COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

The Los Angeles Times is gleefully parroting a sergeant's leaked complaining memo saying the unit was poorly prepared for war.

The soldiers said in interviews, e-mails and official documents that they were sent to war this year with chronic illness, broken guns and trucks with blown transmissions.

The unit's M-60 machine guns reportedly were in such bad condition when the soldiers deployed in February that one sergeant — in a section of a post-training summary sent to his commanders that was titled "gun maintenance" — wrote: "Perhaps we should throw stones?"

The allegations come a month after another National Guard unit alleged that its training at Ft. Bliss was so poor that soldiers feared incurring needlessly high casualties when they arrive in Iraq early next year.

Although the military has defended its troop preparedness, the willingness of units to go public with allegations suggested growing concern among National Guard and reserve members.

Well, gee...thanks for the formulaic C-league analysis, pal. But the UNIT didn't go public with the concerns. Some SOLDIERS did. Which is nothing new. I was bitching about logistics and pay problems very publicly over a year ago. So why does it suggest a GROWING concern?

Answer: It doesn't. It reflects a CONSTANT concern, not a growing one. More than that, it reflects a kneejerk, reflexive, fill-in-the-box pack mentality among journalists who can't tell the difference between a gripe and a scoop.


The M60 machine gun bit is interesting - I haven't seen one in the inventory in more than a decade. I don't trust that bit of information. I suspect either the reporting was sloppy or a mistake was made somewhere else along the line. But it sounds like a command failure to me, not an army failure. The M60 is a simple enough piece of equipment. If you can get the parts, the unit armorers can fix them no problem. If you can't get the parts, that's where a resourceful company XO can jump into the game, hanging out at the maintenance facility on post and hobnobbing with the chiefs until he can get some M240 B's. It wouldn't be difficult.

I have no idea what the deal was with turning in ID cards to use the latrine. Units do stupid things on mobilization. My unit was no exception. (Well, maybe we weren't THAT stupid!)

But that's the decision of the command, and the command has reasons that reason knows not of. And part of that overall process is to get people's attention.

There is some truth, however, to the claim that soldiers are being sent to war having never fired some of the weapons they will be expected to use.

The reason is that units simply cannot get the ammunition it would require to do this to published standards. If I have 4 .50 cal machine guns in the company, the Army will only allocate enough training ammunition to qualify 8 gunners: a gunner and an assistant gunner for each weapon.

The problem is that when we go downrange, these guns often get put out on the perimeter, and then are manned in shifts by whatever unit gets tasked with perimeter security. Which is a very different equation from who's got the paragraph and line number for the gunner and assistant gunner positions in the MTOE.

The solution: The Army should allocate enough ammunition so that ALL soldiers in a combat arms unit can at least familiarize fire on all weapons assigned to that battalion, to include the Mk-19 and the .50 cal. machine gun.

The rest of the article sounds like good old fashioned bitching to me. Our vehicles sucked, too. We went overseas with a vehicle readiness rating of around 50%. I swear to God, if I walked through the motor pool and PMCS'd every vehicle to standard, half of them had deadline faults.

We left Iraq at close to 90%. (Well, minus the vehicles destroyed by RPGs, IEDs, etc.)

The fact that the reporter is calling "defense officials in Washington" tells me that he doesn't know how to report this. He should be raiding rolodexes calling retired Chief Warrants and Sergeants major.

This isn't a Pentagon story. This is a Fort Bliss and Battalion leadership story.

Splash, out

Jason