showing them how to do such things by example. Imagine that, the entirety of the American military in Iraq as a giant, CSS MTT.


Cavguy wrote:

Jill, lots of respect for you and your husband.
Gee, nobody ever complimented me for doing my doctorate.

Regarding your complaints about the fobbits getting steak and lobster and the guys in the COP's not, that's just whining. I venture I've spent as much time in COP's or remote locations as anyone else, and it's just the nature of the beast. You can't mermite lobster to COP's because it becomes unsafe in the 4-6 hours between it being cooked and delivered via LOGPAC to the field. We usually got steak though. The selection was much more limited than on the FOB, but hey, what do you expect? My guys did enjoy their platoon rotation back to the fob for maintenance/rearm/refit, where they enjoyed the bounty provided for about 48h every two weeks.
I am not so concerned about complaints -- although, given the history of attitudes towards REMFs, it's not something that ought to be dismissed too easily. What I am wondering about is simply best exemplified by the insanity of having steak and lobster on the FOBS when you don't have a decent system for those outside the wire. It is a very wierd set of priorities. When you hear from a defense consultant that the bounty on a FOB is excessive, you really have to wonder at what is going on.

I am also concerned at the costs and resource usage of our logistics tail. For how much longer will we be able to be profligate in the use of fuel to truck all of this stuff around? Or how about all of the generators that are running? Something is going to have to give soon, because we won't be able to afford this much longer -- just as Vietnam had to end because we couldn't sustain the dollar outflows anymore. This, though, could be a much bigger shift -- it won't just end a war, it will force a change in the way we do everything.

Look, here's the point -- I look at the contractor/cs/css issue, and for a variety of reasons I see a problem. If I haven't hit the nail on the head with a solution, well, forgive me, this isn't my day job. I may be wrong about the solution, but I don't think I'm wrong about the problem.


Schmedlap wrote:

My company was tasked with providing 2 Soldiers to help the support platoon prepare food. We raised hell over that because we were only getting 2 hots meals per week, but were losing 2 men everyday for the tasking while we were were grossly undermanned and overtasked (neither of those attributes are unique to my situation - every unit in Iraq is undermanned and overtasked, particularly as Soldiers rotate to and from mid-tour leave). The XO threatened to cut off the food for LOGPAC if we didn't pony up. We said fine - we need men, not the brown lettuce. Eventually either the LTC or CSM put an end to the foolishness and we got our men back. The lesson here is that units are overtasked, overstretched, and having enough men is more important than having green eggs instead of poundcake.
I could read this and say that the problem is that the contractor system is not meeting the needs and the units are not really well-prepared to deal with it. I would venture to say that such episodes will become more frequent and more ridiculous. Again, I may not have hit upon the right solution, but I think the problem is there. You can fight with me over tactics, but that doesn't change the strategic situation.

Leaders can handle cohesion in their own way. We don't need a designated time, place, or manner of feeding. Using that justification for revamping some aspect of our CSS makes no sense to me. Sounds like a rationalization for a conclusion already reached.
I've never heard of a great leader tossing a tool out of his kit. Most that I've read about and met will use anything at their disposal, will disdain very little that might give them an edge.

Consider that the most frequently offered advice on building a better family and enhancing relations between members is to sit down together for dinner. What is a small unit if not a family of sorts?

And if you think it too minor an issue to bother with, I would counter with the wisdom of Earl Wavell and others, who have argued that the daily, mundane things in the life of a soldier -- the "actualities" of the soldier's experience -- are important and should be studied. It's why I settled on the subject, because I had never read a memoir or work on the experience of war that did not discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of food-related experiences. They gave me the idea that this was important, they pointed out what was valuable and why, and what were huge, terrible mistakes.

If you wonder why I have such a bee in my bonnet over the contractor issue, blame General Washington -- his appointment of one of his best combatant commanders, Nathanael Greene, to the position of QM, and the two hundred years of subsequent history that followed his example, is the reason I question the current system. Greene didn't like the new job -- and he made Washington promise that after a year he could get back into the fight -- but he knew the importance to the war effort of what was being asked of him.

Regards,
Jill