Posted on 11/21/2003 3:53:16 PM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
CAMP UDAIRI, Kuwait - This being the Army, there's no shortage of different kinds of tents. There are SICUPs, GP Modulars, Crews, DRASHes and Mobiflexes.
But the most important tent in the first Stryker brigade is a custom-made number that comes from a Seattle tent maker. And it cost a quarter of a million dollars less than what the Army would have paid to have it made.
"We saved a lot of money by going commercial," said Sgt. Maj. Tim Stinnet, who worked on the design with Rainier Industries.
A work party of soldiers hoisted the thing this week at the brigade's temporary headquarters about 10 miles south of the Iraqi border.
The 60-foot-by-40-foot structure shelters the brigade's tactical operations center. The TOC - they say "tock" - is a 24-hour beehive where all the brigade's activities are planned and coordinated.
It's the workplace for about 90 soldiers and houses millions of dollars worth of computers, radios, satellite receivers and other high-tech gear.
But more about all that in later stories. This one is about the tent.
Stryker headquarters troops erected it this week at their Camp Udairi base for just the second time. The first was at October's last predeployment field exercise at Fort Lewis.
It's different from the collection of smaller, modular tents that made up the previous TOC. The interior was kind of like a rabbit warren, all narrow passageways and a claustrophobic feeling.
Stinnet said the idea is to encourage people to talk face-to-face as much as via their computers.
"We were interfacing with digits rather than people," he said. "We think it's going to work out a lot better for us."
Stinnet said he was referred to Rainier Industries by others at Fort Lewis. Jessica Morgan, the company's marketing director, said it supplied the post with about 30 training tents in 2000.
The company also has worked with the Coast Guard and the Navy at Bremerton, Everett and Bangor, Morgan said. The company got its start in 1896 selling tents and canvas to the miners heading north in the Alaska Klondike gold rush.
Stinnet said Rainier Industries delivered the tent about three weeks after his first meeting with the company's Pat Tool, where he sketched out a design.
Stinnet separately contracted with a Vermont company for thick, plastic 2-foot-by-4-foot interlocking sections to make up the floor. It includes channels for wiring and cable.
When soldiers put the tent together for the first time and realized the addition of the floor made the walls too short, Stinnet said Rainier Industries brought sewing machines out to Fort Lewis to tack on a 12-inch skirt on each wall section.
The tent, made of thick Army vinyl - olive drab on the outside, white on the inside - cost $24,000, Stinnet said. The floor cost $27,000.
A similar-sized setup from the Army procurement inventory would likely cost on the order of $300,000, he said.
Even at that, the tent and the floor are just a fraction of the $60 million worth of hardware in the TOC. That includes its intelligence and communications sections, which are housed in separate, adjacent tents.
The new structure has its drawbacks. For one, it takes longer to put up.
Staff Sgt. Gerald McClendon said troops could raise the old tent and have the TOC running in 3 1/2 hours. With this one they're shooting for four to five hours.
But set up properly it allows no light to leak out, it's got combination heaters and air conditioners on three sides and it does the job against the wind and rain - not that they'll encounter too much rain over here.
"It's impervious to the weather," said Master Sgt. Michael Van Engen. "It's really good stuff."
Michael Gilbert: mjgilbert41@yahoo.com
(Published 12:01AM, November 21st, 2003)
YGBSM!
All this for one brigade headquarters. Set ups like this make micromanagement possible.
Good thing the Soviets went out of business. This circus would have been toast. Hope we never have to fight anybody that can do Radio-Electronic Combat.
How would you like to be the Headquarters Comedian for this Charlie Foxtrot?
My brigrade toc work out of hummv's and several gp small's and never stayed in place more than six hours.
They have forgetten past lessons.
Sometimes it seems to me that nobody in the chain of command remembers how things used to be done. If they do, they aren't sharing their experiences very well. There doesn't appear to be much institutional memory. I hope they don't have to reinvent the wheel and learn painful lessons the hard way, particularly if they are lessons that were already learned by previous generations of American soldiers on other battlefields.
They saved the taxpayers something like 10K per unit.
Such initiative is to be encouraged, nay, rewarded.
I still don't think the Stryker is a good buy. But the tent is.
I am sure it is a lovely tent, and I am glad the Brigade Sergeant Major got a good deal on it.
I am aghast that one motorized rifle brigade would set up a TOC so huge that a tent like that is a good idea. I used to run a tank battalion TOC and work in an armored cavalry regiment TOC, and this Styker Brigade TOC as discribed could not survive in any threat environment I ever trained for.
This beats Forepaugh's Double Ringed Circus.
Point and correction well taken.
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The chain of command disposes of veterans who remember. That way their command idiocy will not be announced.
At the Armor School, the boast is how all the digitized equipment makes the TOC obsolete. It now fits into a Bradley or now a Stryker. God Save our poor soldiers in this outfit.
Hell's donkeys!
What idiot came up with this new 'doctrine'?
The Table of Command is a vital concept. If the C.O. is killed or otherwise neutralized, the X.O. takes command.
If all the staff officers are wiped out, the senior NCO takes command, and so on down to the least senior private.
The point of all this is that if the enemy kills off the leadership, our forces will not be a disorganized clusterfreak.
The responsibility passes to each man in the chain.
If the last man is in command he still has command and a mission to accomplish.
Do the S3 and S2 even have Strykers? Is there a Stryker equivalent to the M577? Who is running the war while this circus tears down, packs up, moves, and sets up again? 5 hours!
How many generators does it take to run that high-tech Buck Rogers War Machine Puzzle Palace?
This is really starting to sound like a real goat rope.
Doesn't sound like they are following the old doctrine of shoot move and communiction.
Then why is this circus tent being erected in the Kuwaiti desert?
Electromagnetic Pulse. Has the Army forgotten what that is and what is does to electronic gear?
They are getting so dependent on technology that if the systems go down they won't be able to function in degraded mode.
This circus tent is a rocket magnet.
The Stryker brigade combat team.
Guess the S3 does get a Stryker.
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