General on Fort Bragg Situation: "We let our soldiers down . . . No excuse."

by: Brandon Friedman

Tue Apr 29, 2008 at 20:38:14 PM EDT

You can listen to the entire call by clicking here.  

And if you haven't yet seen the video in question, here it is:

Brigadier General Dennis Rogers, Director of Operations and Facilities for Installation Management Command, took our call.  He's the guy who's responsible for maintaining barracks throughout the Army.  Rogers was accompanied during the roundtable by Command Sergeant Major Debra Strickland.

Rogers immediately moved to take responsibility for the deplorable conditions:

BG DENNIS ROGERS: I'll tell you right now before we even start: I assume responsibility for the shortfalls in barracks maintenance which were referenced in the video by Mr. Frawley.  We let our soldiers down.  And I note that a number of you are veterans, or most of you are veterans, and you served.  So you know that there is no excuse for that.  We let our soldiers down.

This response highlights the difference between professional soldiers and Bush administration hacks like Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith who have a genetic defect that inhibits them from taking responsibility for anything.  So I was impressed with that part of Rogers' reaction to the situation.

Rogers and Strickland went on to explain that most of the "shortfalls have been corrected" in those barracks, the "paint has been scraped off," and the nightmarish latrine from the video was "repaired immediately."  He also said that a walk-through of Army barracks nationwide was conducted by chains of command this past weekend.

Now, that's all well and good, but what the other participants and I really wanted to hear was a.) how did this happen in the first place, and b.) how can we ensure that this doesn't happen again?  And that's where the issue became murkier.

We were told that the situation had resulted from the fact that the unit had returned from Afghanistan earlier than expected.  Given only 72 hours notice, the Rear Detachment personnel were in the process of scrambling to make the barracks livable again.  They had apparently filed work orders for repairs that were being processed when the soldiers returned.

The questions I asked along those lines are below, as well as the answers I got.

BRANDON FRIEDMAN: Do we know where in the chain of command the fault lies?  You guys said that work orders had been submitted.  Were those submitted by the Rear-D chain of command?  Was the Rear-D making a good-faith effort to keep these barracks maintained, and they just weren't getting the help in a timely manner?  Or is it more their fault because they weren't asking the right questions?  Do we know yet?

CSM DEBRA STRICKLAND: Mr. Friedman, I'm going to try to provide some of that input.  

There was a previous unit that was in there and they were required to move out.  They were [static] unit that was inside that same barracks.  You know, we've been using those barracks to their full capacity, whether the soldiers are there or not.  Because the barracks have been addressed a couple of years ago, all of the major work that would've been done while they were gone wasn't a requirement again.  

So, they move out and there was a timeframe when the Rear Detachment was documenting what the work orders were to bring that barracks back up to standard.  They didn't really, I think, turn their full attention to it until they realized they had a shortfall in time--because they had ownership for several other barracks and they were in worse condition.  So they were spending a lot of their energy there.

Whenever they got 72 hours notice, trust me, they hit high speed.  But it wasn't all the Rear Detachment's issue.  Our obligation is not to allow re-habitation of those barracks from the garrison perspective if they're still substandard.  And we have options in the event that they're not ready to receive soldiers.  So, we have equal blame and no one's real pleased about that.  We're trying to ensure we've got systems in place, again, to make sure that that doesn't occur.  But there's no guarantee for the future.  I just would tell you that it will be very difficult to accept someone's not alert to this and prepared well in advance.  The Rear Detachment had an obligation to make sure that a building was ready and we had an obligation to support them in that and between the two of us--between the two of us--we managed to fall short of it.

So I understand that the Rear Detachment, working in conjunction with installation authorities, was working feverishly to fix the barracks three days prior to the arrival of the unit from Afghanistan.  I also get the fact that the unit tasked with upkeep had a number of higher priorities.  But that brings up another question.  Let's go back to one thing CSM Strickland said about what that unit was doing:

They didn't really, I think, turn their full attention to it until they realized they had a shortfall in time--because they had ownership for several other barracks and they were in worse condition.

(Sound of screeching brakes)

Other barracks in worse condition?  This is a larger issue and it's a point I think we need to make: As General Rogers said, there is no excuse for this.  

Here's the deal.  We're paying contractors three-quarters of a billion dollars to build the new embassy in Baghdad.  We're paying contractors hundreds of millions of dollars to fix Iraq--and part of that includes building new Iraqi military bases and refurbishing old ones.  Why should our rear detachments have to scramble at the last second to make soldiers' barracks in the United States minimally livable?  

The answer is that they shouldn't.  That's the bottom line.  I don't know how else to put it.  To boot, after Strickland's long answer, I'm still not quite clear on why a unit from the 82nd returned home to substandard barracks.

Aside from that, unfortunately, I'm not convinced that this won't happen again.  I believe General Rogers and Sergeant Major Strickland are sincere when they say they're making it their mission to ensure that this doesn't happen again.  I'm just not sure they can make it happen.  

We heard the same things after Walter Reed.  

UPDATE: I just received this email from former infantry Captain [Name redacted, 26 June 2008] who deployed out of Fort Bragg with the 82nd Airborne Division in 2003 to serve in Afghanistan:

Those barracks were fucked up a long time ago, and this SNAFU isn't half as bad as what happened when we returned from Afghanistan the first time. While we deployed, they activated the Puerto Rican National Guard to cover down on our homeland security tasks.  Needing a place to put them, the post leadership ordered our Rear-D to pack up all of our troopers' personal stuff from their banded and sealed rooms.  Movers came in and packaged it all up, with one Rear-D bubba per hallway.  You can imagine how many credit cards, CDs and other personal items disappeared in the course of that unplanned move.  Platoon CPs were jammed into closets.  It was thoroughly fucked up and was really icing on the cake after an extended deployment and a stop-loss.

The real question should really go to the contractors building the new barracks - why weren't those ready yet?  Those new units should have all been prepared by now (having started almost 10 years ago), which is the real reason these barracks have been maintained on the cheap for so long.

Hearing this, I can only shake my head.  As to his question about the new barracks and the contractors, I actually asked General Rogers that very question about the new barracks this afternoon.  Here's his response (at the 26:00 minute mark):

BRANDON FRIEDMAN: My understanding is that that construction is currently behind schedule.  If that's true, do those contractors working on the new buildings bear any responsibility for this?

BG DENNIS ROGERS: Brandon, the barracks are due to be occupied in the summer of '09.  So, next summer, they'll be on line.  We had a question about that earlier, about schedules, about what was happening 15 months ago and what's happening today.  I can't answer that.  But I'll present that question to our friends in the Corps of Engineers because they monitor it and manage the design and the construction of our facilities for us.

FRIEDMAN: Okay.  Thank you.

While I appreciate BG Rogers taking a stab at my question, he didn't answer the question about whether or not the contractors building the new barracks are to blame for being slow--and for causing this situation.