US Spends $20bn a year on airconditioning the desert

[gaelic cowboy]

It's far, far more complex than you make it out to be.

And in other news, we spend a billion dollars on water.

- Open Tents don't work in Afghanistan because of the wind.
- Open Tents don't work in Afghanistan because of COIN, which means we hire locals to come onto the base and do everything from clean to serve us dinner, and tents are not secure, and the average soldiers has @10k worth of equipment issued to them, not including their weapon, and we can't have local nationals hob knobbing in our tents where our stuff is sitting out, it needs to be locked in some sort of hard structure.
- As already pointed out, the basic load is @80 pounds or more, depending on your situation and mission. I have had up to 130. I disagree with this as much as the next guy, and would rather be mobile and fast than wear a bunch of crap that will won't save me from a bomb and won't be of any use after a couple shots with a 7.62. If we carried less stuff we would also drink less water, which we easily spend just as much time and resources acquiring and transporting as we do fuel.
- Open tents don't work because of Opsec
- Open tents don't work because of ROE and the TTP of the enemy. They fire mortars and rockets and disappear into the night. Thats how they roll.

Do we have some tents? Yes. But not open. Most of them have been spray foamed.

Anyway, thats just a few reasons tents won't work

How Pakistan plays a part in this is another thread altogether.

Then surely cavity walls are the way to go if you cant use tents.

[Strike For The South]

Clearly some of you have never spent time in this kind of heat

Your opinoins are invalid

[HoreTore]

No army in history has ever been able to use money efficiently.

I contribute it mostly to laughably incompetent logistical officers.

[al Roumi]

No army in history has ever been able to use money efficiently.

I contribute it mostly to laughably incompetent logistical officers.

An Army isn't set up to be spend thrift, it will swallow whatever budget it can get.

Blaming loggies is also silly, they just move stuff around and order the next batch from a supplier on a centrally-negotiated contract.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Actually, that is precisely what armies are: spendthrift. Just like any large government program armies are not exempt from a relatively careless attitude towards where the money comes from or what exactly it is spent on. The relatively static way governments budget their funds means that they don't actually have to do work for their allowance, instead they're paid in advance on the assumption that they will carry out their duties. Also what makes this particularly difficult with armies compared to other government programs is that they're not nearly as easily bullied into producing a decent balance sheet for a change.

Turns out the NHS head of IT & head beancounter are useless? Put a moratorium on any deals they signed off. (which incidentally is what happened to the NHS).
Turns out the various chiefs are more concerned with maintaining a large amount of useless junk and rank than with actually managing a war efficiently? Oops... a big reorg is required and good luck with that.

[Hosakawa Tito]

No army government bureaucracy in history has ever been able to use money efficiently.

I contribute it mostly to laughably incompetent logistical officers politicians and the fools who vote them into office.

Fixed that for ya. My guvmint department gives me a fan and trains us to think cool thoughts.

[HoreTore]

Fixed that for ya. My guvmint department gives me a fan and trains us to think cool thoughts.

Ah yes....

As an example, the government-run Statoil has a much larger and more inefficient bureaucracy than Shell.


......no, wait, they don't. Perhaps the amount of bureaucracy has more to do with the size of a company, rather than its ownership status?

And at any rate, the army is in a league of its own when it comes to ridiculous amounts of aste and inefficiency even when compared to other parts of the government. And it's only logical when logistics is handled by people who came in interested in combat, not moving stuff around. I'd say the army would improve greatly if they moved everyone currently employed in logistics over to regulqr combat units, and hired people who are actually specialized in logistics, to do its logistics.

Ah well. Wasting money and manpower seems to be the army's primary objective...

[Major Robert Dump]

It goes far deeper than logistics. For example, on emight be surprised at the obnoxiously small amount of planes and choppers we make due with here. I'm not gonna give numbers for obvious reasons, but it quite literally can take a week to get fly one person from 1 base to another 30 miles away, and that is with movement requests put in 3 weeks in advance. It's far easier to convoy :(

Lets not forget the loads on contractors who have been doing for 10 years now what privates could be doing.

Lets not also forget the auxilliary costs that go into the war:

- Not a standard war, so loads of money spent on "development" "buying the enemy" and feel good projects
- The US quite literally feeds everyone. Everyone on the base, to include the majority of local nationals who are hired to work on the base. This creates vast amounts of abuse and negelct, and people walk out of the DFACS daily with arms full of food. The US also pays for all the housing, most of the fuel, building materials and so on. I won't go into detail and will save it for my Afghan thread, but lets just say everytime the Polish soldiers strip a latrine of all its fixtures and steal the hot water tanks from the laundry so they can make hot tubs, well, its the US that pays for in both money and inconvenience. I might also mention we feed the Afghan army and police. We spend tens of millions a year giving them HALAL MREs, on top of all the raw goods we send to their remote DFACS. We are building a military here from the ground up, while supporting the militaries and contracting corps from all over the world. Gay.
- Propping up the Afghan currency with money infusions that get pilfered by officials. Lets just say very few tears have been shed by US forces over the death of brother K.

[HoreTore]

To be fair, MRD, my point is based on my experience with the norwegian army. I don't claim to be familiar with the inner workings of the US army.

[jirisys]

Clearly some of you have never spent time in this kind of heat

Your opinoins are invalid

I have... Many times.

Your opinoin is invalid! My opinoin is valid so... Everyone's opinoin is valid... But so is yours, but then it isn't, and mine is... ad infinitum

~Jirisys ()

[classical_hero]

I have... Many times.

Your opinoin is invalid! My opinoin is valid so... Everyone's opinoin is valid... But so is yours, but then it isn't, and mine is... ad infinitum

~Jirisys ()

[Major Robert Dump]

I just found out, by the way, that the DOD pays $2.25 per bottle for bottled water produced in Afghanistan.
It's not even shipped across the world. The water is from Asia, and Afghans bottle it. Yay for creating jobs.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Clearly some of you have never spent time in this kind of heat

Your opinoins are invalid

I've just paid top dollar to go swimming in the Gulf of Mexico this September. And not for your omnipresent airconditioning, freezing my poor behind off all day long.

I want heat. A sunstroke. Scorched skin. I'm not in the South until I get my ninety-five fahrenheit with ninety-six humidity.

[Brenus]

"No army in history has ever been able to use money efficiently." What? What about R&R? Soldiers are good in spending money...

[Strike For The South]

I've just paid top dollar to go swimming in the Gulf of Mexico this September. And not for your omnipresent airconditioning, freezing my poor behind off all day long.

I want heat. A sunstroke. Scorched skin. I'm not in the South until I get my ninety-five fahrenheit with ninety-six humidity.

95 is an overnight temp

I know you're just being the wonderful thing that is you but the fact of the matter is this heat incapacitates people and their abilities

The article is nothing more than Northern European tripe assuming that 100 degrees is no different than 80

[Major Robert Dump]

Then surely cavity walls are the way to go if you cant use tents.

Thats way too much effort man. When you have a choice to build your own huts out of surplus lumber or wait 7 months for a contractor to do it, your gonna scrounge what you can so you can have a roof. And just because a contractor does it doesn't mean it will be good, primarily because its a profit game and they hire unqualified Afghans to do the work. Back to COIN.

We all know the Army doesn't plan this far ahead. This war didn't start as a green war, and both it and Iraq went heavy on contractors because contractors make sense for short engagements but not for a decade-long affair. I'm not kidding when I say it takes 7 months to get something simple built