DOGE cuts impact Ft. Greeely chow
Where is Ft. Greely? Try back-of-beyond, Alaska. NNE of Anchorage in that largely empty part of the map… yeah, not someplace people flock to – unless they are under orders. 350 or so permanent party, more when some of the frequent exercises take place there. I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it is a “census designated town”, which sounds like “we didn’t want to call it a town but too many people live in the general area. Ironically, Wikipedia says the annual precipitation is only about 12”, so think of someplace as dry as El Paso but lots further colder. I mean north.
The post in a bitterly cold corner of Alaska is home to approximately 350 soldiers, including those of the 49th Missile Defense Battalion, which operates 40 of the military’s 44 specialized missiles designed to shoot down nuclear or other ballistic missiles targeting the United States.
I’m going to stick my neck out and say they’re important. Critical function important. Maybe they should be fed?
“Since October 2025, Fort Greely has faced a temporary reduction in (dining facility) operating hours due to unexpected civilian workforce retirements and attrition,” said command spokesperson Lira Frye. Her statement did not address any potential impact related to DOGE cuts.
The base experienced a “critical disruption in food service operations” after the remote Army base lost “essential” federal civilian cooks in the wake of efforts to shrink the workforce, said an Army official whose name was redacted in an official contract document published Jan. 7.
The document, a legal justification for an emergency no-bid contract awarded to staff the fort’s dining facility, blamed the issue on staff retirements combined with a federal hiring freeze and a buyout program launched by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration last year.
Have to give props to the local command – they increased food allowances so soldiers could afford to eat off post (but Delta Junction, the local we’ll-call-it-a-town, has less than 1,000 inhabitants – 918 according to the 2020 census) so the number of places to eat is , shall we say, limited. Here’s a comparison – I know a town in East Texas that has 1200+ inhabitants, a Subway, a pizza joint, two Mexican places, and a couple of doughnut shops. At least the local command is trying, and trying to cut through the red-tape BS.
Robert Evans, a veteran and quality-of-life advocate for soldiers who created the Hots&Cots app for troops to review their living conditions, told USA TODAY that the Fort Greely food service disruption represents “a quality-of-life failure.”
“We saw early warning signs with the Deferred Resignation Program drawdown at Fort Hood,” one of the Army’s largest installations, in Texas, “where leadership acknowledged impacts to barracks (quality) and work order response times,” Evans said. He said the program “didn’t just reduce headcount on a spreadsheet; it removed the civilian workforce that keeps basic functions running.”USA Today
But we keep getting told that contracting out food, housing, etc. to civilians is more efficient… yet here they let the civilians go. Is anyone running the nursery? Anyone else think we need real cooks, mess sergeants, and chow halls again?
Anyone else remember the days when we laughed at USSR troops who had crap barracks, poor food, and no money?
Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", Army, DOGE
I agree that the Army should feed its own. I don’t know exactly when 92Gs (Culinary Specialists) were replaced by civilian contractors, but it seems we hear about chow halls getting shut down or having curtailed hours much more often than we should.
I get that larger installations shut down DFACs when they reorganized. Fort Stewart had at least three (probably more)– one per brigade. When 2ABCT was deactivated, it made no sense to keep a DFAC running on a virtually abandoned corner of post to feed whatever stragglers left. During the same time period, though (mid-2010s), 4IBCT (Vanguard-now reflagged to 2ABCT) was closing its DFAC on weekends. That brigade is on its own compound, outside the back gate, and Soldiers who lived in the barracks had to rely on a bus to get them to chow if they didn’t have a car. Who am I kidding, though? The people who designed the Vanguard footprint didn’t care about the Soldiers. They had nice barracks with kitchenettes and washers and dryers, but had to walk over 1/4 mile to the DFAC, and probably 1/2 mile to work. Not too bad until you consider the Georgia heat and near-daily summer thunderstorms. The Shoppette was built outside the gate, so the Vanguard (or now Spartan) barracks resident better make friends quick if they don’t have a car.
Third Brigade at Fort Campbell has a much better layout. Centralized DFAC near BDE HQ, barracks across the street from battalion and company facilities, and a Shoppette that’s a little bit of a walk for a 1/187 Leader Rakkasan, but a stone’s throw for us 3/187 guys.
Cooks are battalion assets. Chow halls are generally brigade-sized assets (before the 2004 transformation, the three IN BDEs at Campbell each had one, as did DIVARTY, DISCOM, and the Aviation BDE, at the least). Do away with the contractors and keep the tried-and-true setup: a CW-2 and E-7 running the DFAC, with a bunch of overworked and grumpy enlisted 92Gs telling us we can only have one protein.
Yes, “we need real cooks, mess sergeants, and chow halls again.” They never should have gone away. It is not more efficient to have civvies running things.
As nice as the people in Delta Junction are, there just is not enough to justify more than the few places there.
I only spent one winter there at the cold weather test center and thought the DFAC was not bad for such a small place. And the only place I ever got to eat moose meat.
Civilians running the messhalls and doing the food? What happens when we deploy and go to the field? Will KBR, etc. provide a bunch of third-country nationals to go to combat with us?
Figure they are probably providing 200 meals a day which is on the very low end of what a profitable restaurant can survive on. The Army doesn’t operate at a profit.
The Army is going to have to bite the bullet and expect to pay a lot more for food, labor and everything else to enjoy operating a mess hall in North Alaska. The troops have to be taken care of.
Reminds me of all my history reading about the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Spanish/American War, WWI, and WWII. Shortages or non-existent food supplies, soldiers needing to go out and hunt the land for wild game, or to barter or buy from local farmers, or rampage and rob at random.
I never went hungry in the Corps during my service. We were self-sufficient at that time with mess cooks, mess sergeants, mess officers, and monthly “volunteers” from the ranks. The food was always plentiful, hot, reasonably tasty, and kept us at fighting strength.
As with any other dining facility we bought from commercial suppliers and grocery chains, and took delivery at least once a week (as I recall) by the semi full. And all this at a time when Presedet Jimmah Cawtah was cutting the defense budget.
Just like the DildoCrats, to take money from one pocket (military messhalls), shuffle it over to another pocket (civilian dining facilities), and insist that the Gooberment is saving money.
If you are part of a ship’s company (the crew) you can eat on the mess decks even in port. My ship had a crew of 300, so its 1200 meals per day underway plus midnight rations aka mid-rats. However inport, lunch is the busiest meal. Guys might eat at home if they live off the ship or get extra sack-time and skip breakfast. Dinner is usually just the duty section of like 75 or so. Unless its a few days before payday, then all the brokies eat onboard. If its the rare 3rd weekend on a payday, the mess decks looks like we’re at sea. If the ship is in The Yards, it can become complicated. I’ve eaten onboard other ships when our commands arranged for this contingency. In summary, at at-sea-commands always have Navy cooks and keep the ships at minimum level of supplies. As far as shore duty, most Nay installations are fairly large population centers so off-base options are available.
You younguns may not know it, but in olden times the army had what they called “cooks”. They even had their own MOS and schools. Every unit had at least one. Even at some platoon size installations we had a cook; admittedly they were probably fuckups who were sent to those remote sites, but we still ate regularly. They fed us three meals a day. Sure, none of them had a Michelin star, but we were fed. Most of the time.
One of the few places where I saw civilian-run DFACs work was on Sand Hill. From what I recall, civilians ran them even when I went through nearly 25 years ago. It makes sense, “Chow Squad” rotates and serves their own, and when we Drills wanted to eat, we’d wait until the last Trainee was sitting to grab some chow, with the DFAC employees gladly serving us. You want minimal interaction between Trainee and non-Cadre, and you definitely don’t want some disgruntled fresh-out-of-AIT 92G PV2 trying to buddy up with 11X Trainees. Most Drills ate for free, but I walked the lighter side of the gray area by paying for my breakfast and, when I had 24-hour-duty, dinner. I still ate field chow without paying but wanted to cover myself just in case an inspector or audit came down. I’ve never heard of Cadre getting busted for stealing food, but it is technically stealing as we all drew BAS. But the food that was wasted, though… We’d do UPU (I think it stood for Unit Pick-Up), or field chow, for every meal we could. It was easier to plan meals around training than vice versa. We’d usually get a pallet of bread and a box of fruit. I’d run chow whenever I got the chance because I didn’t trust many of my peers to–they were always shorting the Trainees a marmite of protein, often due to another Drill grabbing one of ours for their company. Whatever was left of that pallet of bread went straight to the dumpster–usually at least 5-6 loaves of good brand name stuff. Same for the fruit. After my first cycle, I started just giving out extra. The Trainees burned through the calories, and I’d rather they get the food than left it rot. Besides, it became a game to chuck apples and oranges at Trainees. They loved it, though occasionally someone would get clocked if they weren’t paying attention. I ended up with a constant supply of fresh bread and sometimes bagels, along with Heinz 57 and A1, and plums on the rare occasion we… Read more »