I find it hard to believe that a man that graduated from West Point didn’t have enough fucking brains to take care of this mess when it first popped up. I really doubt it would have taken more than a couple of days to clear up.
When I was in Desert Storm, most of my field gear was on a truck that ran over a landmine and burned to the ground. I was told not to worry about it as it would just be reported as a combat loss. When I went to outprocess, I was told that I owed a shitload of money for all the missing gear. I then went to the Battalion Sergeant Major, explained what happened and he fixed it right there on the spot, no muss, no fuss.
Now if I, being a lowly Specialist could have enough brains to do that, then why didn’t this Lieutenant who presumably was smart enough to graduate from West Point? It can’t have been the fact that he was wounded, I was hurt pretty damn bad myself and was still hobbling around on a cane over a year afterwards trying to outprocess.
A report of survey would take the supply section a day, tops to complete. It might take another day to get it signed but no more than that. Being told that he might have to stay in the service for “weeks or months” would surely have been no problem seeing as how he said right in the article that he didn’t want to get out of the Army.
Something doesn’t smell right about the whole thing.
President Bush is incompetent. As a head of state, he’s nearly as much of as embarassment as North Korea’s President Kim IL Sung. Domestically, he economically screws many of his supporters, yet they continue to rabidly support him. His fiscal policy of lowering taxes (easy, low-hanging fruit for garnering voter support) while wartime spending is increasing budget pressures is wrong on so many levels. Cronyism exacerbated the problems in a time of domestic tragedy. Internationally, he invaded a foreign country on specious, if not blatantly false reasoning; crony capitalism now rules and the populace is in as great a danger from insurgent attacks as they were under their previous regime.
This is not an example of his incompetence, his administration’s incompetence, or his party’s incompetence. This is an example of military incompetence, and is totally separate from either party.
Sorry if calling a spade a spade upsets Bush-haters.
I’ve tried to explain this ad infinitum. People don’t recognize that problems with getting troops the proper equipment are the result of two things 1) ineffective military bureaucracy and 2) the procurement process which forces the Pentagon to spend money on things it doesn’t need while more important and necessary programs do not get adequate funding.
It has virtually nothing to do with who is President. I was in the Army for 20 years and I served under 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans and when it came to stuff like this you didn’t notice a difference depending on who was in the White House. To even suggest the President could fix this is overstating the power of the Presidency and understating the power of pork-barrel spending in Congress and the power of the military bureaucracy.
I also view the claims concerning the body armor “not being the right kind” skeptically. Many of the reports talking about how more armor would save more lives are disingenuous because they don’t adequately reflect the importance of manueverability of infantrymen.
Nobody should ever be suprised that the term “SNAFU” originated in the military. I just wonder what letters the Spartans used for the term. I suspect the first ape armies from 1,000,000 B.C. used the tem “ook-ook-eek-ook-ook”. And we all can laugh at the thought of some sort of Borg army in our future. “You will be assimilated. Once you fill out form 2365C in triplicate and report to the SIC on Alpha Centuri for the assimilation process. Transportation will be your responsibility.”
It’s how armies work. From president Og through President Beep-beep-XL.
True 'nuf, dat. But it doesn’t apply to this. This incident, as reported, happened way down the chain from the prez. The way things look, that buck never got to the president’s desk. Of course, this doesn’t absolve him from acting and taking responsibility to see that the right thing is done - but he can’t do that until he knows something’s gone wrong.
That’s what I don’t understand about the many reflexive Bush-bashers; that you guys assume he’s omniscient and knows about the tiniest of details about everyfuckingthing that’s going on in his administration - that, clearly, given the size of the gov’t, is impossible. The executive branch, if you include the military, would be the largest corporation in the world. And every guy all the way up and down the line, is jealously guarding his little piece of turf trying to elarge his fiefdom. There’s just no possible way for anyone to be on top of all that minutiae. But what you guys expect is even more extreme. Bush, not only is supposed to be omniscient, but prescient; you expect him to know and have a plan in his file cabinet for every little fuckup before it becomes an actual fuckup. You guys expect ready-made solutions from people for problems of which they’re not even aware. Lemme ask you. You got a drawer full of solutions there at work for every possible problem that might ever arise? I 'spect not.
The idea that Bush is a “unitary executive” or that he should have power over the entire executive branch is one Democrats reject. However they also expect him to well, have power over the entire executive branch and knowledge over everything that happens in an organization with millions of employees.
Yep. Plus he’s really fucking stupid, but also supposed to be capable of making, implementing and managing the most detailed and complex of plans. All this while he’s masterminding an innumerably-faceted conspiracy of untold magnitude.
And when Clinton was president, the same was expected of him by Republicans. Heard it all the time in my office. Holier-than-thou attitudes occur on both sides.
Here it is. The end of the world. Cats and dogs living together.
I am going to “defend” Bush here. This incident is not his fault, personally, or by proxy. It is the fault of the officer or sergeant (or whatever) who did not sign the form. It is OK to write equipment off as “battle damage”. The person who should have done so, failed to do it. It’s cut and dry. The regulations and the authorizations are probably already there, it just was not acted on. Later on, someone else sees the paperwork, a block is not checked. He or she flags it, without knowing the situation or having any reason to question it. The fault still goes back to the person who failed to sign off at the time it happened. SNAFU, in all it’s glory.
And that probably would be the First Sergeant. He or she is the manager of the the headquarters paper work. It’s the job of the Top Kick to see that all of the I’s are dotted and the T’s crossed. And it’s the job of the Adjutant to check on it.
I had a some respect for President Beep-beep XXXIX, but Junior is just an idiot.
I have access to news wires at my work, and I saw something posted 20 minutes ago that the Army is refunding the Lieutenant’s money. As for people collecting donations for him, the soldier is saying that he’s going to pass it all on to a veterans charity in his area.
(Sorry, can’t link to story, but it should be on the major news sites by this evening.)
Wrong. That would be the job of bothe the supply Sergeant and the officer in charge of supply. Once the paperwork is implemented through supply, it go’s to the company commander for a sign-off and then gets forwarded up the chain of command. The FARTHEST it should have to reach is Battalion Headquarters where the Battalion Commader signs his john hancock on the report of survey and everything is done.
The only other time it would EVER go farther is if he were in a detached command, such as a small unit detached to support a different unit. I know all this because that’s what happened to me. I came out of our sister Battalion with a few other guys and was cross-posted to our sister Battalion.
Top Kick is an Army term, usually (most always) shortened to Top.
First Shirt is an Air Force term. From what I can find, it seems to be just another term that originated when the Army Air Force became the plain Air Force and is used to denote that it is an AIR FORCE 1st Sergeant that they’re talking about.
What a weird story. It has always been my experience that acres and acres of stuff is written off (honestly or not) as combat losses. Maybe something has changed in the years since I retired.
When my Battalion left Saudi Arabia after Desert Storm, we BURNED all of our tents so we wouldn’t have to wash them to send back to Germany. We also burned five conex containers filled with wood that we had brought from Germany to build various things with as we weren’t allowed to take it back with us.
Yes, a LOT of things are simply written off as combat losses but if it isn’t written down in the first place, someone ends up getting screwed. But really, the process to fix the fuckup is so ridiculously easy it’s funny that a lieutenant couldn’t figure it out.
Yes, that’s true. It was a joke in our outfit that every plane that went down did so partly by being overweight from all of the equipment it was carrying. All of the stuff that was unaccounted for since the last crash was on the plane that went down.
This case was obviously a screw-up at the company level that should have been caught at the battalion level.
