With a background in electronics hardware, I had always been fascinated by the Bathtub curve, which is a model for a typical hardware product life-cycle from infancy to death. Today, it struck me as a good analogy of the U.S. Military and their readiness and ability to be effective.
Congressman John P. Murtha in an op-ed response published a few days ago,says:
"At the beginning of the Iraq war, 80% of all Army units and almost 100% of active combat units were rated at the highest levels of readiness. Just the opposite exists today. Virtually all of our active-duty combat units at home and all of our guard units are at the lowest level of readiness…The intense strain that this Administration’s policies have placed on our current military force is the problem."
The current war in Iraq has pushed the US military to the far end of the Bathtub curve, and we are starting to see more failures in a system that has been pushed to the brink of its operational parameters.
Nothing embodies this so vividly as the deteriorating conditions at Walter Reed hospital, which has generated a round of surgical amputations of the men in charge. Whether that will cure the patient, remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope for that happening, especially if the replacements (like Lt. Gen.Kiley for Gen.Weightman) are not much better.
From the original Washington Post article ( subscription needed):
"In 2004, Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) and his wife stopped visiting the wounded at Walter Reed out of frustration…Beverly Young said she complained to Kiley several times. She once visited a soldier who was lying in urine on his mattress pad in the hospital. When a nurse ignored her, Young said, "I went flying down to Kevin Kiley’s office again, and got nowhere. He has skirted this stuff for five years and blamed everyone else."
For a subscription-free, but more cautious coverage of the basic details of the controversy: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/03/online_reedarchive_070302/
Update(Thanks to Ruchira for the link):
It appears that Lt.Gen.Kiley’s heading Walter Reed proved to be a short affair. Today’s WaPo report confirms that:
"The Army named Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker as the new commander of Walter Reed only a day after picking Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who had previously commanded the medical center, as the temporary chief. Kiley’s selection had angered soldiers and family groups — and, more important, Gates — because of their belief that he had been aware of problems at the hospital and done little to address them. Kiley is the current Army surgeon general"
Accidental Blogger 
2 responses to “The Military in a Bathtub (Sujatha)”
Sujatha:
Thanks for bringing this to the attention of the readers. This scandal is almost as troubling as what happened in Abu Ghraib. In this case, it is US soldiers who are being abused by their custodians. When a country goes to war with criminally dishonest intentions and most citizens do not have to pay a price in terms of lives, lifestyle or even taxes, those making the sacrifices at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder pay a high price.
Not only has the Secretary of the Army been fired, Gen. Kiley is NOT going to be the eventual replacement for Gen. Weightman. His tenure as the temporary chief of Walter Reed was very short lived. I am not surprised at all. Weightman at least had the gumption to take total responsibility for the mess even though he had been on the job for only the past six months. I saw a news clip of Kiley dismissing the problems as “overblown.” I knew immediately that his days were numbered.
Defense Secretary Gates is going about the whole thing with a bit more courage and decency than Rumsfeld, in whose watch not a single head had rolled. But I don’t know how much good Gates’ brave actions will do. If the military is failing, we only have to look at the clueless Commander in Chief and his deputy who have doggedly refused to acknowledge any problem either with the Iraq war or the state of the military. As they say, fish rots from the head. This is the same Bush who ran part of his 2000 presidential campaign blaming Clinton for neglecting the military and promising grandiosely, “Help is on the way” !!!!
For a truly appalling and heartbreaking story on the care (or the lack of it) of those wounded in war and the chaos that prevail in the system of veterans’ health care, see this article in Newsweek.
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Ruchira,
Thanks for the WaPo link, I’ve added the news about Kiley’s being just temporary in an update.
Yes, the horror stories of wounded veterans let down by the system will just continue to burgeon, just as the resources to help them get spread out more and more thinly.
To push the bathtub analogy to its logical end, what does one do with a broken product? Discard and replace it, of course. Only, it won’t be quite as simple for a complex structure as the military.
I really don’t know where they are headed, but if they could recover after the Vietnam war, they will survive this. The question remains as to what form this survival will take.
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