Supporting The Troops: Is It Possible To Do Too Much?

During my "hiatus" I had set aside a few things things that I thought might eventually be worthy of comment. Most of those seem a bit dated by now, overcome by further developments. But one exception is an op-ed piece by Max Boot of the LA Times entitled Our Enemies Aren't Drinking Lattes.

Returning from Iraq and elsewhere, Boot was surprised, impressed and a bit disturbed by the creature comforts available to our soldiers:

In the past few months, I have traveled across U.S. Central Command's area of operations — a vast domain stretching from the deserts of Arabia to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Everywhere, I have found massive bases fortified with endless rows of concrete barriers and stocked with every convenience known to 21st century Americans.

Some front-line units continue to operate out of spartan outposts where a hot meal is a luxury and flush toilets unknown. But growing numbers of troops live on giant installations complete with Wal-Mart-style post exchanges, movie theaters, swimming pools, gyms, fast-food eateries (Subway, Burger King, Cinnabon) and vast chow halls offering fresh-baked pies and multiple flavors of ice cream. Troops increasingly live in dorm-style quarters (called "chews," for "containerized housing units") complete with TVs, mini-refrigerators, air conditioning/heating units and other luxuries unimaginable to previous generations of GIs.

Boot is obviously torn by this, as am I. After all, what sort of venal, unpatriotic, scrooge could possibly object to providing our men and women in harm's way with anything that that might mitigate even somewhat the hardship, dangers and loneliness they are enduring on our behalf?

But there are costs involved in supporting our troops in this way (and to this extent) that are enough to give anyone pause.

The first of these is the threat isolation and relative privilege poses to the mission itself. "Successful counterinsurgency operations require troops to go out among the people, gathering intelligence and building goodwill. But few Iraqis are allowed on these bases, and few Americans are allowed out — and then only in forbidding armored convoys." The fact that our troops can and do spend most of their time in bases that provide security and creature comforts unimaginable to most Iraqis seems at least as likely to build resentment and jealously as it does gratitude among those we are trying to help. It also serves to reinforce the essential "alieness" of Americans. We say we are "in it with them," but in fact we are not. To the extent this envy and alieness hampers our ability to fight the insurgency, it at least extends the time over which our commitment must be maintained and may well doom that effort entirely.

But the even more compelling problem is that people are dying -- literally -- in the effort to ensure that Joe and Jane GI have lattes and Hagen Daz in Iraq. Boot cites some stunning statistics:

According to Centcom, there are 20,000 combat service support troops in its area of operations and another 80,000 contracted civilians. . . . U.S. troops in those countries consume 882,000 liters of water and 2.4 million gallons of fuel every day, plus tons of other supplies that have to be transported across dangerous war zones. Centcom has more than 3,000 trucks delivering supplies and another 2,400 moving fuel — each one a target that has to be protected.

. As Boot enthused about the latte he had just finished, a Marine captain brought him back to earth with this question: "I wonder how many men had to die to get those coffee beans to Baqubah?" And I wonder how much comfort it provides to the parents/spouses/children of soldiers killed to know that their sons/daughters/husbands/wives/fathers/mothers died in the effort to get cherry pie filling to the troops at the front.

Boot ends with an interesting observation:

How to explain this seemingly counterproductive behavior? My theory is that any organization prefers to focus on what it does well. In the case of the Pentagon, that's logistics. Our ability to move supplies is unparalleled in military history. Fighting guerrillas, on the other hand, has never been a mission that has found much favor with the armed forces.