Not that it makes it much better, but I'm going to assume gross negligence and incompetence until deliberate malice is proven.
What the story sounds like is that whoever is in charge of feeding the Guardsmen pushed out a hasty and poorly worded catering contract that got picked up by a company that couldn't actually fulfill it's end of the deal and is just trying to fake it. The company gets X dollars per meal delivered, but they don't have facilities or staff to actually serve X full meals correctly each meal time and supply chains for food service are already screwed up so their normal shortcut meals aren't available.
Once the Guard takes delivery of the meals, it counts as delivered, so they chance it, over and over again. Dump and stir from tin cans without checking to see if the can opener left metal shavings on the food, don't check meat temps because the next batch has to go in to the ovens, menus are probably next to non-existent and rarely followed because of supply problems and the pace of delivery.
It could be sabotage, or sabotage could be a part of the gross negligence and incompetence, but I'd bet if there were still actual investigate reporters out there, it wouldn't be too hard to get to the bottom of what is happening.
Perhaps, but I believe any food product for government use / consumption falls under the USDA and there is a USDA inspector onsite supervising all product during production, so if it wasn’t malfeasance, the USDA inspector is in a lot of trouble. As I said, all product goes through very sensitive metal detectors prior to packaging. Any metallic objects, even the smallest metal shavings
is detected and an alarm sounds. There is the rare occurance of one serving that escapes detection but virtually impossible for more than that unless the metal detectors are not working or malfeasance prior to packaging.
Just going off what I learned from my ex-wife.
I would tend to agree on negligence over malice due to contract award to local lowest bidder (or to politically connected) without any due diligence before award to see if the vendor was capable. During gulf war 1 run up i was sent down to Wilmington port facilty from fort Bragg for various guard and hey you duties one of which involved me standing at the highway exit in full uniform and road vest to make sure convoys from Bragg actually took the right exit (think this was in july or August and sucked standing there for hours sunburned on the parts skin that showed and a line on my head here my beret marked a straight line between burned and light skin ). The army contracted with a local diner to supply our meals and they weren’t really great (mostly too little food was the biggest problem we had but i dont remember any raw chicken though). The BN SGM checked on us one day and all of us told him we were all mostly starving until we could go find extra food (probably fast food stuff) after each shift. A day or so after that i think he went and lit a fire under some rear ends as we started to get meals that were more in line for what we needed.