I remember Carter's Army

 Heh.  We'll know the circle has fully turned when the black boot comes back, and Sergeants Major are more concerned about being able to pick their teeth while admiring their reflection and platoon MTEP evaluations are conducted using Blue Force Tracker displays in the vehicles while sitting in the motor pool running off of power-inverters plugged into the wall, vice vehicle power.  Unless they get that solar-panel operated combat vehicle built, of course.

The really creative units will use unit funds to buy RC paintball tanks and conduct the tank gunnery tables doing that.

These budgets cuts will not only put downward pressure on the quality and quantity of materiel but on the quality and quantity of personnel, also.  That's an even greater danger, IMHO.

NevadaSteve, don't go to sleep .... your participation and vote will be needed in 2012!   The situation won't magically change itself.

I think the Dems would LOVE it if we all kept snoozing, and dreaming of hope and change, as most did in 2008.

I remember Carter's Army.  On ARTEP at Graf in Fire For Effect instead of a Battery One the evaluator would select one howitzer to fire.  Ammunition was that short.  Then came Reagan!  New guns, new vehicles, lots of bullets, lots of fun.

My housemate lived the Carter army. He was in the Berlin Brigade as an Intel guy, eavesdropping on phone calls and suchlike. Apparently the guys in Berlin were actually somewhat serious, compared to the rest of the forces. They were mostly just a tripwire, and expected to give a good account of themselves while dying. The housemate has spoken of having to keep his chemical gear with him at all times, even at home. (mask, atropine injector, usw. 

"They were mostly just a tripwire, and expected to give a good account of themselves while dying."

No doubt.  While C Btry 1/22 FA relieved C Btry, 94th FA (Berlin Bde) in Berlin, I drove the 1/22's S-3 to Munster/Bergen-Hohne. He was the OIC of their ARTEP evaluation team that year.  From my chats with them, hardly anyone in C/94 thought they'd survive long if the ballloon went up.

Interesting tidbits of trivia:

Unlike us and other USAREUR FA units, C/94's guns didn't have any spades to back up on. (Plus, they were all painted OD green with bright red tow pintles and hubs, and shined with baby oil for parades.) Because of their urban environment in Berlin, they carried these huge wooden chocks that they wedged under their tracks to reduce movement from recoil and stay laid.

Also, they had an 8-gun battery that they split into 2 separate 4-gun firing platoons, which would maneuver and conduct fires separately.  Most everyone else, AFAIK, had 6-gun batteries that usually moved together as one unit.

I enlisted in the early summer of '79. So, I caught what would have been the tail end of the Carter Disaster for the Army, Navy and Air Force.

In the Corps, it didn't end. By as late as '85, the Corps was having to cut rifle range ammo alotment in half, motor pools were filled with deadlined vehicles with no spare parts, guns with shotout tubes were common in the gun parks, guns with so much wear and no replacement parts were so common that gunbunnies tended to dig "fighting holes" to jump into just prior to lanyard yank incase the break block blew out, etc and so on.

On the sky side, the airframes in use were older than most of the pilots (A4 and F4).   I do not recall when the newer airframe (F18) started reaching the squadrons, but in Japan, it was still the old rough birds. And squadrons in  Japan were the primary for Korean defense. Cannabalizing parts from one airframe to keep another flying was common practice.

I've said this before in other threads on the same sort of topic, but here it is again, as an example:

I was filling a manpower gap in the battalion .50 plt in weps company in '85. We were tasked with becoming "vehicle born". Problem was, the jeeps were so worn and thin in the floorboards that they couldn't support a gun pedestle. So, we had to adapt.

The windshilds were removed. The .50 tripod was mounted to the hood of the jeep. The rear legs against the windshild pivot pins and the front leg bent downard and resting on the bumper. An engineering stake was layed across the leading edge of the hood to reinforce it. The whold thing was tied down with parachute cord. Twist sticks had to be fixed into the cord because the recoil would loosen them up. So, every hundred rounds or so, the driver would run around the front of the vehicle tighting the things down.

The gunner operated his weapon from a kneeling position on the front passenger seat.

It didn't get any better. It did get much worse under Clinton.

Heh.

I spent the Carter Years in Air Training Command. Office furniture was what we used for pecking order symbolism...if you had a chair with arms and/or wheels on it, you were somebody.

I went to Hogs about the time Reagan was elected, when the tactical Air Force was rebuilding. TAC (this was before it was merged w/SAC to become ACC) was not only recovering from Vietnam but rebuilding as well...airframes, infrastructure, readiness, you name it. The architect was one Wilbur "Bill" Creech who, while rather, um, eccentric, was a brilliant organizer, manager and leader who made the MBA schools' management texts (really) based on how he turned around a hollow force.

When I left TAC, you started sweating if your unit Mission Ready rates dropped below 95%. We could be ready to launch a squadron of jets (24) literally anywhere in the world in 12 hours (and that was the MAXIMUM time allowed before brakes had to be released for takeoff). If I didn't hit the range at least threee times a week and go to Red Flag at least once a year I was not trying. World War III would have been ugly, but in retrospect, not nearly as ugly as we thought, given what we now know about the Warsaw Pact and how well prepared we were in the mid-80s. 

Alas, we have a burgeoning peer competitor whose military leadership is, and I'm not exaggerating here, based on what I read in their English-language papers, spoiling for a major fight...for three reasons: they own our economy, they understand our leader, and they see us re-hollowing out our military. What amazes me is how little is learned based on empirical evidence...

- Transmitting signals that you are unwilling to defend your interests only encourages your enemies.
- An elite that promotes and encourages a systematic and conscious denigration of a society's core values undermines the security of that society by eroding citizens' willingness to preserve it.
- 25% of the US population thinks socialism is superior to capitalism despite the obvious disparities between the two systems' living standards, to say nothing of the lack of liberty and coercion endemic in the former's confiscatory system.
- Spending more than you make leads to economic crisis.
- More government means an infantilized population, i.e., less self-reliance, less innovation, less courage and less freedom.

Behavior has consequences.

When Robert A. Heinlein was gunnery officer of USS Roper, he was right disappointed that not only did he not have enough funds to exercise the men at the guns, but had barely enough just to keep the pieces clean and servicable.

B.O.H.I.C.A.

I had a platoon of 15 people - on a good day.  The working vehicles towed the dead ones to the field setup, then came back for the personnel.

I had the only working 100kw generator, and literally had to place guards on it, even though it was always behind a lot of concertina, being the SCIF generator, lest the G-3 folks slip in, yank our plug, and plug in their own van.

We hoarded paperclips, raided property disposal to clean out drawers for office supplies, paid for the troops' toilet paper, and celebrated when the barracks showers worked.

And now my nephew will have to tolerate something worse?  Sheesh.