Mobilization Day

And so it begins . . . I reported to Naval Air Facility Washington DC, located at Andrews AFB, on Wednesday morning to start the archaic and paperwork intensive mobilization process. The navy has some of the most advanced weapons in the world but when it comes to personnel management, we are a little hurting. Although my orders did not commence until 0730 on the 14th, I was wary of getting through NAF Wash in just one day (and I was right . . . it took all or part of three days). But now I am vacinated against small pox and, as a special bonus, free of charge, anthrax too! The anthrax vacination makes your upper arm sore for about a day and the small pox vacination comes with a pretty hard core briefing and about seven handouts summarizing what to watch for and how to care for the vacination sites, even a warning about not letting domestic pets lick the used bandages (oh yeah, you know what, this is the military, it must have happened at some point). I got a new set of dental x-rays (still looking good) and went through a dozen other administrative check out procedures.

In all seriousness, the Navy really takes the health/medical screening seriously. I'm sure this is cost driven but it is also good for the individual sailor too.

Many of the reserve management software programs (most notably, the payroll system) do not talk to the active duty systems so the transistion between reserve and active means a lot of manual data input and scores of forms, checklists and applications. No doubt this is what people think about when you see images on TV of America at war: DATA ENTRY WARRIORS! I have been told that for every one combat troop in Iraq, there are five support troops of one kind or another. So when people wonder how it is that with 160,000 troops in country that we can't maintian peace, remember that it is really only about 32,000 of those troops who are doing all the patrols and the raids and the convoy security, etc. Those are the hard core ground troops.