FedEx Core Team Meeting and Some Info About the 11th ACR

Had an SDR&A Core Team meeting today. Here are the notes:

PPE’s to Anita by today. - I'm Late!

Downloads (all) to be performed by Jerry.

Due Tues - list of all downloads, how and who accomplishes.
Update last report.
Audit NSC Tapes.
Send Madelyn a report documenting this action and enter into TSG.
Tweak TSG to ensure its being used properly.

Notification to Ron Wallace concerning InfoSec - Done

Contractor Release checklist from Ron Wallace - Done

Report for closure on DVX System Report – CC Bob Bryden - Done

Follow up with Chuck regarding COS Expense Report.

Vacation Requests – Done

Schedule a meeting with Joann and Anita regarding the new Interns.

Thursday June 3, 2004 10:00 – Do an orientation.

Server Setup and Maintenance – Jerry – Computer Repair/ Built own computers.

Training System – Jackie – Establish a skill set & communicate to Willie Brooks

(Internet Usage) English Grammar Skills/Graphic Design.

Download Automation – Mamata/Chuck

4th Intern to work with Norma.

What we do, international mission, what we do as a unit.

Travel and Vacation Schedule by the 15th for my and Joann’s Staffs.

Training schedule by mid-June.

Management/Leadership in AMA or LP1 at Express.

Proprietary Information Agreement for Contractors. NDA copies. Call Ariba people. Also call COS mgrs.

An Article Posted Today About the 11th ACR (from Ft. Irwin, CA)
I downloaded a newspaper article about the 11th ACR today. They are deploying with us. Here is the article:

Posted on Mon, May. 24, 2004

A few good men -- and a few more, and …

By Joseph Galloway

Knight Ridder Newspapers


WASHINGTON - The Army is looking for a lot more than just a few good men, and it needs them in a hurry. Army manpower people are now looking at scraping everything out of the barrel to send to Iraq, because the Army is stretched thin and stressed to the max.

For the first time in recent history, a brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division (Mechanized) is being pulled out of South Korea and shipped off on a one-year rotation to combat duty. It will leave the division with just one combat brigade facing the Demilitarized Zone that divides South Korea from North Korea and Kim Jong Il's million-man army.

The soldiers who were six or eight months into their Korean tour -- itself classed as a one-year unaccompanied hardship tour -- are looking at 12 more months, this time under fire in Iraq.

"It reflects the fact that we are at war," a Pentagon briefer who can only be identified as a "senior military official" told reporters. He added that the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry would be taking some of its M1A2 Abrams tanks and its Bradley fighting vehicles to Iraq as well.

When the Korea brigade moves out, all 10 of the active-duty Army's 10 divisions will be involved in Iraq or Afghanistan. They're either there now or have recently returned and are preparing to go back.

Those who believed that the Iraq war was a spike, not a plateau, and that by now the American forces would be dropping to 110,000 were wrong. The force is going to remain at 135,000 to 138,000 for at least the next 18 months, according to the Department of Defense.

If things get worse -- always a real possibility in Iraq today -- that force may need to be further reinforced and expanded.

Now the Pentagon must find enough troops to take over for those stalwart soldiers of the 1st Armored Division who had finished their year in hell and were on the way to the airport and a ride home when they were turned around and told they'd have to do an additional 90 days.

In addition to the 3,600 troops being pulled out of Korea, Pentagon officials say they've pulled the files of 17,000 Individual Ready Reserve soldiers and are sifting and screening them for those who have crucial specialties. Under present authorization, the Army could be telling as many as 6,500 folks who thought they were home free -- finished with their enlistments and back on civvy street -- that they aren't.

Everyone who signs up for military service owes Uncle Sam a total of eight years. After a four-year, active-duty enlistment, that person still owes four years on the Ready Reserve list. No pay, drills or meetings -- a civilian, more or less. But these people can be called if they're needed. Some 7,000 of them already have been called since Sept. 11, 2001.

Even more surprising is the word out of the Pentagon that there's a plan afoot to shut down the Army's prized National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., and to shuffle its vaunted Opposition Force (OpFors), the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, off to real combat.

America's stunning victory in the Persian Gulf War was born in the Mojave Desert around Fort Irwin, where the Army's heavy-tank divisions fought realistic war games against the 11th ACR. It's never been shut down since it was founded in the early 1980s.

Those who skinned the Army back from 12 divisions to 10 in the 1990s, and those who've refused to consider any significant increase in manpower despite the current crisis, bear equal responsibility for the burden they've placed on our soldiers and their families.

The civilians in the Pentagon, the same ones who were so eager to invade Iraq, don't want to restore those two Army divisions, in part because that's what their political nemesis, Secretary of State Colin Powell, recommended as the Army's base force.

We'll say it again: An army is a fragile institution. It can be broken by overwork and a lack of manpower, just as surely as it can be broken by a lack of money and the right equipment. And once broken, it takes a decade to repair and restore an army to greatness.


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Joseph L. Galloway is senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. jgalloway@krwashington.com