The military has relied heavily on outside food vendors for decades now. There are still cooks in the military but not a lot. The Marines will be rolling in with MREs not mobile kitchens.
I think the issue here isn’t that the military can’t competently deploy quickly. Parts of it absolutely can.
But that “quickly” is usually on the order of 18-24 hours for the very fastest troops, which are usually light infantry/paratroopers who would basically carry everything they’d need for some relatively short amount of time without support- maybe a week or so?
And that 18 hours was historically a single battalion (~650 men), with a brigade (3-5k soldiers) taking 24 for the old “Rapid Deployment Force” of the 1980s and 1990s.
And those were units that were specifically detailed to be available that quickly. IIRC they were rotated out of that alert status periodically.
That’s the thing here; the National Guard isn’t typically working on time frames of hours- usually it’s days for natural disasters, and they typically deploy the closer units first, or pre-stage them in events like hurricanes.
Neither the regular military nor the NG are structured or typically expected to deploy in such a short time frame as what we saw in Los Angeles. Doesn’t mean they’re incompetent, just operating outside their playbook and probably making a lot up as they go along.
Except that they can’t set up what they don’t have, and they weren’t deployed with porta-potties. Nor with any of the other logistics they should have.
Militaries have a long, long history of using local services, even when deployed in areas full of people who literally want to kill them. In fact, if this deployment had been done competently, paying local food trucks to come in could even have been part of the actual plan.
Everybody in this thread is talking like all of these soldiers will need to take a dump all at the same time. I’m not sure what “overwhelming the system” means, LA has a robust sewer system and lots of toilets.
Is there a quarter master sat behind a desk somewhere saying ‘these are state funded supplies. You’re under federal control now so I can’t release them to you. Sorry, but rules is rules.’
I don’t doubt it. These are easy problems to solve. Which tells you something about the people in charge, that they are still, in fact, not solving them.