A Familiar Strain Is Felt In Stateside Guard Unit (Low Morale)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31689-2004Sep18?language=printer

The 635 soldiers of a battalion of the South Carolina National Guard scheduled to depart Sunday for a year or more in Iraq have spent their off-duty hours under a disciplinary lockdown in their barracks for the last two weeks.

The trouble began Labor Day weekend, when 13 members of the 1st Battalion of the 178th Field Artillery Regiment went AWOL, mainly to see their families again before shipping out. Then there was an ugly confrontation between members of the battalion's Alpha and Charlie batteries -- the term artillery units use instead of "companies" -- that threatened to turn into a brawl involving three dozen soldiers, and required the base police to intervene.

That prompted a barracks inspection that uncovered alcohol, resulting in the lockdown that kept soldiers in their rooms except for drills, barred even from stepping outside for a smoke, a restriction that continued with some exceptions until Sunday's scheduled deployment.

The battalion's rough-and-tumble experience at a base just off the New Jersey Turnpike reflects many of the biggest challenges, strains and stresses confronting the Guard and Reserve soldiers increasingly relied on to fight a war 7,000 miles away.

This Guard unit was put on an accelerated training schedule -- giving the soldiers about 36 hours of leave over the past two months -- because the Army needs to get fresh troops to Iraq, and there are not enough active-duty or "regular" troops to go around. Preparation has been especially intense because the Army is short-handed on military police units, so these artillerymen are being quickly re-trained to provide desperately needed security for convoys. And to fully man the unit, scores of soldiers were pulled in from different Guard outfits, some voluntarily, some on orders.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. The army may be making a mistake

NOT seeing their families before deployment will do WONDERS (NOT) for morale...

This unit is already broken before going ...

Ah yes things are great, and fights are common in situations like this. Oh and retrained as MPs... God help them

[Eye and Monkey]

2. How long before someone says "frag the lieutenant"?

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Lts had a survival of 17 seconds in Nam

and good question, we are not that far from them 17 seconds of life in a hot zone

[Toots]

19. And you know this as a fact how??????

I would have to disagree, but what do I know, I was only over there.

[AIJ Alom]

25. Well he had to out do his dad somehow.

Can someone say nosedive !!!

[Jacobin]

6. Yep. VietRaq, IraqNam....fragging not far behind.

[fearnobush]

13. That base is Fort Dix and my good friend has to report their next week!!!

He's leaving his good job, kids and wife to go to Iraq via Ft. Dix. He has a few years left before retiring from the guard. I guess Bu$h wants to get all his blood and taxes worth by sending all these old guys to fight in his illegal, failed war.

[Mr_Spock]

3. I wish Iraq was worth it for these guys sakes - what a waste

It's so painful knowing that these Guard unit people NEVER imagined that in this time of modern high-tech warfare that they would be going to a third-world country dessert to be shot at for a year. These are people with careers here. Very, very discouraging :(

[Pirate Smile]

4. These are "fresh troops"?. They don't sound fresh, they sound fried

already. Oh, sh#$.:-(

[PsN2Wind]

7. South Carolina Guard

Anybody else curious as to how many of them voted for Dubya and Chambliss. Tempers my sympathy some.

[northzax]

8. Best.Line.Ever

"Gamble, who at age 51 is a 33-year-veteran of the Guard, said he is not worried about putting an already stressed unit into the cauldron of Iraq duty. "I haven't ever been deployed before, myself," he said. But, he concluded, "I feel like this unit will handle this well. Once we get in-country and get into missions, I think the stress will level off."

oh, yeah. Sounds like someone who's never been in a war zone (neither have I, by the way) frankly, I can't see that going to a hot zone, getting shot at, and likely losing fellow soldiers is going to reduce stress, do you? God Bless these guys, they're going to need it.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. What does this NCO think this is

A camping trip?

By the way for those who asked, when do we frag the Lt... wait it will be quite higher....and lower

GOOD... he THINKS he is going to find honor and glory and all that crap, doesn't he?

[Kagemusha]

10. He didn't literally say it would fall. Just level off. Not what level.

But hey, these guys get trained and drilled for press duty too.

[Kimber Scott]

12. Once they have something "real" to do, instead of just train and be

locked up, their attitudes will improve - temporarily. Once the newness wears off and they get a little battle hardened they will be very hard to deal with.

[John Q. Citizen]

11. All this is a direct result of the poor planning by the Pentagon

The civilians in the Dept. of Defense never figured that it wouldn't be easy to waltz into Iraq and occupy till you got the oil.

The chickens are coming home to roost, but it these guys paying the price instead of the chicken-hawks who sold the war as a lark.

[LiberalFighter]

14. National Guard placed on lockdown??

Geesh... don't sound like any type of weekend duty anymore.

More like lockdown of prisoners in a prison.

[grasswire]

15. makes me wonder....

....if the lockdown is meant to keep personnel from leaving.

[Lerkfish]

17. too bad the Alabama guard didn't lockdown the shrub 30 yrs ago...

eom

[Ilsa]

24. Ironic, isn't it? Doesn't the governor normally

call the National Guard to "lockdown" and keep the peace, in event of local emergencies, such as after hurricanes, etc?

[Alabama68]

16. No Big Surprise

It's not big surprise that morale in the military is the lowest it's ever been. We are losing in Iraq to a better trained, better equipped, more experienced fighting force. We need to follow Spain and get out of Iraq now to end the embarrassment.

[JoFerret]

18. Excellent article. Soldiers bone-tired. Pentagon planning blamed

I expect we will start to read more of these stories plus the ones from higher levels about poor planning, Pentagon incompetence, the troops who pay the price for it. I've read a number of articles positing the idea that BushCo are breaking the military with their boneheadedness and vanity.

More from the article:

As members of the unit looked toward their tour, some said they were angry, or reluctant to go, or both. Many more are bone-tired.
....
"Our morale isn't high enough for us to be away for 18 months," said Pfc. Joshua Garman, 20, who, in civilian life, works in a National Guard recruiting office. "I think a lot of guys will break down in Iraq."
....

A series of high-level decisions at the Pentagon has come together to make life tough for soldiers and commanders in this battalion and others. The decisions include the Bush administration's reluctance to sharply increase the size of the U.S. Army. Instead, the Pentagon is relying on the National Guard and Reserves, which provide 40 percent of the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Also, the top brass has concluded that more military police are needed as security deteriorates and the violent insurgency flares in ways that were not predicted by Pentagon planners.

[dand]

20. These poor bastards, going against Iraqis fighting for their country,

being forced to go to a living hell against their will. Yet they are mostly Democrat hating Republicans.
This is Viet Nam all over again, we didn't learn a thing.

[sofa king]

21. The right way, the wrong way, and the Army way.

The other morning I was poking around through a great book called For the Common Defense, by Millett and Maslowski. I've dragged that poor beat up book around for half of my life now and I'm regularly impressed at how important it is. Here's a couple of my impressions today.

The article above is literally timeless. I'll bet that you could find virtually the same story, with different details, from virtually every war America has fought.

This is because America has always relied very heavily upon citizen soldiers for its defense (and bullshit trumped up wars of aggression like the Mexican, the Spanish American, and Iraq). They are notoriously unreliable--myopic, overly independent, and vocally resistant to professional military discipline.

But the biggest problem the regular armed forces has had with its auxilliaries is the propensity for citizen soldiers to go AWOL.

George Washington was faced with the threat of total dissolution of his standing army several times during the Revolution as volunteer units' committments expired, and staggling kept his forces in a constant state of confusion. Both sides of the Civil War were considered completely unprofessional by European observers, largely because of rampant absenteeism.

Absenteeism is contagious. If deemed permissable, it grows until the unit in question must be deemed completely ineffective. Sooner or later it has to be confronted, much to the detriment of unit morale.

Citizen soldiers are constantly played for suckers. They are lured into signing up for a finite term of duty, usually with wispy promises of non-combat duty, because they won't do it if they know for certain that they're going in "for the duration." Then a war comes along, their terms of service begin to expire, and surprise, they're not going home.

(That, by the way, will be the next timeless story we start to see as Guard units gripe and threaten revolt as are kept on duty far past their perceived terms of enlistment.)

Invariably, militia fail to understand the importance of unit cohesion and discipline off the battlefield. A unit which isn't all there isn't ready to do what is required of it. That unreadiness can touch off a chain reaction of mistakes which can prove far more damaging than a few soldiers heading home to see their folks would seem to imply. This undoubtedly keeps regular service officers awake at night.

Invariably, the regular armed forces tries to use its milita units as if they were professional units, and is surprised and exasperated by truculent citizen soldier resistence--sometimes in the face of genuine danger. This also keeps regular service officers awake at night. That's why they drink so much coffee, I guess.

And invariably, the compromise winds up being the Army Way, a fitful stutter-step toward its goals. Because of the confusion and lack of discipline they create, citizen soldiers are almost always more costly and less effective in wartime than advertised in peacetime. But at the same time, politicians always overestimate the capabilities of the regular armed forces, so citizen soldiers are always needed.

This clash of ideas has an interesting and paradoxical application to this election. If you want to shut up the most hard-core conservative regular military person, just point out that there is no longer any question that Bush went AWOL. Regular soldiers, especially officers, despise absenteeism and the people who do it.

Conversely, the most rabid anti-Bush guardsmen are likely to have an unusual tolerance for Bush's dereliction of duty. They've done that time with their thumbs up their asses and no obvious reason for not going home for a weekend of Mom's cooking.

And yet somehow, it has always worked out in America's favor. Until the day that it doesn't, and then we're fucked nine ways to Sunday.

[Eloriel]

22. My greatest concern

You touched on it here:

Invariably, militia fail to understand the importance of unit cohesion and discipline off the battlefield. A unit which isn't all there isn't ready to do what is required of it. That unreadiness can touch off a chain reaction of mistakes which can prove far more damaging than a few soldiers heading home to see their folks would seem to imply. This undoubtedly keeps regular service officers awake at night.

I don't know THAT much about the military. I was an Army wife for 7 years (and he later went on to retire from the Army), and that certainly doesn't make me an expert, but it does gives me a little insight.

I am HORRIFIED, absolutely horrified, by just the part of the article quoted in the OP -- haven't read the whole thing yet.

Bush&Co. are absolutely ruining our military -- ruining it in the same way they have ruined our economy, our treasury, the environment, and everything else they have touched. Ruining as in DESTROYING. And, not being any kind of "expert" I'm having trouble imagining what will be required -- if it will even be possible -- to build it back up again, in terms of personnel, money, materiel, etc.

That there is any unit as already "destroyed" as this unit is described in the OP absolutely fills me with -- well, shock and awe. We have shocked and awed our own troops.

I am not one to whom "military discipline" means much more personally than RUN, RUN, FAR, FAR AWAY!!! (LOL) but I DO understand that military discipline is absolutely essential to the whole purpose of having a military, as well as the ability of any military unit to meet its most basic mission (e.g., stay alive!). This unit is destroyed. They might as well disband and send any salvageable individual troops to other units. Everyone IN this unit is literally at greater risk going to Iraq, as much from themselves as any "enemy."

[sofa king]

23. It's a little scary, I agree.

But if you'll permit me a little bit of optimism, there is another side to this coin.

It's not the way a regular officer would want to foster unit cohesion, but these guys are developing a discipline of their own sort.

Every last one of them is pissed off by now. Even before they've seen combat, they've had a unifying collective experience, and I think that's going to help them a lot when they get into the poopy over in Iraq.

That's just one factor which must be weighed against low morale, inexperience, and mission creep. But honestly, I think that the crappy experience they've had in New Jersey is going a small way toward keeping them alive in Iraq.

At least I hope so.

[Cleopatra2a]

27. You are right

I had to ask my ex-Army spouse how many people in a battalion, he said roughly 800-1000. The article did not state why the 2 companies got into a fight. I think they were taking care of the discipline problems on their own. Whether they like it or not, they are going to Iraq, and they have to work together to stay alive.

[shadu]

26. I would go home to check on my pets, one way or another

[tblue37]

28. And yet

when Bush addressed a convention of National Guard members last week, they applauded his every utterance, while sitting in stony silence when Kerry addressed them a few days later.

Most of these guardsmen support Bush, even though he deserted his own NG post and even though he abuses both active duty troops and NG and Reserve troops.

I hate to say they are getting what they deserve, and of course I do realize a lot of them don't support Bush. But most of them do, and most of their families do, and most of the active troops and their families do.

If Bush is elected, these guys will probably end up staying in Iraq not just for a one-year or even an 18-month deployment, but for a 2-year deployment, and they will also probably get their fannies stop-lossed.

What will it take to persuade these idiots that as CIC Bush is an absolute disaster and needs to be voted out of office?

[Cleopatra2a]

29. Who was in the audience?

Only Bush lovers??

[tblue37]

30. While I can imagine that Bush's audience was screened

to make sure of that, it is obvious that Kerry's audience would not have been. The problem is that NG guys, like Reservists and active duty troops, tend to lean pretty strongly Republican. Also, a lot of NG and Reserve troops are former active duty troops, which also means predominantly Republican.

[Tight_rope]

39. Well if they are stupid enough to support Bush...then they deserve to die!

[Bigmack]

31. Marines' morale low, too....

Attacks disillusion Marines

By Mike Dorning Chicago Tribune
(snips)
RAMADI, Iraq — Marine Cpl. Travis Friedrichsen, a sandy-haired 21-year-old from Denison, Iowa, used to take Tootsie Rolls and lollipops out of care packages from home and give them to Iraqi children. Not anymore.

"My whole opinion of the people here has changed. There aren't any good people," said Friedrichsen, who says his first instinct now is to scan even youngsters' hands for weapons.

Marines were ordered to show friendliness through "wave tactics," including waving at people on the street.

Few spend much time waving these days as the hard reality of frequent hit-and-run attacks, roadside bombs and exploding mortars has left plenty of Marines, particularly grunts on the ground, disillusioned and bitter.

Since the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, deployed in the area six months ago, 34 of its members have died and more than a quarter of the 1,000-member unit has been wounded.

Sgt. Curtis Neill remembers a rocket-propelled grenade attack on his platoon as it passed some shops one hot August day. When the Marines responded, the attacker fled, but they found that he had established a comfortable and obvious position to lie in wait.

There, in an alleyway beside the shops, was a seat and ammunition for the grenade launcher — along with a pitcher of water and a half-eaten bowl of grapes, said Neill, who was so amazed that he took photos of the setup.

"You could tell the guy had been hanging out all day. It was out in the open. Every single one of the guys in the shops could tell the guy was set up to attack us," said Neill, 34, of Colrain, Mass. "That's the problem. That's why I'm bitter toward the people.

[salin]

33. Do you have a link to the story?

thanks in advance.

[justjones]

32. Sounds like slavery to me.....

36 hours of leave over the past two months? What's that, like, a day and a half? WTF?

So, like, signing up for the Guard is like signing your life away?

[catmandu57]

34. This may be old news now

Last Friday in Ft. Carson Co, it was reported that soldiers there whose enlistment was set to expire were being coerced into reupping until 2007.
They were being given the choice to resign and stay in the army or be transferred to a unit scheduled to go to Iraq for an extended tour.

[Dr Fate]

35. Cant they go work on a campiagn of their choice instead?

That's what Bush did.

[llmart]

36. Who in their right mind.....

is ever going to want to join the National Guard or Reserves any more? You'd have to be destitute to do that. So our idiot-in-chief has virtually guaranteed that it will now be next to impossible to have enough people in the National Guard and Reserves, let alone regular military.

[Rose Siding]

37. Some grave analysis from Carter at Intel Dump

http://www.intel-dump.com/

Analysis: Sending this unit into harm's way under these conditions would be tantamount to negligence and dereliction of duty — or worse. This is a formula for disaster. A unit without cohesion and good leadership will crumble under the strain of combat, and the daily strain of operations in Iraq. Worse yet, this unit lacks the fundamental discipline to do the right thing in a complex operational environment like Iraq, where the undisciplined actions of one Private First Class (see, e.g., Lynndie England) could have a strategic impact on the world. Discipline is absolutely essential for a unit like this, where live bullets and shifting rules of engagement make every decisions a critical one.

Moreover, a unit that lacks this kind of basic discipline will be more likely to suffer casualties in combat. Check out this excerpt:

Except for a brief spell during Labor Day weekend, soldiers have been confined to post and prevented from wearing civilian clothes when off duty. The lockdown was loosened to allow soldiers out of the barracks in off hours to go to the PX, the gym and a few other places, if they sign out and move in groups.

So... do you think this unit's soldiers are going to have the discipline to wear their body armor and carry their weapons 24/7 in Iraq if they can't stomach wearing their military uniforms 24/7 at Fort Dix? I doubt it. And in an environment like Iraq, where the next mortar round may come in at anytime, this unit will pay in blood for its lack of discipline.

If I were on the Army staff evaluating this unit, I would recommend against sending it for the mean time. I would then fire most of the company and battalion leadership, and either break this unit up into fillers for other Guard units, or reconstitute this unit with a new base of leadership. That may be difficult to do given the National Guard status of this unit, and the fact that everyone is home grown. But that may, in fact, be the problem here. Until now, no external eyes looked at this unit, and these problems were allowed to fester over time. Clearly, this unit cannot meet the standard, and cannot be expected to perform well in Iraq. We need to fix this unit before we send it, and then we need to fix the larger systems in the Army Reserve and National Guard that let a unit get this bad.

[Tight_rope]

38. "Army needs to get fresh troops to Iraq" = Army needs fresh meat in Iraq!

[VolcanoJen]

40. Kick... leadership remains in denial.

Heartbreaking article, especially the part where their commander insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the unit morale is not poor.

[eriffle]

41. Just Curious

What is happening in these states where the National Guard is deployed to Iraq and a natural disaster happens? Pretty much every state from Gulf of Mexico to New York was flooded by Ivan last week, and I know here in West Virginia our National Guard gets deployed for flood relief. I know our army national guard is deployed right now, so are the people who normally depend on the guard for flood relief just S.O.L. thanks to A.W.O.L.?

[Hand]

42. You've got it...

I've been constantly wondering that myself over the past few months. Any time there's a hurricane, tornado, massive flooding, whatever, the NG is the first body mobilized for rescue and relief work, security, maintaining order, etc., etc.

Normally you'd see truckloads of NG being deployed in advance of the event (if it's predictable, like a hurricane) to help people evacuate, discourage looters, deliver supplies, lay sandbags... well, you name it.

In advance of Charlie, Frances, Ivan, how many NG troops did you see in the news doing their usual job? I saw none. They're all federalized for Chimpy's vanity war. And the disaster victims are paying the price--slow and inadequate response/relief, traffic jams on the interstates, needless deaths because of no sandbagging, more extensive property damage, looting, fights at shelters...

"MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!" shrieked the prep school pussy.

:mad: