Old equipment, no mission

According to my company's "modified table of organization and equipment" (MTOE, an Army unit's "blueprint" of personnel and materiel), our designated mission is to haul fuel trailers.

So, now that we're about done with our post-deployment recovery, we've started drawing all our vehicles from the "Left Behind Equipment" civilian caretakers. It's been a tedious process in part because we have to test each one by pumping fuel in, then right back out, to make sure it's operational.

Along the way, I've learned a lot of things that I never realized before.

First, all our MTOE equipment is essentially useless. As we've found out during the pump tests, years of disuse have left the lines filled with sludge that contaminates the fuel so badly that it can't be used. There's a certain parts-per-million maximum that certain vehicles need, and we just can't reach that.

Second, given our current tactical needs, 90 percent of them can't be used overseas. As we've learned over the past 10 years, the IED threat requires that our trucks be uparmored, and as you can see in the first picture, these are not.

Third, we often wouldn't even be able to fill these things to capacity anyway -- anything more than a 5 percent grade puts limits on how much the truck can safely pull.

Lastly, this model of fuel trailer (the M967) is useful only for major fuel depot refueling. You know the trucks you see refilling gas stations? These do the same thing. But even on Fort Hood the Army doesn't operate a bunch of gas stations -- the only two places we go are North Fort Hood and the Brownwood National Guard training center. That's it -- and those trips were rare even during the peak deployment times.

What it CAN'T do -- and this is critical -- is refuel a vehicle by itself. A convoy of these can literally run out of gas and be unable to refill each other. They're only good for refilling those large depot fuel bladders (called "fuel farms").

These days, the Army uses uparmored versions of the M978 more than anything. They're more powerful, more versatile, and can be turned around more easily. My detachment in Tarin Kowt used one to refuel the outlying bases around Uruzgan Province.

We won't be getting any of those.

So where does that leave us? We have no mission, and with nothing to do we are essentially no more than babysitters for broken and obsolete equipment -- hardly the makings of a great evaluation.

Before and during our deployment, we used trucks that could lift containers (palletized loading systems, or PLSs), and we could do that here but for one problem: our battalion doesn't have enough M1077 flatracks to go around. It's the flatrack that everything sits on, whether its a container or pallets.

We've got tons of these M3 flatracks ("crops"), but these are useless for carrying containers. These things go *inside* the containers and are typically used to provide a removable platform for pallets of ammunition. They're not supposed to *hold* the container, they're supposed to be *held in* the container.

We could get some PLSs (no shortage of them), but we wouldn't have the proper flatracks to use them. Were we to take any, it would be taking capability away from the battalion's designated PLS company, which already has too many soldiers relative to their equipment.

Fantastic.

So here we are, back from deployment, with just about nothing to do but keep useless junk from rusting further. You can bet we're going to be the #1 go-to company in the battalion for litter clean-up details and what we in basic training so affectionately called "area beautification."