Posted on 02/05/2013 8:55:15 AM PST by Pan_Yan
...
One of the first considerations is cost: is it worth the trouble and expense to ship a given item home? A quick trip around the yard reveals hundreds of white four foot by four-foot cardboard containers called “kicker boxes,” each of which costs about $5,000. They are used to ship equipment back to the U.S. As Pagan rummaged through a random box, he pulled out several small pieces of gear worth about $20,000 each. Many of the boxes, he explained, can contain as much as $200,000 worth of equipment.
As retrograde has become a larger focus, these sorting operations have increased dramatically. When Pagan arrived in Afghanistan eight months ago, they were processing the equivalent of 250 twenty-foot containers of equipment each month; now they are averaging 278 per week, with shifts working 24-hours a day.
Similar operations are taking place on the other side of Bagram, where the 401st Army Field Sustainment Brigade handles Theater-Provided Equipment, known to the troops as TPE. For years in both Iraq and Afghanistan much of this class of equipment, especially armored vehicles, stayed behind and was handed off from unit to unit. Now, the TPE is finally going back.
...
But the earliest piece of the puzzle is accountability. Property managers from the 401st estimate that 20% of their inventory is unaccounted for, that is, no field commander has signed for it. But as units pull out of bases, more and more of that equipment is resurfacing. In 2012, troops closing down bases found nearly 24,000 pieces of equipment valued at over $300 million previously unaccounted for. Some of that is being redistributed to other units, but most of it is being shipped home.
(Excerpt) Read more at world.time.com ...
There also can't be a lot of infrastructure there. Destroy it all in a week of concentrated air strikes. Let the the Taliban figure out how to replace it.
Yes, a lot of equipment is unaccounted for because most field commanders don’t want to take the time for documentation. Yes, in today’s armed forces that equipment has become really valuable. And it eventually resurfaces because there’s really no value for most of this stuff on the black market. Maybe the solution is to put GPS tracking devices in the equipment. If they can track a Canadian goose with a tag around its leg, they ought to be able to track a $200,000 piece of military hardware.
I remember a SyFi story about a spaceship’s crew
having to do an inventory and they had something
listed as Offog and no one knew what it was so they
listed it as missing in space. Then there was an
official bruhahaha and lots of correspondence about it
turns out it was a misspelling and really meant
offical dog or the ships mascot.
Most Syfi is just real life transposed in time and space.
I am surprised The One has not just ordered DoD to abandon all gear in place to re-equip the Taliban, but there is still time for that I am sure.
That would be waaaay too efficient. We'll pay to move all our old equipment at great cost all the way around the world for a second time. Then we'll give our new friends the Taliban all brand new US military hardware (with free shipping!!!)in return for them playing nice with us. When they don't play nice we'll give them more stuff.
Afghanistan is just about as far from science fiction as possible. Most of our non-weapon supplies were taking a ten day train ride from either Latvia or Vladivostok to Afghanistan. To facilitate this the U.S. had to build a track to the closest city since Afghanistan was the largest country in the world without an operational railroad.
A LOT of high-end equipment is already equipped with GPS tracking and active RFID systems. Engines, especially aviation turbines, munitions containers, etc.
Tracking equipment once it’s removed from the packaging is another issue.
Oh, so the GPS is in the packaging, not the equipment itself? Gee, that’s smart. /sarcasm
A four by four by four cardboard box costs five grand? Please tell me there's more to it than that.
Doesn't look like it, though I hope the price is a typo.
About 2/3 of the way down the page you'll see a Pfc carrying a flattened one on his head.
SyFi is a TV channel, sci fi is a genre. You are likely talking about a science fiction story, sometimes referred to as sci fi, because I seriously doubt if it that storyline has been featured on SyFi network.
A science fiction short story.
“... I seriously doubt if it that storyline has been featured on SyFi network.”
SyFi does show reruns of “Firefly” all the time and that’s about a cargo ship so it all ties together.
“... I seriously doubt if it that storyline has been featured on SyFi network.”
SyFi does show reruns of “Firefly” all the time and that’s about a cargo ship so it all ties together.
That’s us. Here’s what our forefathers—more American in nature than us—did during WWII and after.
Denazification, cumulative review. Report, 1 April 1947-30 April 1948.
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.Denazi
The inventory losses wouldn’t be as much of a problem, if we had more domestic manufacturing competition in our country—especially manufacturing of military hardware. And we wouldn’t see so many inventory losses, if not for the laws supporting the divorce/cohabitation regime of the past few decades.
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