How to not feed the troops

DOGE uncovered the fact that 60% of the money taken from troops’ pay to feed them was used for “other purposes”. That’s not the half of it.

My son joined the Army in the fall of 2020. Not great timing, but what are you going to do? He went to Basic at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, during the winter of 2020-2021. The “dining facilities” (mess halls) were all closed due to a strike and Covid restrictions. That left all the young troops eating nothing but MREs for their entire time in Basic Training. MREs that were stockpiled in sheds. In Oklahoma. In the winter.

These MREs were frozen solid. That’s not too bad, since every MRE comes with a heater pouch. Just add water, and it will warm everything up. Except that the troops were not allowed to use the heaters, because “Somebody might get hurt!”

So they were reduced to bashing their frozen solid MRE meals with rocks. They smashed the packets with rocks until the frozen food was reduced to bite-seized chunks they could chew. Every meal, every day, for three months.

https://www.labroots.com/trending/plants-and-animals/3774/study-chimpanzees-travel-tools-gather-food

And let us not forget the idiotic masking requirements. The idiocy ran so far as to mandate the wearing of masks during physical training (PT). So, when it rained, the troops were essentially forced to waterboard themselves as they exercised and then ran for miles wearing sodden cloth masks. But that’s a different story.

My son was eventually stationed at Fort Cavazos (nee Hood). His battalion lived in brand new barracks. These barracks were so new, he never once had a valid postal address the three years he was there. Their compound included a nice looking mess hall. Which was open for a grand total of almost four weeks (not in a row!) during the three years he was stationed there. This was the mess hall his pay went to fund. If he wanted to eat anywhere else, he had to pay cash.

Were there other dining facilities on the fort? Yes, indeed there were. There were three others. But only one of them was ever open on any given day, with no schedule posted as to which one it might be. And there was no bus or shuttle service to move troops around. So, during their 90 minute lunch break, he could run 3 miles to the nearest DFAC, only to find it was randomly closed that day. And then he could run back to his duty location, still hungry. (Fort Hood has about 28,000 Soldiers scattered over 332 square miles, by the way.)

When the DFAC was open, it often didn’t have any hot food. Lunch was usually a cold table of deli meat and stale bread.  That's if you could get through the long, long lines to get anything at all.  And that's if they didn't simply run out of food before you got any.

No, of course you’re not allowed to cook in the barracks. Somebody might get hurt!

Troops with cars made pocket money as an on-post Uber service.

The US Army cannot or will not feed the troops or deliver their mail to them on permanent bases on US soil.  Why should we have any faith they can prosecute wars overseas?