Ping to anyone and everyone interested in military history of the US campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 thru today, 14 June 2017.
I recommend that folks interested in why this problem still exists read the article by Mr. Peter Sleeth, that he wrote in 2012 for ProPublica.com Please do not do an auto-matic criticism of ProPublica as with out its support Mr. Sleeth would not have been able to uncover the ongoing problem with RMDA not collecting Army unit records; I’m NOT talking about individual soldier personnel files and medical records, those are being preserved at a 99% rate.
https://www.propublica.org/article/army-says-war-records-gap-is-real-launches-recovery-effort
Unfortunately the Army did not carry through with forcing RMDA to collect the records, but told CMH to continue doing it and for units to send any records they may have saved to CMH. Please note that nearly all of those records are still classified and will remain so until CENTCOM and ARCENT declassify them. CMH does NOT have the authority to declassify any of the records it still maintains. Also it has transferred all of the records to RMDA for transfer to the National Archives and Records Administration.
As a USAF historian, I appreciate the dilemma. Attempting to capture just the records from one unit is almost impossible. Our histories were about 10 gig and tens of thousands of files.
With just a handful of Historians in the field, we can’t process even a tiny percentage of records. The records from WWII were meticulously maintained. The unit clerks and their arcane filing systems put our modern systems to shame in many regards.
Add the Combatant Command Structure with its unwieldy Joint Service agreements, and the exponential increase in records, and it’s amazing if we end up with anything useful. It will be decades before real historians piece together a narrative that shows this period in context. It will also take a special talent to sift out all the propaganda.