When the Baddies Get the Goodies

So an opportunity for a course recently presented itself. It's a training course that certain soldiers would eventually need for their promotions. There are tons of those courses out there, but what makes this unique is that the major Army training command (TRADOC) realized that there was enough of a critical mass of soldiers deployed in Afghanistan who needed the course to warrant an iteration being run...for three weeks, all the way over here.

Sounds good enough, right?

A lot of the soldiers from one of the busiest, most-tasked sections here (the Engineers) actually need this for their MOS. Several of them tried to sign up, but eventually their OIC (Officer-in-Charge) realized that if they all took it, his section of guys would be as useful as a hockey cleat for a three-week period in the middle of the deployment.

So what did he do? Without many better alternatives, he just told his guys that they could either take that class, or have R & R leave...but not both. Predictably, every single guy took his name off the list.

And who'd that leave? The folks who are already skating by without half the responsibility of the first group (who, ironically, need that course and will eventually have to take it back in the States), and who just want something "cool" to add to their military resume and look even better on paper.

For what it's worth, I'm not involved in any of this directly (I neither needed that course nor signed up for an in-theater junket), but that gives me some credit for objectivity. Objectively speaking, then, situations like this tend to suck.

The busiest, most-engaged people get indirectly *punished,* while the skaters get a chance to break away and then look even better on paper in the end for having done it. This happens on active duty all the time...too often, the folks that find their way into all the non-operational tours wind up with the best professional and civilian educational opportunities, while the deployers just sort of miss out.

As with a lot of things associated with large bureaucracies, I'm not saying I have a better answer. I don't. But when I hear grumbling about this sort of stuff in the chow hall, I can empathize.

Thinking Locally, Drinking Locally

One of the crown jewels of Kabul's "New Economy" is the Bagrami Industrial Complex, which is located about 7 km east of downtown. Inside the Bagrami Industrial Complex, a huge Coca-Cola bottling plant was opened in 2006. Some residents complained that the $25 million investment, made by an Afghan family mainly based out of Dubai, could've been better directed towards hospitals or schools.

The plant, however, directly employs 300+ people, and indirectly employs a couple thousand more ('indirectly' here refers to the drivers, store owners, streetside vendors, etc.) Those jobs help put Kabul on the road to stability, and that stability will enable the existence of needed institutions to help the city get on its feet and stay there.

I'm glad to know that all the Cokes, Diet Cokes, Sprites, and Fantas in our chow hall are bottled in Bagrami. Not only does the local purchase help stoke the local economy (and because we pay market rate, we're not creating an inflationary burden on Kabulis), but it means we don't have to rely on a long logistical tail to get the products. No ships to load up in the Persian Gulf, no port call in Karachi, and no hazardous trek through the Khyber Pass to get American soldiers and contractors their sweet, nutrition-free drinks.

That's a better way to do business. I know sodas aren't much good to begin with, but I'll also admit I enjoy them from time to time...and it's nice to know they're coming from right down the road.

Up Time

There's no shortage of comparisons out there between the experiences of deployed soldiers these days and those of past wars and conflicts.

In the past, soldiers had way fewer creature comforts. No unlimited Baskin Robbins, not to mention unlimited food and water, in a chow hall inside a landlocked country with a semi-functional road system, for instance. No wireless Internet to keep up on news from home. No DSN switches at Hanscom for free phone calls home 24/7.

There were also a few, uhh...creature comforts that soldiers enjoyed that are now prohibited by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It might surprise you, but technically no soldier out here can have a sip of beer or look at prurient images.

But this has all been said before. And we've all heard the narratives...the old guys were tougher, the new guys are better-trained. The old guys could get by with less, but the news guys have a broader mission set.

Here's one key difference that's often overlooked: In a break from ALL past conflicts, to include everything from well before the Vikings right through Desert Storm, the experience of a deployed Officer or Sergeant on certain bases, in certain positions, is marked by virtually no 'downtime.'

This has everything to do with connectivity.

Ask any soldier, sailor, airman, or marine from the pre-Global War on Terror (GWOT) era about his or her deployed experience, and you will inevitably be regaled with stories about waiting and boredom. Now, if that person was in a combat zone, that boredom may have been punctuated with brief spasms of violence, but that violence was likely followed by more...boredom. Those periods were necessary times for bonding with fellow teammates, and for the physical healing that comes with sleep, and for giving the ol' adrenal glands a break (the old term 'battle fatigue' actually has to do with what happens when the adrenals are taxed dry).

Years ago, whenever you were moving somewhere, that's basically all you could've been doing. Anytime you were waiting to move somewhere, that's probably all you could've been doing. Once your mission had been wrapped up, your weapons were cleaned, and your patrol debrief was done, there's not a whole lot more you could've done.

These days, not so much. We're wired for sound and effect in our workspaces, our living quarters, and even in our MRAPs. Our leaders understand we're human, and need time to sleep and to workout, but there's a pretty clear expectation of responsiveness to all the various forms of communication that we have. I sit at a desk with three machines (one unclassified, one on an Army network, and one on a NATO network), and inboxes that are hundreds-deep with messages. If all I ever did was try to read and respond to them all, I never would...so I prioritize the most important ones in order to keep my boss and the rest of our staff as informed as possible.

When I do get to leave the FOB (Forward Operating Base), it's just to go to another FOB. Still, that's such a welcome relief from the monotony of Camp Phoenix's gray hues that I welcome the chance. Leaving also means reporting on the early side of early (even a 0900 departure means lined up and ready at 0815), which I always enjoy because it's the only real downtime I might get for days -- I literally have to be there, but there's nothing else I could be doing than just standing or sitting around. (I have purposely avoided carrying a cell phone out here, although most of our Officers do).

I won't ever, ever, ever, ever (did I mention ever?) play the who-has-it-worse game when I realize there are soldiers out in places like Kunar and Helmand Provinces who get into near-daily firefights and have to fear booby traps and underground bombs at every turn. What I will say, however, is that endless 12, 14, 16, and 18-hour days while constantly in an "up" state of readiness takes its own sort of toll in its own sort of special way.

Telecommuting to War?

I'll take the Captain Obvious Award for pointing this out, but the Obama Administration is under serious pressure to: (1) save money; and (2) bring down troop numbers in Afghanistan to show 'progress.'

One innovative way this is happening involves the movement of certain headquarters-y, administrative-ish units out of the theater. That simultaneously accomplishes the goals of reducing the BOG number (Boots on Ground) while saving on the tremendous costs associated with the logistical tail involved in supplying a landlocked country with 19th-century infrastructure.

If you can believe it, the "dumb math" shows the cost per soldier here is more than $1.1 million per year (I call that dumb math because it's a crude calculation of costs divided by soldiers, which involves a lot of fixed costs associated with equipment and infrastructure)...it depends who you ask but the marginal cost per soldier is closer to half a mil when you count base pay and bennies (with higher margins for Reservists and Guard, who wouldn't normally draw federal base pay from the Pentagon), incentive pays, food/fuel/water costs, other contracted administrative support, etc.

But anyway, if you put some of those headquarters folks in friendly Gulf countries, you still get the long deployment days out of 'em (they're pulled away from the distractions and creature comforts of home), but you save huge amounts of money by reducing that logistical tail. Because so much data can move so quickly and easily over e-mail, voice comms, and even video teleconferences, its effect on operational capabilities may be minimal or even nil.

Once you factor out the reduced force protection costs (somehow averaged out per soldier...let's just pretend there'd be a way to do this), the decreased logistical convoys, the ease of moving goods across water instead of land, etc. let's just be real fast and loose and say you'd chop the per-soldier per-year cost in half.

For a 200-person staff headquarters, you're now talking about $50 million. Multiply that once or twice over, and soon you're talking about real money!

It wouldn't work for our unit (we run the bases in Kabul, so a lot of it necessitates base-to-base movement and physical involvement in projects), but for certain other units it really makes sense. It could even work in the U.S., but the trick would be that you'd have to move people far enough away from their homes for the deployment rotation period to where they wouldn't constantly be distracted.

The Tough Conversation

Senator John Kerry swung through here today and stopped to eat at our chow hall. It was a pretty neat experience.

I got to shake his hand, and then our Commander said, "Captain Page used to be a Navy Officer."

Senator Kerry then had to ask, "So why'd you leave?"

"I wanted to be closer to the action."

His comeback: "But c'mon, you could've stayed on to catch bin Laden."

I'll admit that was pretty quick. I knew he had to make his way through the room so I just said, "Uhh...I guess I should've gone to BUD/S, sir."

The whole visit was standard stuff. The 181 Infantry Commander handed him a plaque, and then our Commander gave him a decorative thingy, and he said a few words and left. The most interesting part for me was having dinner with James Traub (NYT, Foreign Policy).

But the most interesting part of what JFK said to us was about how he was about to head back to Pakistan. He was off on his way to some heated negotiations. Besides our need for Pakistan to work to "drain its own swamp" of extremist elements, we also rely on them for transshipment of nearly 70% of our materiel for Operation ENDURING FREEDOM (OEF).

But here's the thing -- since 2008, NATO has steadily brough that number down (it used to be 85%). It's more expensive this way, but we can bring cargo through the Med, and up into the Black Sea to be offloaded in Georgia and then ferried across the Caspian (before then going from Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan because Turkmenistan still won't play with us). Alternatively, we can offload at Riga in the Baltic and then move it through Russia via rail. Yes, I said Russia. NATO goods through Russia.

It's great that we've developed this Northern Distribution Network to wean ourselves off total reliance on Karachi -- that strengthens us tremendously at the negotiating table, and helps people like Senator Kerry when they go to Islamabad to try to extract concessions.

Reading the Tea Leaves

"While no decisions on numbers have been made, in my view we will be well-positioned to begin drawing down some U.S. and coalition forces this July even as we redeploy others to different areas of the country," Gates told reporters.

No one really knows what this means.

It definitely has a lot of people excited, though, and it's got the rumor mill flying.

I'm not reading too far into any of this -- the troop reductions have been talked about for over a year now, so I'm not expecting anything too sudden or precipitous. There's quite a bit of speculation going on in Kabul now, though.

Rolling in the Rhino

So yesterday I got to head to the Embassy via the Rhino. The Rhino, by the way, is an uparmored bus that's operated by a FLE (Forward Logistics Element) and flanked by MRAP trucks (Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected).

Taking the Rhino meant being subject to the whims of the FLE's schedule, so even though the meeting was only an hour, the entire journey lasted 12 hours from door to door. I wound up getting an impromptu bus tour of Kabul and saw everything from the crowded bazaars to the King's and Queen's Palaces near Camp Julien and Camp Dubs.

One of the things that stood out was that once it started getting dark, there were no women to be found...anywhere. During the day, it's common to see women walking around Kabul -- sometimes in groups, sometimes alone...and ranging in dress from anywhere from a full burqa to the chador with face exposed to just a hijab. Sometimes within the confines of the 'Green Zone' you might see an Afghan woman walking around without even a hijab. Either way, I thought it was remarkable that after dark, even while the bazaars and streetcorners bustled with cars, bicycles, pedicabs, and endless pedestrians, there was literally not a single female in sight.

One other funny anecdote from the day...a huge portion of our daytime trip actually just involved Specialist Brown and me waiting for the Rhino to come pick us up to take us back to Camp Phoenix. We weren't sure exactly when it would come back to get us, so we played it safe and waited in front of the Embassy for what turned out to be hours.

That might sound frustrating to a lot of people, but remember, everything is relative. More than one State Dept. person came out to ask if we were okay/what were we doing, and we explained. When asked why our spirits were so high, we basically told them that neither of us had really just sat and relaxed like this in months. Yes, we were doing nothing, but there really was nothing we could do...moving meant taking the risk of missing the bus.

I've caught myself feeling less wound-up today, and I honestly think it has something to do with the fact that I got to decompress a bit and *just sit there* yesterday.