Inside the Headquarters

They call it the experimental forward operating base, or ExFOB. (We call it a mud pit.) The results of these Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.-based experiments could reduce a combat unit’s need for power and water. (This is big.) It would reduce its logistic needs. It will get resupply trucks (and the Marines driving those trucks) off the IED-laced roads. Ah, sounds pretty good, now, yes?

In fact, it is good enough that they say our friend, Corps Commandant Gen. James T. “Not in My Corps” Conway, may spend some time with the boys, tents and toys (and mud).

Conway was the catalyst for the Corps’ current work in energy conservation.

ExFOB, created by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, is a four-phase experiment that tests methods to reduce the logistic needs of combat units. Aside from its ecological and cost benefits, reducing consumption can extend a Marine unit’s sustainability.

Though ExFOB can improve support to today’s warfighter, it targets Conway’s goals of reducing energy consumption by 30 percent by 2015, reducing water consumption by 16 percent the same year and increasing renewable electric power by 25 percent by 2025. Nearly 30 vendor equipment displays will address power, shelter and water capabilities.

Phase One of the experiment simulated the energy and water demands of a Marine unit at forward operating bases similar to those in Afghanistan. Phase Two evaluates existing commercial technologies to produce water on site to meet the Marines’ needs and increase power generation efficiency to sustain the base. Commercial, off-the-shelf technologies have the potential to increase the efficiency of Marine Corps forward-deployed forces, sustaining them over longer periods.

During Phase Three, a Marine unit training in real-world operations will use the renewable technology and energy-saving techniques learned during the earlier phases. (That should be interesting.) Phase Four will facilitate future science and technology efforts by gathering data on experimental systems.

The ExFOB is a collaborative effort. The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory is working closely with the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, the Office of Naval Research, Marine Corps Systems Command, the Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office and Marine Corps Base Quantico.

Because the event is in a Secret-Squirrel kind of area, access is limited. We observed some of the most unattractive terrain we’ve ever seen, though we did see a baby deer and a convention of squirrels. The landscape is stark, a vista of mud. What trees there are would not improve much with foliage. But ExFOB is supposed to simulate a forward operating base in desolate Afghanistan, so maybe we feel our need to visit the rugged nation waning.

It is only recently we learned of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. They do many technological experiments, warfare simulations and war gaming. Robotics? They do it. Resupply with unmanned aerial systems? They’re looking at it. Changing the way their precious Gun Club fights? That, too. How about their work with the newspaper industry? Ah, more on that in a later post.

Despite the misfortune of Navy Capt. Holly Graf and the alleged suffering of the USS Cowpens (CG 63) crew under this so-called Capt. Bligh, we find the allegations and subsequent findings against her outrageous.

Foul and harsh language around sailors a problem? Fear on a warship? What has this Navy come to?

In the name of “We’re bored so now we’ll spy in on our commanding officers,” it has been reported the Navy has relieved no fewer than six commanders since January – this January. But, the downfall of “Horrible Holly” has piqued considerable interest and spiked column inches.

Graf is a 1985 Naval Academy grad who was relieved for allegedly abusing her position and crew.  The Navy Inspector General performed its investigation post haste. Its finding against Graf: cruelty and maltreatment. This is a rare—and not to mention a tad suspect. Do we have another railroaded officer to cover the deficiencies of her seniors?

Graf may have treated everyone poorly, but she treated them equally. In watching the carnage, we cannot help but ask, “So, do you, Cowpens crew, get it now?” We certainly are shedding no tears for this ship’s company. Our guess is the whistleblowers, while justified, have not endured years of true abuse, maltreatment, beratement and sexual harassment. Hey, let’s add sexual assault to the mix. They like to say those things don’t happen today; we’ll let them live the fantasy.

In a statement to investigators, Graf explained her actions were her way to challenge her crew. (Sounds reasonable.) We say it was a way to toughen up what has become a flaccid Navy. Most commanders probably would not subscribe to Graf’s methods. (With all Navy’s focus on diversity, vice leadership, will hugs be required next?)

We wonder about Graf’s executive officer, with whom many of the quoted conversations should have taken place. “Don’t come to me with your problems,” Graf said. “You’re a f______ department head.”  Sounds reasonable to us. “I can’t express how mad you make me without getting violent.” Apparently this statement was a problem for the Navy, but not a problem for Graf. She was to the point and used imagery with great effect.

We’re told the overall morale in the Navy, especially the surface community, has been in the toilet for some time. The officer corps seems to lack the (oddly out-of-control) strength and confidence of a Holly Graf, traits she may have sought to instill in her crew.

The main offenders in this tragedy are the myriad officers above Graf. Reports say she has had this controversial leadership style for some time. Where were those officers to say, “Hey Holly, what the hell is going on?” They certainly rushed to judgment when her behavior became a problem for them.

Navy – In case of war, break glass.

The Marine Corps seems to have it own Tea Party movement: There is a bill in the House of Representatives to rename the “Department of the Navy” to the “Department of the Navy and Marine Corps.” While it might garner some additional awareness for the Boys’ Gun Club, proponents of the change seek parity with the Navy.

But there’s a down side to this equalizer, and bill backers don’t seem to see the Marine Corps may lose more than it gains.

The Marine Corps and the Navy both fall under the Department of the Navy. That top cover has been a sweet deal for the Marines. Equal footing could cost the Marine Corps people and money. The lean Marine Corps? No more! The Navy Department is saddled with tremendous administrative responsibilities, many the Corps has been able to avoid.

Legal and contracting are just two areas that could shift resources away from Corps Commandant Gen. James T. “Not in My Corps” Conway’s precious (and simple) priorities. Do movement supporters know what ball-and-chain possibly awaits? If we were the Navy, we’d say, “Great. Here’s the table of organization and required funding. You get the cubes in the basement. Welcome aboard.”

Point man of this assault on the Hill is North Carolina Congressman Walter Jones whose district includes sprawling Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. Joining him is former Corps commandant Gen. Al “Only When There’s Trouble” Gray and Gen. Anthony Zinni, former CENTCOM chief. Also involved are the Marine Corps Mafia (uh, League) and the Marine Parents Association.(Who?).  Star power comes in the form of R. Lee Ermey, a Marine Corps veteran and cable TV host who played the drill instructor (shot and killed by a recruit) in the movie “Full Metal Jacket.”

The bill, HR 24, has 370 cosponsors and was introduced in January 6, 2009. It appears it has been in committee since. Senate bill S 504 has two cosponsors and remains in committee. Though these bills may be going nowhere, this group may want to rethink its oddly placed priorities. Proponents of the change are whining the well-worn “recognition for our sacrifices” refrain. We believe they were paid for their service and already receive tremendous credit. We would hope they move on, otherwise the Boys’ Gun Club may become a bit less expeditionary.

We have been reading the reports on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with waning interest. They call it “Lightning II.” We call it “Déjà vu.” Pick your poison. It is another DDG-1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer-to-Nowhere. It is the littoral combat ship that more than doubled in price. It is the bankrupt and canceled presidential helicopter.  Just change the name and the general facts remain about the same.

The Joint Strike Fighter reportedly is the Pentagon’s most expensive system. Defense leaders bought into the dream. Yeah, it was pricey, but DoD would come out ahead in the long run. (Their opinion, not ours.) The Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and nine allied nations all were going to the same bird. It made sense for everyone to have the same plane. (This seemed more a liability than combined advantage from the start.) And birds could be delivered quickly. (Read: Check’s in the mail.)

DoD’s Dream Machine seems to be anything but. The F-35 has been fraught with (you guessed it) cost overruns and delays. Reports say building the plane has been “difficult,” and it is running billions over budget. Defense Secretary and Occasional Superhero Robert M. Gates has described the situation as “troubling.” Worse, production is behind schedule. The Air Force delivery has been pushed from 2013 to 2015.

Our guess is things will get worse before they improve (or the program dies). We guess no one will see a full squadron of F-35s until well after 2015. Cost overruns will continue. (See programs above.) Given the size or the F-35 program, economies of scale will come into play: the size of the program will send costs further out of control at a faster rate.

Is the Joint Strike Fighter the Defense Department’s version of “too big to fail”?

The phrase, “For Official Use Only” is the faux veil behind which government agencies, including the Defense Department, hide. All too often those with authority declare, “Make it FOUO.” The intent often is to hide information. But it is a designation not a classification.

Essentially, FOUO is meaningless.

We often see FOUO documents sitting in our cyber box here at Inside the Headquarters. Far from the Pentagon Papers, they are average Defense Department fare. It is easy to find what out the creator was trying to hide, but it is more humorous than newsworthy, and a tad pathetic.

Yet FOUO spells security, for many. Of those with whom we spoke, few understood its meaning and equated it with a classification.

Classified material, like “secret” and “top secret,” have specific handling instructions. Only those with the clearance and a need to know can view such documents.

But FOUO? The intent is to classify a document that is unclassified. It is to bury it from public view without codified protections. But FOUO material is subject to the same Freedom of Information Act guidelines as other documents.

Recently a war game and all related documents were assigned FOUO. The move instilled a culture of fear and mistrust. Organizers were trying to bury one word by waving the FOUO wand. It has worked thus far. (We won’t reveal their “secret” yet.)

The culture of fear seems to be gripping many departments in Washington. FOUO feeds this “Revolution of No.”

Maybe this is a tad obvious, but women who VOLUNTEER to serve in the ALL-VOLUNTEER force are volunteering to serve in the military service of choice. Most understand this. Many who have not served get it, too.

But not everyone is trackin’. Recently, a column in the Washington Times newspaper portrayed female servicemembers as victims of the big, bad military conspiracy.

In “Leaving Home and Hearth for Battle: When Women must Fight, America’s Families Lose,” Suzanne Fields wrote, “… some of them are victims of military bureaucrats and high-ranking policymakers who are blind to the values of our culture and deaf to the ancient call of history.”

Huh?

Yeah, we thought Phyllis Schafly, too. Fields used a recent report of a soldier facing legal action because she could not deploy. Her family care plan had fallen through. Actually, her mother brought the child back cross-country and reneged on her promise. While details of this soldier and her unit’s circumstances have been well-publicized, it seems there may have been more going on here with Spec Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother and Army cook, than reports conveyed. (But we digress.)

The Army treated Hutchinson who declined to deploy to Afghanistan with her unit like it would any other soldier. Fields (and it seems most news outlets) found this an outrage, because Hutchinson happens to have a child. (It seems no consideration was given to her fellow soldiers who would have to suck up her workload.) Hutchinson’s story is the basis of Field’s argument that “Motherhood Trumps Military Commitments Every Time.”

Fields seems to argue that women with children be removed from the armed forces. The ancient call of history seems to be that of motherhood. In fact, back in the olden days, parents and grandparents could not fathom a mother serving in any capacity other than mother. (We really can’t fathom she believes this. This post-World War II ideal is not accurate.)

The author drags in the deaths of women (not just mothers) in theater and blames a wink-wink, nudge-nudge agreement between Congress and the Army. Similarly she blames the swell of female servicemembers (Read: Lambs led to slaughter.) on this deal with lawmakers. (There has been no significant increase in percentages of females serving in the past decade.)

Eat More Chicken … Discharge all Moms. You will be doing America a favor.

Defense Secretary and Occasional Superhero Robert M. Gates announced the Navy will be opening service on board submarines to women. It is a move decades behind women’s service aboard surface ships and gender neutralizes nearly all Navy specialties (excluding Navy SEALS and a handful of others).

As required by Title 10, Gates forwarded his notification to Congress, informing lawmakers of the Navy’s intent. Congress has 30 days to act, but once the clock runs out the Navy is free to move forward.

On the heels of Gates’ announcement, the Army felt the need to emerge from the Navy’s wake. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr., declared his service will take a hard look at women’s roles in combat and review current Army policies in that area.

Wow, do you think this is the first time they’ve looked at women in warfare? This from the man canned from combat and “promoted” to his current position? Casey is no luminary, but he seems well-meaning. Maybe the Army will reach the same conclusion about combat exclusion that most already have. But will there be proposed changes in ground combat guidelines, and will they pass the notification test?

One service we did not hear from was, you guessed it—The Boys’ Gun Club. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James T. “Not in My Corps” Conway made no announcement like Casey. In fact, we probably won’t hear from him. His precious Corps has wars to fight, he says. But his over protection of his service may be the thing that’s killing it.

Homosexuals? Women? There has been little progress. (We’re not talking social experiments.) The “I’ve got a war to fight” excuse may be wearing thin. Does the Marine Corps offer something the Army doesn’t? Of course it does, namely light, quick-reaction infantry, but few understand what that something is. The Army is narrowing the gap. It is a bad day in Marineland when the commandant seems bitter and out of touch. Jim, friends on the Hill may be harder to keep, even with guys like Son of Murtha in your legislative office.

That aside, we say, “Nice move,” on the part of the Navy, and, “Way to ride the Navy’s wave,” Army (though it did seem a tad desperate). Both should gain some ground on what seems to be an increasingly isolated and oblivious Marine Corps.

Employing U.S. females to engage the Iraqi and now Afghan women is not a new idea. Small-unit leaders quickly learned storming a home went more smoothly with U.S. women present to keep Muslim women calm. Calm mitigates escalation.

Currently in Afghanistan, teams of women of varying size don their counterinsurgency garb and head into villages to meet with women, distribute medical supplies and glean the latest scoop on up-and-coming sheiks and who planted the latest IEDs and where they might be found.

Small Wars Journal recently published an article critical of U.S. half-hearted attempts in Afghanistan. At issue – the continued practice of ignoring the Afghan female population, fully half the nation.

Despite promising results from the female engagement teams and the push by some for FET units from every climate and culture, Small Wars says U.S. leaders are far from committed, and highlighted four factors that seem to be sabotaging coalition potential.

First are the “die-hard presumptions by battlefield commanders that engaging local women will pay no dividends.” Talking to local women is worth the effort. They wield influence over the family including their husbands and children who are Afghanistan’s future. Women have valuable information about the community, and they are willing to share.

Second is the “hackneyed hypotheses that female engagement teams will offend most Pashtun men.” Afghan Pashtun men like Western women and are not offended by their presence as many believe. They prefer them over U.S. males, seeing U.S. women as a sort of third gender. Whatever, it works. (Could it be the U.S. males who are intimidated by their female counterparts? Gasp! Sounds like one for the Magic Eight Ball.)

Third, crippling the FET effort is the continued “unwillingness to establish full-time FETs made up of volunteers who are given the resources and time to train as professionals should.” The teams are still ad hoc. They are thrown together with people who have other jobs and responsibilities.

Does this imply the FET work is not important enough to warrant full-time teams? Does this hint at the idea that Afghan women are unimportant and, dare we say, the counterinsurgency role of U.S. females equally inconsequential? Does it seem these women provide some gender service for male unit commanders? Creepy. If they took the teams seriously, it might not be so icky.

But the biggest problem may be the “failure to involve FETs in the planning stage of operations, leading to poorly conceived missions.” We say the true culprit is combat (or rather combat exclusion) and the divided gender-specific roles played upon the Afghan stage. During clearing operations, for example, female Marines may be “used” to calm the Afghan women, only to be disbanded when the crucial work is about to begin. Their full counterinsurgent potential is lost and the goodwill garnered is lost. Granted, their units are demanding their return, but Small Wars maintains the FETS should remain in the villages building relationships.

Are U.S. commanders unknowingly sabotaging their own hard-fought gains due to a lack of understanding and myopic approach to complex cultural challenges?

Well, the news out of Afghanistan on this latest “offensive” has been good. Resistance has been light, though sniper activity is on the rise. Regardless, the Marines (and of course NATO and Afghan forces to keep everyone happy) may be adding more tallies to their “Win” column.

So how does the Marine Corps win wars? After seeing what they call the “routing sheet” we are stumped. What percent of these warriors have met this tank ditch? How many have labored under this value-sucking system of 8 ½’x11” sheets with oddly spaced lines and a nonsensical and inconsistent codes (unbroken by the Navajo Code Talkers, they say). It is a demon that destroys creativity and strikes fear in the hearts of once-valued risk takers.

We say very few have spent much time with this cursed convention.

A routing sheet is a cover document for some body of work. It summarizes the information contained within. So why not write a summary? Why? We have routing sheets! Maybe they facilitate staff work and coordination? Hardly. This trail of tears is a means to an end: Those who stand in the path of progress shine (and they alone). These few choke the life out of the bold and the beautiful demanding another space here and one fewer line there. Collaboration via the hallway, phone call, or late-night tryst? Not in this route-sheet hell. It better be on the routing sheet (so heinous an act that the Geneva Conventions dare not mention them). Formatting alone may take more than a week, but the information (the reason that led the doe-eyed and bleating to this slaughter) is ignored.

At first you may shout, “Content! Has anyone read the content?” but you quickly learn few care about the substance and value of your work and see it as a means to your end. On the up side the routing sheet ensures you are either more crafty accomplishing the Corps’ work or you are never again so weak-minded as to take up the fight. (Sadly, the latter may prove true.)

The Routing Sheet. How many will be lost to this crime against substance and efficiency? It may keep the masters and mistresses of the gate relevant, but the talent heads to Wharton.

A fighting organization needs uber-confidence. Pride in self as well as mission are essential. Its players need to get into character for the big show. They require a rhythm. A vibe. Charisma. Sexy works. Lethal is even better.

It seems the Army has broken the code.

Not to regurgitate old news, but the Associated Press has reported on an atypical forward operating base in Afghanistan. It’s called Tombstone, and visitors beware. Tombstone conjures images of gun-slinging outlaws of the Wild West. Sexy? Yeah. And lethal with attitude. It implies operating on the edge; risk (just short of mayhem); us against a larger, collective them. (I’m sure you have other interpretations.)

The gunslingers at Tombstone are deep in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand province. One sergeant major said of the name “It’s got pizzazz.”

It has a lot more than pizzazz.

Tombstone’s OK Corral houses teams of Stryker vehicles. There is a likeness of gun-totin’ lawman Wyatt Earp at the base’s entrance. The civilians there also have embraced the theme adding a number of Wild West touches. There are door signs reading “Long Horn Saloon” and “Big Nose Kate’s”. “The Crystal Palace Saloon“, pulled right from 1881 Tombstone, is where soldiers hang, smoke, tell lies. “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters of the likes of Butch Cassidy, Jesse James, and the Sundance Kid adorn the dining hall.

Some say Afghanistan reminds them of the American West desert. But we think it is more than that. Another repro sign reads, “Notice! To Thieves, Thugs, Fakirs, and Bunko-Steerers … If found within the limits of this City after TEN O’CLOCK p.m., this night, you will be invited to attend a GRAND NECK-TIE PARTY, the expense of which will be borne by 100 Substantial Citizens.”

Gallows humor.

Base themes typically are more somber, sometimes named after the fallen, or as in the case of neighboring Camp Leatherneck, the Corps seems to draw upon its proven narcissism.

This is one to study in retrospect, and top behaviorists would enjoy studying Tombstone and the cultures of these far-flung outposts. Sure “cowboy” may have its negative connotations, but if it gives these gunslingers a much-needed edge, maybe others should take notice.

Viva la Tombstone. Yee-hah.