By the way, I was unclear in my point about how it’s easier to do that with conscripts. I didn’t mean the professionals won’t do it on the day, just that you might end up paying for it at recruiting and reenlistment time, and that the opportunity cost of having a skilled soldier dig in rear areas is higher than the opportunity cost of having an unskilled soldier do it. Similarly the USAF could have their pilots do more kinds of support for their planes on the ground, such as handling towing or refueling or perimeter security, and the pilots might do it pretty well, but it would still tend to be quite expensive.

I don’t know about the organizational resistance to underground hardened structures Ivvenalis refers to, but it might be in part organizational recoil from incidents like the underground headquarters built early in the learning-how-to-fight-the-Wehrmacht process described in An Army at Dawn.

There are ways for organizations to go wrong in multiple directions, and it’s not so easy for human decisionmakers to do nuance, and it’s usually quite hard for large long-lived bureaucracies to do nuance.

I don’t have a solution for that, or at least one short of getting into a major war (which tends to make people suddenly much more rational than they would be otherwise) but that’s my observation of how big organizations seem to function.

By the way, the Afghans themselves, even in relatively poor rural areas, had photovoltaics all over the place. They didn’t provide enough power to run large electrical motors, but it could keep the lights on and cell phones charged.

Here is the 80 pages long report the government released on that in .pdf form: Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan.