| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq |
| CJTF7 and Coalition Provisional Authority Update |
| 2004-01-29 |
| I overhead a gentleman, perhaps one of you, saying, "What is a COSCOM?" So perhaps that’s a good place to start. I’m privileged to command what is called a Corps Support Command. We have delivered an awful lot of fuel -- 186 million gallons -- and 330 million gallons of water. Four-and-a-half million cases of bottled water is what we have taken out to our soldiers, and 100,000 maintenance work orders. So we fix our equipment to keep it at a pretty high readiness level for what we’re going to do, and I will talk about that a little bit later. And then finally, we order a lot of repair parts to keep that equipment running: 4.3 million requisitions to request things, to get repair parts. But that’s kind of dry also, so perhaps it’s helpful if I put it another way. There is a city in the United States of America called Springfield, Missouri in the center of our country, has about 150,000 people. We have provided enough food to feed everybody in Springfield, Missouri three meals a day for a year. We have delivered enough fuel for 40,000 automobiles every day. We have got enough water out there to fill 3.2 million one-liter bottles, and everybody in Las Vegas, Nevada -- all 500,000 people in Las Vegas -- can take a shower every day with the water that our soldiers make. And we repair 400 pieces of equipment daily, turning them around and sending them out and getting it moving. All right? Next, we have a saying that nothing happens till something moves because I can do all that, but I have to move it someplace to get it to the soldiers. As you heard before, we operate from the Turkish border all the way down to Kuwait, and that’s how we do it. We have driven 26 million miles this year. We have over 2,000 trucks on the road every day, and we will talk about those types of trucks. Seven thousand of those moves that we do every year are called heavy equipment moves. We move rather large tanks. We don’t want to drive them on the roadways, we don’t want to drive the bulldozers on the roadways, so we will put them up on heavy equipment transporters and move them around in order to save the road networks. We have been very flattered and happy to be part of the stand up of the Iraqi railroad again, and we have had over 350 rail movements just in the past four to six months as we have stood up and gotten that moving, and it has been a great asset to us also. And then we have put 8,800 flights in our Iraqi airfields that we’re around and utilize. But to put it another way, if I had to put that in other terms, like 8,700 trips -- the 26 million miles is 8,700 trips from New York to San Francisco. We have a large company in the United States called Wal-Mart, and they have 3,000 trucks throughout the United States. I put 2,000 trucks on the road every day, and that’s a pretty significant thing we think. We have moved 210,000 tons of equipment. That’s 35 days on the trains -- that’s 35 days of Amtrak going Boston to Washington every day. And that’s 20 flights every day in and out of Los Angeles Airport -- 20 days of flying in and out is how many flights we have run. And I’ll start over on your left-hand side. That’s where we were in June of 2003, when we first started this operation. Our soldiers were eating predominantly the Meals Ready to Eat -- the MREs, we call them, the packaged food -- or a heat-and-serve ration we call a field ration. We have soldiers on two bottles of water per soldier per day, about 3 liters of water per day, and the rest of the water had to be provided by water we’d produce and we’d make. Less than 20 percent of our force had the new-style body armor, and we only had what we would call green trucks, or United States Army trucks, our own organic trucks driven by our soldiers. Those were the only trucks we had available to us to run the operation for logistics. And that’s where we were at in June of 2003. Since that time, what you see on the other chart here, on the yellow part, is where we are now. Eighty-two percent of our soldiers are eating in dining facilities that are contracted. We have four bottles of water per soldier per day. A hundred percent of the force that we have has the new-style body armor. And we now have United States Army, we have contractor trucks, and we have trucks from the Iraqi nationals who are helping us, also. |
| Posted by:Chuck Simmins |
| #1 The guys that are running this would sure as heck have jobs waiting for them when they retire... |
| Posted by: Pappy 2004-1-29 9:25:36 PM |