Operation Food Truck

When your whole world has fallen down around you what helps more? 
A hot meal
or
Having a bag of rice thrown at you?

Looking at the situation in Hatti and examining the post earthquake response the biggest concern is medical aid and food supplies.   

How would I handle this if I were commander in chief?   
I would Hire food trucks. 
Offer food truck owners and their teams $50,000 per person to go to Haiti.  Then take armor transport ships and load them with the food trucks.  The Navy's responsibilities would be getting the food trucks to the locations, making sure their operational needs are met and ensuring the safety of the food trucks and their workers.  


Why food trucks?  
Pretty simple.  
NGO's can get the food but they can't prepare it.  
Food Truck owners know how to prepare food and maintain a level of cleanliness. 
Second, Food trucks can be easily moved to and from locations so as clean up operations and some sense of normalcy is restored.

Budgeting $25 million per 100 food trucks for workers.
Then an additional $25 million for operational costs such as fuel, electrical setups, and cooking supplies. 

Bringing the total cost of hiring the trucks to $50 million per 100 trucks. 

To avoid creating issues with garbage there would need to be reusable bowels, plates, and utensils and setting sanitization stations  for the dishes and utensils to be ferried too and from to be cleaned and sanitized.  I'd recommend looking at hospital supply catalogues for the types of sturdy, reusable, and transportable setups.   

Budget an additional $500 K per sanitization station for setup, stock and hire locals for the cleaning and transport duties.  With a total budget of $10 M. 

Total Price Tag for initial costs.
$60 million per 100 food trucks. 

As for total costs, that is a question for the Haitian government. 
The U.S. contribution would be the transportation and supply line operations and welcoming assistance from any other organization  that would be willing to assist. 

Plan for a one year operation. 
That should be sufficient time for rescue operations and clean up to be completed and for local infrastructure to be able to take over the operation.   

Why do it this way?

For Decades and Decades dumping supplies into a disaster area though helpful rarely does the good necessary to help a region get back on it's feet.
By doing it this way it creates a dignified way of distributing the food and supplies while the area and/or region, in this situation Hatti, is able to address the disaster it's self. 
This is literally how we do it here in the U.S. during emergencies.  
It's just more neighbors helping neighbors, or the next town over putting people up in the local school or church, or other place with kitchens and bathrooms and showers. 
At the moment, Haiti, for all intents and purposes has none of this.   Nor do many of the other areas facing food shortages post disaster. 

Providing prepared foods during the Emergency does one other very important thing.  It makes sure that hoarding and exploitation for those supplies doesn't happen.  After the emergency has passed and stabilized supply lines and surrounding infrastructure is reestablished then trade and markets can return to normal operation.   

Just make sure your food truck teams are versatile and inventive cooks with  a solid supply of spices.  Because when it comes to aid supplies it's usually mostly beans and rice and powdered nonsense. 

Food Trucks =
Mobile Kitchens
And hey, for food truck operators they can put up a badge of honor on their trucks.  
"Hatti Relief - 2021" or something like that. 
And looking at how successful this ends up being then this model can be deployed to disaster areas anywhere in the world

And here in the U.S.  After the Rail infrastructure is repaired and revitalized...well that's a discussion for another time.   

Gridiron Blitz

How do you do distance learning when you can't interact with your students? 
How do students ask questions when they can not reach their teachers. 

That is the next big question we will be asking our nation, and worlds, educators. 

The Afghan Project. 

At least that is what I would call it if I were starting something like that. 

For the past 20 or so year women and girls have moved into the same position that women were fighting for at the turn of the century in the United States. 
Removing the factor of race issues, the divide between male and female hasn't even been fully settled in most of the rest of the world.   
The ability to Vote.
The ability to Learn.
The ability to Work. 
 How do you support these things without a military presence? 
Fundamentalists are, much like in the U.S., leading the charge to "Make Afghan Great Again." as the U.S. forces withdraw. 
...
The above words I wrote weeks before the situation is what it is in Afghanistan today.   Crowds trying desperately to make it to the Kabul airport to evacuate the country.  
The focus is getting the Americans and other foreign nationals out while accepting refugees "as they can."  
This isn't a U.S. problem. 
 This is a U.N. problem.  
Unlike the Iraq war the war in Afghanistan was a U.N. sanctioned multinational response spear headed by the U.S.  
So though I do not fully agree with the President's response that it is "an Afghan problem" I will say that it is a U.N. problem as to figuring out what to do for the people trying to leave the nation. 
So let's talk about the hard numbers as if the U.S. where shouldering the entirety of the burden. 

Roughly 300,000 Afghan people where allied directly with and working along side American and Coalition forces throughout the past 20 years.   So that is the target number for the next 5 days. 

300,000 people 
We'll worry about the bureaucratic side of this in a moment. 

The average NFL stadium holds 60'000 spectators.  
that means you would need 5 stadiums to evacuate people to. 

Why a Stadium?   
Though sleeping in the seats may not be comfortable the stay would be temporary.
There are bathroom facilities and food vending facilities already set up to accommodate that number of people.  
There are P.A. systems for announcements and communicating what's going on for large crowds.
Locker facilities have showers if needed for emergencies.  
The Stadiums are already set up with a mind for large crowd security and there are ways of getting supplies in and out efficiently.  
The field it's self where medical and security screening facilities can be set up. 
So five teams volunteer their fields for the season to evacuate the refugees to and use as processing facilities to find them their homes.  
I'm sure there are a number of active and former military members what would assist in the screenings by helping the individuals they worked side by side with in a war zone figure out if they are staying, going, or heading back.   

From there, as the evacuation is happening and people are being screened we find 300'000 homes. 
I know, many of the 300'000 will be family units and/or willing to cohabitate so 300'000 homes may be overkill but still, the overage...well..we'll talk about that when this operation is done and the Kabul airport is no longer the site of a humanitarian crisis. 
In the U.S. or outside the U.S. it doesn't much matter, but homes to find.  
Plan on giving them starting money. $30,000 per adult and $10,000 per child. 
to buy clothing, food, and necessities to get started.
Remember almost all of those people will be arriving with nothing more than a suitcase...if that much.

"Who's going to pay for that?"
Well, considering that it costs $1,000,000 per troop per year to be in Afghanistan and all but a very small number will still be mobilized in the region in evacuation efforts I'd say we can find it in the budget somewhere. That's roughly 9 billion, we'll round it up to an even 10 billion out of the $45 Billion dollars spent in Afghanistan last year.  

As for the bureaucratic side of things. 
Well, this is a humanitarian crisis. 
And, this isn't just a U.S. problem, but as I illustrated in the above numbers, the U.S. is capable of shouldering the burden entirely without extra budgetary concerns, it's just a matter of will. 
The Army can handle the logistics, 
Marines the escort operations while coordinating with the Airforce and Navy for getting people where they need to go. 
The National Guard is already busy with wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters...or should be.

So that's what you need.
5 stadiums
$10 Billion Dollar Relocation Budget.
And
the Elbow Grease of the U.S. Military ($40 Billion Budget, $5 Billion less than the Afghan operational Costs) 

Granted, some icing on the cake would be some NGO's and assistance from other nations involved in the operation.  Especially with the finding homes part, but that's the short of it. 

From there, it will be making sure that everyone that needed out got out and then figuring out what roll the U.N. and the U.S. will have in Afghanistan when the dust of all of this settles. 

"The hell makes you think all this would work Jack, and what makes you think this seat of the pants idea of yours would work anyway.?"

...Oh...Well...I came up with this idea years ago when we first started talking about leaving Afghanistan seriously. 
And everyone is wanting to equate every damned thing to holocaust, so that's what we're doing. 
Treating the Afghan people the way the Jewish people should have been treated after World War II. 
Ya know, because we have a lot less Nazi Sympathizers in Congress now...or at least we should. 

Anyway, that's the plan.
Has been the plan.
Just need the American people to agree with the plan. 

We have six day.   

Symptoms of Withdrawl

 I'm yet to look into the full events of the past few months but so far things are going mostly as anticipated. 

"We didn't expect Taliban forces to move so quickly."  
Some are saying. 

Actually, yes.  
You should have. 

The long and short of it is, as I was telling trainees almost 20 years ago now, is this. 
The "War on Terror and our efforts in the middle east are not wars that will be won on the battlefield but won in the the hearts and minds of the people."  

The original grievance of the Various terrorist organizations of the 90's and 00's was that their homes and nations were being used as battlegrounds between larger nations and that their rights and cultures were being disrespected. 

So why/how did the Taliban gain so much ground so quickly? 
Simple.  
They won the war. 
The coalition and American forces won the ground battle yes, but after years of occupation the Taliban won war in the hearts of the people.   

Pulling American forces out of those nations was not the wrong move. 
Not by a long shot.   
Various pundits and arm chair strategists will give their reasonings as to why we should pull out. 
But the simple answer is that it was time.
Win or loose, it was time.  
There would be no accurate gauge on the effectiveness of the strategies and support that has been poured into the region over the past twenty or more years (depending on how you view the scope of the conflict).  Like knocking over the first domino in a carefully constructed design, pulling American forces back and looking at what was built and/or achieved was necessary.   
And now that has been done things, over the course of the next handful of years will play out in a number of ways but from a success perspective it will be hard to tell immediately.
For starters, the Taliban and groups that have supported them over the past decades have been taking a much longer view of the proceedings.   After all, these regions have been disputed by major world powers since recorded history began.  Been passed back and forth as well as hosted major civilizations from start to finish. 
So they've been planning and waiting for the moment coalition and American troops would leave, and as the dominos placed by those forces fell so are the ones they had placed. 
They were able to snag "seats of power." essentially over night by all accounts. 
But that's the interesting part, and why, things will take awhile to shake out. 
Just because you sit in the castle does not mean you control what is happening in the fields. 
If the Taliban forces want to be taken seriously as a government then they will have to adhere to larger international laws. 
After all, they too had been moving and operating on the resources that had been brought into the region over the course of the conflict.   So the question is, did they actually set up a government or simply win some well executed and planned battles? 
The second very large factor that will determine success of the whole endeavor is how the outside.
 world will interact with the situation at hand.  
Remember, the major reason many of the terrorist organizations were able to make such headway in their agendas and why groups like the Taliban formed in the first place was because of disrespect and religious suppression.
Especially in the early 00's the agenda was pushed forward on the backs of people screaming "Christian Nation" and "Muslims are bad."   And even though this was not the intention of those tasked with fighting the war on Terrorism these were often the loudest voices heard, or allowed through the curtains of propaganda.   
Let's be honest, both sides were guilty of this. 
So over the coming months the U.S. forces have two very large, very tough tasks ahead of themselves.  
First, is to prove themselves. 
Aiding the interpreters and other on the ground allies that have helped, for years, the American and Coalition troops be so successful in their military maneuvers. 
Getting they, and their families, safely out of country until the fighting dies down. 
Once the blood and tensions of cooled it will more than likely be safe for them to return home and begin the hardest part of the whole thing.   

Building peace.
Not a nation.
Not a tactically advantageous location.
but a safe and peaceful place like that so many people from nations like the U.S. take for granted.  
This will be a true test of the whether or not "The U.S. won the war on Terror."  is in how we treat our allies from these past 20 years. 
This is how we will win the hearts in the battle. 

The second piece of the puzzle. 
And possibly the most difficult, is how to aid in the years to come. 
As has been shown through out the course of the Covid Pandemic no nation is truly isolated.  
No one nation is truly independent of any other. 
How the U.S. and N.A.T.O forces choose to aid and show support in the region will show how much respect is had for the nations we were 'saving' as many people view it. 

Let's be real.  
Mission was accomplished. 
The perpetrators behind the September 11th attacks were brought to justice in one form or another.
The political parties that had become dictatorships that had been installed by Allied forces through the mid 1900's removed and local governments in various forms of success taking over the roles. 

The mistrust is still there, and will be there, easily for another full generation or two.  
Hell, here in the U.S. we're still debating civil rights between the races and trying to find a healthy balance between religion and government, so attempting to enforce such in another nation any further would be an exercise in narcistic hubris.   
So that is how we win minds.  We recognize that the tasks outlined in the 00's have been achieved and quietly withdraw for the time being.  


One third piece to this puzzle. 
Respect.
Recognizing that it will be painful to watch as things slowly settle out for good or ill in the region over the course of the next few years. 
But also offering true aid when needed. 
Natural disasters, famine, disease.   
These are still battles that need fought on a global scale, and in many places that are considered "first world." still rear their ugly heads.  

So on our side of the fence it will be the task of regrouping, examining both success and failures, while retraining to meet the tasks and difficulties ahead. We also need to keep the gates open for the people in true danger to be able to find safe harbor until the storm has passed. 

As things settle there, into what ever the future has in store it will be time to look inward and more close to home.  To the South.  To the island nations and those we share borders with.  
Because right now, much as was happening in the middle east during the past decades, we have migrants fleeing warzones.  Coming to the U.S. for help and safety from conflicts instigated by those in our nations past.   Those aren't opinions.   Those are matters of public record. 
But this time, unlike the problems caused during the 70's into the 00's and all of the conflicts entered into their we should not be asking "how do we fix this."  
we should be asking "how can we help."
And a much more difficult question. 
"How can they help us."

Success is measured in years and decades, not weeks and months. 

Stay Safe out there.