Circa 1996-ish, my Engineer Group had a MAJ Fehrenbach on the staff in the S3 section. In the course of things, we got to have a dining-in with the actual Fehrenbach of authorial stature. Which was interesting–He took as his speech-subject this exact Task Force Smith “thing”, in an all-encompassing manner.

Everyone nodded along, agreeing with him, saying how we mustn’t let it happen again. All the while? Out on the ground in our unit? Same kind of crap that led up to the conditions creating Task Force Smith. We weren’t training, there was no money, and the fucking ammo budget was so tight that if I wanted to give any of my guys going to the promotion board a second chance at improving their marksmanship boards, then we had to cut people like me from even doing official qualification fire. Training just didn’t happen, for most of the later Clinton years. No money–All we did was “Post Support”.

I left the unit for a couple of years, went to the NTC for a tour, and then Korea again in order to get back to Fort Lewis for retirement purposes. When I came back, I went right into my old platoon as a vastly senior Platoon Sergeant, and I have to tell you, it about to broke my fucking heart. The state of training had backslid so far back that it wasn’t even funny, and there was no money to even fix broken trucks. Some of the crap I fell back in on had been broken when I was running that same platoon six years earlier, and had never been fixed. No money.

Things were so bad that when we got a new Group Commander in, and he had a sensing session with all the Sergeants First Class and up in the Group, we all unanimously told him that there was absolutely no damn way we were ready for war or a deployment, and that getting us ready would take months to do properly. He sagely nodded his head, agreed with us, and said that we were the bill-payers for the Stryker Brigades that were standing up, just then. And, that he’d brought up the same issue with FORSCOM, which they acknowledged, telling him that we were guaranteed a six-month window to train before any real-world deployment.

In the event, we got alerted in late December of 2002 that we were due to put our shit on the boats for Iraq in mid-January of 2003, and fuck any promises made by anyone. I honestly do not know how the hell we managed to do what we did in the time allotted, but we managed to get our gear on the boats by the required date, with no help from anyone else on Fort Lewis. Stories I could tell about that BS, and the oblivious bureaucracy we had to deal with… To this day, I’d still buy tickets to watch those pricks burn to death in a bonfire.

In any event, it was a miracle that none of that crap caught up with us in Iraq. Had we done the “Northern Route” through Turkey, as planned, vice eventually going in through Kuwait after the Iraqis collapsed, I’m not at all sanguine about what would have happened. Most of the Observer/Controllers I’d been with in the previous few years, who’d seen 3 ID in action at the NTC? We were all convinced we were gonna watch the invasion crash and burn, as inept and feckless as those guys had been in training. Honest to God, most of us were sitting there exchanging emails and discussing what we thought would happen, which was, we thought, going to be epic failure on a scale not seen since Task Force Smith.

As it was, apparently being sat out in the deserts of Kuwait for six months to a year had worked wonders to concentrate the minds of those guys, and they got their shit together enough not to screw the pooch entirely. If the division whose brigades we’d seen gone in without that time and training effort, though? I shudder to think. It would have been one big 577th Maintenance Company, writ large.

They talk a lot of shit about “No more Task Force Smith’s…”, but the reality is, they really don’t grasp that whole thing as anything other than a popular buzzword, and do not recognize the conditions within their organizations as being at all akin to what really made that disastrous showing inevitable. Readiness is an issue that I suspect is going to bite us in the ass, again and again. The system just doesn’t “get it”, and isn’t self-aware enough to really be able to even recognize, let alone fix, these myriad issues.