thedrifter
04-19-04, 06:51 AM
04-15-2004
From the Editor:
Mail Call: A Disturbing Report from the GAO
Mail Call: A Disturbing Report from the GAO
By Ed Offley
Dear Any Service Member:
If you are wondering why 12 months after Operation Iraqi Freedom your mail is still arriving late in Iraq or Afghanistan, I can tell you why: The Department of Defense doesn’t care whether those parcels or letters from home get to you in a timely manner.
Don’t take my word for it. After a seven-month review of how the U.S. Central Command organized and ordered the execution of a postal delivery plan for the 250,000 troops who invaded Iraq, the congressional General Accounting Office (GAO) this week released a blistering report that confirms in dreary detail why so much of your mail has consistently arrived weeks late, if at all. (To read or download the full report, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Long-standing Problems Hampering Mail Delivery Need to Be Resolved,” go to the GAO website, click on the “Today’s Reports” button and open “April 14.”)
Here are some rough numbers: During calendar year 2003, which included the primary surge of U.S. forces to Southwest Asia, the 42-day military campaign to topple the Ba’athist regime and post-combat occupation, American families and friends of the troops sent more than 65 million pounds of mail to the Iraqi AOR. This averaged out at 377,000 pounds per day, the equivalent of forty tractor-trailer loads of mail.
Within the first weeks of the conflict, the White House and congressional offices were bombarded with calls and letters from angry family members who were learning that the gift packages, cards and letters they had sent to their loved ones were failing to arrive. Their complaints were as effective as shouting into a sandstorm.
Some of the problems were inevitable due to the nature of the war, the GAO found. For the first three weeks of OIF, as Army, Marine Corps and British units raced up the Euphrates River valley, CENTCOM leaders ordered a ban on mail truck shipments from Bahrain and Kuwait until mid-April in order to maximize the shipment of critical supplies such as ammunition and fuel. And unlike Operation Desert Storm 12 years earlier, the combat and support units were dispersed over a much greater area, making timely mail deliveries to the troop level far more difficult.
But the GAO found serious structural flaws in the military postal system established for OIF that cannot be explained away as the product of the “fog of war” or exigencies of combat. They included:
Inadequate Field Supervision: CENTCOM in an October 2002 planning conference directed that a Joint Postal Center (an Army unit) be established to oversee postal operations in the theater of operations as a single-service manager. However, this unit arrived late in the operation, was seriously undermanned, and failed to receive sufficient support from the several of the services.
Delayed Reserve Deployments: The OIF operations plan called on U.S. Army Reserve postal units mobilized for Iraq to deploy to the region in the first 10 days of the force buildup in early 2003. However, postwar studies showed that some postal troops were held back at their mobilization stations for up to 130 days, with the average delay being 69 days.
Poorly-trained Personnel: As in the first Gulf War, reserve postal troops arrived in theater “largely untrained in establishing and managing military postal operations” because peacetime because of insufficient peacetime training opportunities.
Equipment Shortages: Postal troops at mail receiving stations in Bahrain and Kuwait did not have sufficient amounts of heavy material-handling equipment such as forklifts and airline baggage offloading gear. Postal troops throughout the AOR did not have sufficient amounts of postal handling equipment and supplies. For the fist month of the war, CENTCOM failed to provide postal units with trucks to transship mail from the ports of entry to forward-deployed units, forcing the overworked units to scramble for local charters.
Poor Communications: Postal units lacked effective communications gear that was essential to coordinate mail deliveries with forward-based combat units, making deliveries even more difficult.
Bad Planning: Postal planners seriously underestimate the volume of mail that they would have to deliver to the troops. Officials calculated that each service member would receive on average .5 pounds of mail per day, but the initial mail surge was “closer to 5 pounds per day,” the report stated. Moreover, 80 percent of mail delivered came in the form of parcels rather than “flat” mail. The influx of mail reached a maximum monthly rate of 11 million pounds for the OIF troops, in contrast to a 10-million-pound monthly maximum for the Desert Storm force, which was twice the size of the 2003 invasion force.
Insufficient System Monitoring: The GAO found, and the Defense Department agreed, that the existing mail delivery tracking system was totally ineffective and could not deliver even an approximate assessment of how the system was performing. As a poor alternative, GAO investigators interviewed 127 military personnel at random to devise a gauge of mail delivery effectiveness.
Even that anecdotal effort produced a bleak judgment on the wartime mail system: Half of the troops interviewed said they did not receive any mail at all for the first four weeks of the war, with some reporting mail shipment delays of up to four months. About 80 percent of those interviewed said they were aware of mail that had been sent to them that they had never received.
In June 2003, Marine Corps officials at Camp Pendleton, Calif., received a rail shipment of 100,000 pounds of mail destined for the I MEF and other combat units that never reached the troops. It took another two months to sort out the material and get it to the rightful recipients.
Post-combat Failures: After the end of major combat operations last spring, unit rotations back to the United States and redeployments within Iraq further fouled up the mail deliveries. One example cited by the GAO investigators involved the 3rd Infantry Division, which had spearheaded the invasion:
“Mail delivery to the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division was stopped when word was received that the division was about to redeploy [to Fort Stewart, Ga.]. When this plan changed and the division did not redeploy, mail started to flow again. The division was told several times that it would be redeployed and then it did not; each time, when deployment was thought to be imminent, mail delivery was stopped. This created a backlog. When the 3rd Infantry Division finally did redeploy, the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division stayed behind and was assigned to the 1st Armored Division. But this information was not disseminated, and the 1st Brigade received no more mail while in theater.”
The GAO report concluded: “The untimely delivery of mail to troops overseas involved in contingency operations is an important mechanism to boost morale among service members and their families and friends. Without taking action to resolve the identified issues … mail delivery will continue to suffer …. Past experience has shown that postal operations have not received command attention or been designated a priority.”
The report contains a number of clear and specific recommendations for modernizing and improving the military mail system, including the creation of a performance tracking system that will accurately gauge mail delivery performance; creation of a single agency to manage all services’ mail; and a recommendation that DoD share after-action reports with all of the combatant command headquarters to forestall future problems. The DoD concurred with all three recommendations.
However, military people and their families should take this with a grain of salt. When GAO investigators contacted the Joint Staff’s Joint Center for Lessons Learned – the office that coordinates after-action reports and “lessons learned” studies from major operations like OIF – this is what they were told:
“[T]hey informed us that military postal operations have not been identified as an issue area for lessons learned and they do not anticipate that postal operations will become one.”
They still don’t care.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=33&rnd=903.7357590671073
Ellie
From the Editor:
Mail Call: A Disturbing Report from the GAO
Mail Call: A Disturbing Report from the GAO
By Ed Offley
Dear Any Service Member:
If you are wondering why 12 months after Operation Iraqi Freedom your mail is still arriving late in Iraq or Afghanistan, I can tell you why: The Department of Defense doesn’t care whether those parcels or letters from home get to you in a timely manner.
Don’t take my word for it. After a seven-month review of how the U.S. Central Command organized and ordered the execution of a postal delivery plan for the 250,000 troops who invaded Iraq, the congressional General Accounting Office (GAO) this week released a blistering report that confirms in dreary detail why so much of your mail has consistently arrived weeks late, if at all. (To read or download the full report, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: Long-standing Problems Hampering Mail Delivery Need to Be Resolved,” go to the GAO website, click on the “Today’s Reports” button and open “April 14.”)
Here are some rough numbers: During calendar year 2003, which included the primary surge of U.S. forces to Southwest Asia, the 42-day military campaign to topple the Ba’athist regime and post-combat occupation, American families and friends of the troops sent more than 65 million pounds of mail to the Iraqi AOR. This averaged out at 377,000 pounds per day, the equivalent of forty tractor-trailer loads of mail.
Within the first weeks of the conflict, the White House and congressional offices were bombarded with calls and letters from angry family members who were learning that the gift packages, cards and letters they had sent to their loved ones were failing to arrive. Their complaints were as effective as shouting into a sandstorm.
Some of the problems were inevitable due to the nature of the war, the GAO found. For the first three weeks of OIF, as Army, Marine Corps and British units raced up the Euphrates River valley, CENTCOM leaders ordered a ban on mail truck shipments from Bahrain and Kuwait until mid-April in order to maximize the shipment of critical supplies such as ammunition and fuel. And unlike Operation Desert Storm 12 years earlier, the combat and support units were dispersed over a much greater area, making timely mail deliveries to the troop level far more difficult.
But the GAO found serious structural flaws in the military postal system established for OIF that cannot be explained away as the product of the “fog of war” or exigencies of combat. They included:
Inadequate Field Supervision: CENTCOM in an October 2002 planning conference directed that a Joint Postal Center (an Army unit) be established to oversee postal operations in the theater of operations as a single-service manager. However, this unit arrived late in the operation, was seriously undermanned, and failed to receive sufficient support from the several of the services.
Delayed Reserve Deployments: The OIF operations plan called on U.S. Army Reserve postal units mobilized for Iraq to deploy to the region in the first 10 days of the force buildup in early 2003. However, postwar studies showed that some postal troops were held back at their mobilization stations for up to 130 days, with the average delay being 69 days.
Poorly-trained Personnel: As in the first Gulf War, reserve postal troops arrived in theater “largely untrained in establishing and managing military postal operations” because peacetime because of insufficient peacetime training opportunities.
Equipment Shortages: Postal troops at mail receiving stations in Bahrain and Kuwait did not have sufficient amounts of heavy material-handling equipment such as forklifts and airline baggage offloading gear. Postal troops throughout the AOR did not have sufficient amounts of postal handling equipment and supplies. For the fist month of the war, CENTCOM failed to provide postal units with trucks to transship mail from the ports of entry to forward-deployed units, forcing the overworked units to scramble for local charters.
Poor Communications: Postal units lacked effective communications gear that was essential to coordinate mail deliveries with forward-based combat units, making deliveries even more difficult.
Bad Planning: Postal planners seriously underestimate the volume of mail that they would have to deliver to the troops. Officials calculated that each service member would receive on average .5 pounds of mail per day, but the initial mail surge was “closer to 5 pounds per day,” the report stated. Moreover, 80 percent of mail delivered came in the form of parcels rather than “flat” mail. The influx of mail reached a maximum monthly rate of 11 million pounds for the OIF troops, in contrast to a 10-million-pound monthly maximum for the Desert Storm force, which was twice the size of the 2003 invasion force.
Insufficient System Monitoring: The GAO found, and the Defense Department agreed, that the existing mail delivery tracking system was totally ineffective and could not deliver even an approximate assessment of how the system was performing. As a poor alternative, GAO investigators interviewed 127 military personnel at random to devise a gauge of mail delivery effectiveness.
Even that anecdotal effort produced a bleak judgment on the wartime mail system: Half of the troops interviewed said they did not receive any mail at all for the first four weeks of the war, with some reporting mail shipment delays of up to four months. About 80 percent of those interviewed said they were aware of mail that had been sent to them that they had never received.
In June 2003, Marine Corps officials at Camp Pendleton, Calif., received a rail shipment of 100,000 pounds of mail destined for the I MEF and other combat units that never reached the troops. It took another two months to sort out the material and get it to the rightful recipients.
Post-combat Failures: After the end of major combat operations last spring, unit rotations back to the United States and redeployments within Iraq further fouled up the mail deliveries. One example cited by the GAO investigators involved the 3rd Infantry Division, which had spearheaded the invasion:
“Mail delivery to the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division was stopped when word was received that the division was about to redeploy [to Fort Stewart, Ga.]. When this plan changed and the division did not redeploy, mail started to flow again. The division was told several times that it would be redeployed and then it did not; each time, when deployment was thought to be imminent, mail delivery was stopped. This created a backlog. When the 3rd Infantry Division finally did redeploy, the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division stayed behind and was assigned to the 1st Armored Division. But this information was not disseminated, and the 1st Brigade received no more mail while in theater.”
The GAO report concluded: “The untimely delivery of mail to troops overseas involved in contingency operations is an important mechanism to boost morale among service members and their families and friends. Without taking action to resolve the identified issues … mail delivery will continue to suffer …. Past experience has shown that postal operations have not received command attention or been designated a priority.”
The report contains a number of clear and specific recommendations for modernizing and improving the military mail system, including the creation of a performance tracking system that will accurately gauge mail delivery performance; creation of a single agency to manage all services’ mail; and a recommendation that DoD share after-action reports with all of the combatant command headquarters to forestall future problems. The DoD concurred with all three recommendations.
However, military people and their families should take this with a grain of salt. When GAO investigators contacted the Joint Staff’s Joint Center for Lessons Learned – the office that coordinates after-action reports and “lessons learned” studies from major operations like OIF – this is what they were told:
“[T]hey informed us that military postal operations have not been identified as an issue area for lessons learned and they do not anticipate that postal operations will become one.”
They still don’t care.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=33&rnd=903.7357590671073
Ellie