Sound familiar?
The News-Tribune follows a platoon of Strykers through their paces at Fort Irwin as they discover that their enemy doesn’t always wear uniforms – their equipment is showing signs of age and the tail of their logistics teams seems broken;
At one point in Yakima, fewer than half of the Strykers in the cavalry squadron were considered ready for combat, said squadron chief mechanic Chief Warrant Officer 2 Ric Minton, 31, of Olympia.
He and his team “didn’t sleep for three days” to get the squadron’s readiness rate back up to 90 percent, he said.
Spending constraints further crimped the brigade as it prepared for its Yakima exercise during the October government shutdown. The unit could not buy essential replacement parts until the spending restrictions were lifted.
“When we got the parts, our operational readiness levels came up to standard,” said Maj. Dennis Fajardo, the brigade’s logistics officer.
Minton said the Strykers were in good shape when they hit the ground at Fort Irwin in early January. The Army sent the machines by train from Lewis-McChord to the desert base. About 10 of the cavalry squadron’s 69 Strykers were down for repairs early this week.
Now, wait, weren’t we assured that the DoD was completely funded during the goverment’s shutdown? I guess not. But, as I read the entire article, I had flashbacks to the 1978-1981 period when maintenance on vehicles and equipment was accomplished by cannibalizing other vehicles because there was no money to fix them right, so soldiers made do with what they could, like they always do.
Of course, the big difference between now and the Carter years is that the troops are still involved in a shooting war and their equipment is already decrepit and the parts/maintenance chain is already drying up.
Category: Military issues
“You guys make a good photo-op”. So, it must be OK?/sarc
To quote an aspirant for Champagne in Chief, “What difference does it make now?”
Yeah, Jonn – it does sound familiar. Like the mid/late 1990s. And from 1973-1981. And post-Korea. And 1946-1950. And post-WWI. We never freaking seem to learn.
“Kumbaya” is a nice song, but the real world just doesn’t sing it.
I thought we needed the Stryker because it was highly mobile and, more importantly, cheaper to run than the Bradley. With a powerpack swap taking 3 hours, tires vs track, and way more fuel efficient… I’m going to go on a limb here and say that someone at that 5 sided building in the swamp is trying to snuff this vehicle out. I’ve got thousands of hours in Strykers and I’ve rarely seen one go non-mission capable.
I remember in the white name tape Army that if you had the part on order, you were golden even if the item wouldn’t work.
Roh-dog: any piece of equipment will go NMC if you can’t get repair parts. Stuff wears out and breaks.
Talk to folks that were in post-Vietnam thru Carter. They can tell you some horror stories about their stuff being deadlined because they were “awaiting parts”.
SJ: still true, to an extent. And it still leads to the same abuses (“command substitution” AKA cannibalization) and the same results – low MC rates and/or the creation of “hangar/motorpool queens” that are so pilfered they’ll likely never work properly again.
When the spare parts ain’t there, the equipment generally ain’t that useful – even if you’re covered on paper.
It was also amazing that we couldn’t get crap (and, this was the 82nd ABN). All of a sudden Dominican Republic popped up and the lots were full of 18 wheelers loaded with the parts that we had had on order for ages.
SSDD (same shit, different decade)
Carter at least forewent some of the luxuries and perks of the office, but B. Hussein 0bama? NO WAY, nothing gets between him and his next party/golf junket, vacation,…
I was a Navy Aircrewman during the Carter administration. It sucked donkey balls, and Carter’s drawdown “savings” cost us a number of lives. Lack of spare parts, reduced training time, reduced flight hours, reduced everything, while still being required to keep high-tempo ops going against our Soviet friends on all the world’s oceans. 2 of those guys lost were my friends. Squadrons coming off deployment were transferring parts to squadrons relieving them because we couldn’t get spares. In a 12-aircraft squadron, if you could keep 9 birds airworthy at any one time, it was high-fives all around. Squadron budgets were strictly adhered to, and woe be the skipper whose unit goes over the limit. Squadrons started shutting down some functions/staff as the end of the month approached, and especially the end of the fiscal quarter. I well remember being on a shuttle crew taking a P-3 from NAS Brunswick, Maine, to Lockheed out to Burbank, CA. We picked up a replacement bird and were bringing it back when we got a flash message over Nevada to land at Hill AFB, Utah, and contact the squadron via landline at Base Ops. We all thought the balloon was about to go up. Landed and parked outside the terminal while the Mission Commander went in and made the call. Turns out that the entire wing was out of money for fuel, and we had to stand down and await the new fiscal quarter. Spent 3 days there before we could buy fuel and fly home. I was fortunate because I was able to visit my folks who lived just over an hour north of there. We all went up and my folks put on a BBQ for the whole crew and neighbors. However, It was a real burden trying to keep all the flight crew’s skills up since we often had to use simulator time in lieu of actual flight time and it just isn’t the same thing. Like I said, people died. Good people who we lost because material and skills degraded for lack of funds while mission op tempos were kept… Read more »
“…the big difference between now and the Carter years is that the troops are still involved in a shooting war”
That’s the money quote today, IMO. Truly, truly, I do not understand how Washington, DC sleeps at night.
I pray that Carter, Clinton, and Obama are all held accountable for the deaths they caused. This, in the nut-shell, is why I despise the Left. There just seems to be too few who are even remotely rational, let alone fair-minded.
OldSoldier54, if you put ‘rational’ and ‘liberal’ together in the same sentence, it’s an oxymoron.
None of this surprises me at all. I think you can expect more of it in the near future, too.
“Of course, the big difference between now and the Carter years is that the troops are still involved in a shooting war and their equipment is already decrepit and the parts/maintenance chain is already drying up.”
That might be the point. If the weapons don’t work, the troops can’t fight. If the troops can’t fight, they have to stay quiet and safe behind the wire. And if they have to stay behind the wire, the Administration can say everything is fine, and no one will contradict them.
Mike
Ex-PH2 – Agreed.
This is why I think we should not allow civilians to be President. Every time we have had a damn civvie in the Oval Office, the military has suffered.
Even without budget cuts, when I worked on Ospreys we would continually have at least 2 aircraft designated as parts birds simply because we didn’t have the necessary resources to get them flight ready. I can only imagine what they’re dealing with now
The Big Picture, people, Big Picture!
This latest round of wrecking the military in order to “afford” more socialist financial black-holing means within the next decade or so, we’re, again, going to be facing an enemy wanting to end our existence. And we’re going to have to go to war with “the military we have” rather than the one we need. And, it’s going to cost orders of magnitude greater in expense to rebuild that military while in panic mode, than any monies that might have been saved through this latest “peace dividend”.
But!! on the other hand, by the time we need the military again, it shall have been shorn of all those pesky types who actually concern themselves with actual war-fighting, rather than political knee-crawling.
Every body wins!!!
As bad as Carter was in so many ways, he did manage to get a whole bunch of stuff prepositioned in the ME, which we used during Desert Storm. It was a huge help – maybe it was his own military service which allowed him to do it. That is the only reason I can never put him in quite the same boat with Clinton and Obama. Other than that, they are duplicates of each other, sort of.
There was a running joke around the ANG during the mid 90’s: how many aircraft can you ground for less than $10 in parts?
Meanwhile, the rubbernecks in Congress and the White House can’t give enough handouts to welfare flunkies and illegal aliens fast enough!!
@#14, It was announced on the local news last night that there were memorial services held for a Warrant Officer with Hawaii ties. He wasn’t from here and I don’t think he was stationed here but he had a lot of local friends. Anyway he was a drone operator that never went out of the wire but he got killed when his FOB was hit. So NO, sheltering in place behind the wire isn’t saving anyone. But the news blackout is extremely effective.
As shitty as I thought the days were under President Clinton and her husband Bill, I shudder to think about what it’s like now.
Brother this has been happening for years – can’t get into specifics but by the end of NTC, an Armor company I was observing had one M1A2 that was FMC, and that was after they cannibalized the power pack from a deadline they lawn-darted early in the rotation. Has nothing to do with the quality of the leadership, logisticians or mechanics… their maintenance budget for the FY… which was the same FY that would see them deploy to the box, was less than the replacement cost of one power pack for an M1A2. Fully funded my ass.