Troops deployed to southern border do deployed troop shenanigans

Fox News caught these two soldiers asleep at their post. Nearby were a half-dozen migrants patiently waiting for them to awake so they could turn themselves in.

Jeff LPH 3 sends in a Army Times article about all the crap soldiers are getting in to that are deployed on the southern border. This does not include the Texas National Guard soldiers there on that state’s mission. This is about the troops the federal government have deployed down there (with no equipment, no mission, and poor or non-existent supervision). It’s no surprise then that the soldiers have fallen asleep at their post (without using the time-tested and first sergeant approved buddy system), consuming drugs, and getting lit and driving (with one soldier dying and another being seriously wounded because of it). You know. Soldiers being soldiers.

Army Times;

On the evening of Sept. 10, a soldier deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border slid a manifesto under each door in his brigade headquarters and then slipped away.

The frustrated Army National Guardsman assigned to the 110th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade headquarters had seen enough.

Three soldiers had died in three months, the most recent in an alleged DUI just five days earlier, and more than a dozen troops from the mission had been arrested or confined for drugs, sexual assault and manslaughter.

“Someone please wave the white flag and send us all home,” the letter pleaded. “I would like to jump off a bridge headfirst into a pile of rocks after seeing the good ol’ boy system and fucked up leadership I have witnessed here.”

The unit never found the author.

The letter was provided to Army Times by another anonymous soldier, who like others for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss equipping, staffing and misconduct issues plaguing the border mission.

For much of 2021, more than 4,000 Guard personnel from 20 states helped monitor the U.S.-Mexico border alongside Customs and Border Protection personnel. The majority were part of a brigade-level ground force led by the 110th MEB known as Task Force Phoenix, a combination of 34 distinct Guard units stitched together with virtually no prior relationships, complicating an already wayward operation. Most returned home in October, when a new Guard task force took over.

This is the story of a task force that left soldiers at isolated observation posts for hours on end without the night vision goggles they needed. They stared into the darkness and fell asleep on the job while awaiting shipments of equipment for months, and only assisted in less than one in every five apprehensions. Legal restrictions on the use of Guardsmen left them with little more than watching as a mission. Army Times interviewed seven Guard troops involved in the mission and obtained hundreds of pages of documents and audio tapes, including official incident reports and planning documents.

Among Army Times’ findings:

• When troops weren’t on duty, most were at hotels in remote locations. Alcohol and drug abuse became so widespread that senior leaders issued breathalyzers and instituted alcohol restrictions that tightened as the misconduct incidents piled up.
• Leaders initiated more than 1,200 legal actions, including nonjudicial punishments, property loss investigations, Army Regulation 15-6 investigations and more. That’s nearly one legal action for every three soldiers. At least 16 soldiers from the mission were arrested or confined for charges including drugs, sexual assault and manslaughter. During the same time period, only three soldiers in Kuwait, a comparable deployment locale with more soldiers, were arraigned for court-martial.
• Troops at the border had more than three times as many car accidents over the past year — at least 500 incidents totaling roughly $630,000 in damages — than the 147 “illegal substance seizures” they reported assisting.
• One cavalry troop from Louisiana was temporarily disbanded due to misconduct and command climate issues — an extremely rare occurrence.
• A 1,000-soldier battalion-level task force based in McAllen, Texas, had three soldiers die during the border deployment. For comparison, only three Army Guard troops died on overseas deployments in 2021, out of tens of thousands.

The linked article goes into many of these things in detail. The deaths are a tragedy and overwhelmingly, perhaps all, preventable. The morale issues are all too obvious when you deploy people for an indeterminate amount of time and don’t give them a mission. We’ll sacrifice years for the mission. It’s what we’ve been trained and conditioned for. Without a mission, minutes turn to hours, hours to days, and days to years. Low morale, depression, and related issues should be expected in that environment.

Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", Army, Biden, Big Pentagon, Border, Disposable Warriors, Military issues, National Guard