This is the eighth installment of my Round 3 series covering my most recent deployment. If you need to get caught up, here’s an article about the history of the wing to which I was deployed. This article relies heavily on at least a passing knowledge of Catch-22, one of the best military satires of all time. If you haven’t read that book, read my article first, then head to your local book store and request Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Frozen Reaction by Spencer Jacobson.
A few years ago, I read Joseph Heller’s darkly humorous satire of Army Air Corps life in World War II Italy for no other reason than I hadn’t read it yet. It helped that Catch-22 was listed as a “must read” in several book lists. I found the book sagely relevant, even though the story takes place eighty years ago. Stories of bumbling senior officers, mischievous junior officers gaming the system, and military blunders are as relevant in the age of hypersonic missiles and stealth fighter jets as they were in the age of carpet bombing and propeller driven pursuit planes.
One of the recurring themes in Catch-22 is the acquisition of eggs, especially eggs fried in fresh butter. In the book, Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder serves as the mess officer for the fictitious bomber wing, and uses his position to create a “syndicate” that starts buying and reselling eggs as a way to line everyone’s pockets. In order to get officers in power on his side, Lieutenant Minderbinder entices them with eggs fried in fresh butter, and eventually his syndicate is a massive global organization and starts to harm the people it was supposedly helping.
There is a good reason that eggs fried in fresh butter would be so enticing to a man far from home and missing the tastes and smells of a fresh cooked meal. Procuring eggs and butter might seem a trivial thing in your day to day life, most everyone has eggs and butter in their refrigerator right now. If you wanted to, you could walk to the kitchen, fire up the stove, throw a pat of butter and an egg in a pan, and within five or so minutes you would have nice egg fried in fresh butter. When you factor in the fact that Catch-22 takes place well before refrigeration was completely figured out and the difficulty of acquiring mission essential supplies during any war even today, let alone a war eighty years ago, one could see how a homesick senior officer would be willing to throw his support behind a confident Lieutenant who can get one of those simple tastes of home brought to his base.
Food is by far the number one impact to morale on an Air Force deployment. Good food can help take an Airman’s mind off the fact that they are far away from home, if only for the five minutes they scarf it off their Styrofoam tray before trudging out into the heat to wrench on a jet, stand at a guard shack, or do whatever it is the “Dirt Boyz” do. Food is also one of the most tightly regulated of supplies by the DoD and the Air Force. We have established menus, health and safety checks on vendors, and the huge, bureaucratic weight of the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) to oversee it all.
On a typical Air Force base, the Force Support Squadron is the on-scene conduit for all things morale. Lodging, food, and scheduling activities to keep the Wing’s morale up all fall under the FSS. While at home station, FSS activities are a supplement to the activities outside the gate. When you’re deployed, however, getting off base might be either impossible or not worth the hassle, so the Expeditionary Force Support Squadron becomes the only game in town for entertainment and the proverbial eggs fried in fresh butter. Believe me, life imitates art more often than not, and for some reason the military loves to imitate its own satire without the courtesy of acknowledging the irony.
At the 332d the proverbial eggs fried in fresh butter our leadership wanted was actually fresh baked bread. There was a little bakery staffed with Local Nationals down the street from the base, and our Coalition Partners used them quite often to supply their dining facilities with bread and pastries. Rumor had it that if the wind was just right, an Airman could just barely catch the enticing scent of a bakery hard at work supplying our Coalition Partners with gluten. I will say that I think that rumor is bullshit, because no matter the direction or intensity of the wind, I only ever caught wiffs of the typical scents of the Middle East: dust, sewage, and diesel fuel with a tinge of stale sweat.
While the wind-based rumor might have been false, those who had the privilege of dining with our Coalition Partners always reported that their baked goods were top notch, and they often lamented the fact that our dining facility served thawed out frozen bread. Unfortunately for the ECONS and the EFSS, one of those who had the privilege of dining with our Coalition Partners was our Wing Commander.
When I arrived at the 332d, the Saga of the Bread as I called it in my head had been playing in the background of otherwise successful deployments for months. Keep in mind that there were a multitude of real-world missions going on at the time. It was a little hard for me to imagine that while the 332d was trying to save as many lives as they could during the completely botched Afghanistan “Retrograde,” at least a few senior members were thinking about getting better bread.
As the Contracting Officer in charge of the Air Force Contract Augmentation Program (AFCAP) for the 332d, I was eventually invited to one of the meetings with the General and his staff to discuss new sources of gluten. Since the dining facility was run by an AFCAP contractor with EFSS support, and the ECONS buys generally everything for the base, representatives from both squadrons were summoned by the General to discuss a way forward towards acquiring fresh bread and pastries for the Airmen of the 332d.
I will admit to showing up to that meeting (and the deployment as a whole) with a very jaded outlook. Some might even have called it “salty.” While I sat around the General’s conference table and listened to Colonels and Lieutenant Colonels and Majors talk about bread, my inner monologue replaced “fresh bread” with “eggs fried in fresh butter.”
The EFSS commander and the ECONS commander, Major Cultra, spent the meeting calmly explaining why we couldn’t do exactly what the General was asking because of food regulations put out by the DLA and the different pots of money that the ECONS had at its disposal to buy supplies and services. I won’t bore you with the exact reasoning why, but the gist is the DLA sets forth food regulations that the EFSS has to follow when procuring food for the dining facility, and fresh bread wasn’t within the 332d EFSS’s charter. As for the money, well that’s even more boring and bureaucratic, but the 332d ECONS didn’t have the authority to spend congressionally appropriated funds on food.
“What if,” asked the General, “we used non-appropriated funds to procure the bread?”
This was a solution that the EFSS and ECONS commanders had been trying to get around to with one caveat: food procured with Non-Appropriated Funds (NAF), funds raised through EFSS’s organic fund raising activities (sales of booze, entertainment tickets, 332d swag, etc.), couldn’t be put in the dining facility because the dining facility is for appropriated funds and never the twain shall meet.
“That’s stupid,” said the General, “what if we bought bread with our NAF funds, put the bread in the DFAC with a big sign that said ‘this bread bought with the proceeds of the 332d’s alcohol sales’ so there is no confusion?”
“That should work, sir!” Said a Major with no stake in this conversation whatsoever except looking good in front of the General. At this point we had been in the bread meeting for over an hour, sucking up two very senior fighter pilots’ time. Time that could have been better utilized executing the air campaign in Southwest Asia. More importantly, we were all becoming exasperated at the batshit insanity of military procurement for something as simple as bread, and because of this exasperation we didn’t notice that one very important member of the wing for discussing bureaucratic matters was missing: the the Judge Advocate General. The JAG. Or, in more common parlance: the lawyer.
Without input from the JAG, we murmured our agreement, if only to extract ourselves from the conference room, and the General launched into a short diatribe that included two statements within the same sentence that made me drop my normally stoic visage into one of frustration.
“We need to accelerate change or lose,” stated the General strongly, slapping his palm on the table. “How can we expect to beat the Chinese, the Russians, or the Iranians if we can’t even buy bread?” A fair point, but a gross over-simplification of how the USAF procures weapon systems.
A couple years ago, the Air Force acquisition community started getting hammered with the phrase “Accelerate, change, or lose.” The idea behind the phrase was that we needed to accelerate the acquisition processes that we could accelerate, and change the ones we couldn’t accelerate in an effort to make procuring weapon systems faster, or we would lose the next peer to peer conflict. When Contracting leaders use this phrase, the commas between “accelerate” and “change” are very strongly pronounced. I confirmed this just last week when the Hanscom director of contracting, Colonel Enriquez, used the phrase organically in a brief with a palpable pause within the phrase.
When non-Acquisition folks use the phrase, they omit the commas. This changes the meaning from “make things faster” to “change things faster” (or lose). It is also often haphazardly applied, as in the instance of the Iranian defeating carbohydrates held within the bakery outside of the 332d’s Hesco barriers. In certain situations, mostly bases with the bare minimum life support functionality, we would have had no problem procuring bread from this little bakery. DLA’s rules wouldn’t have as much influence over a base trying to feed its troops to survive, but we were not that base. The 332d had been in place for years, and the base was in a period where we were growing our footprint. Everyone knows that the bigger the military footprint, the bigger the bureaucracy for everything from bread to bombs.
“I don’t even like bread,” declared the General, “its not healthy.” With that statement, this author’s normally stoic (but scowling) visage cracked from one of frustration to one of disbelief. Even Major Cultra, the ECONS stoic and extremely professional commander, twitched ever so slightly in her chair at the General’s statement. If the General didn’t even like bread, what the actual foxtrot were we doing there?
The General was not wrong in his frustration at the lumbering acquisition process. It frustrates everyone who works in it on a daily basis, and we spend a lot of time and money trying to come up with ways to make it faster. However, if the General really wanted to “accelerate, change, or lose,” he would have sent home most of our over-experienced ECONS to work on making those changes at the program level, not procuring bread. When we already have bread, a better quality bread isn’t going to win the next war, but satellites, bomb loaders, and weather data might.
Given the time that has elapsed since returning from the deployment, I can see that the General was only trying to make life a little bit better for the Airmen under his command. Throughout my time deployed there, the General did more than a few things to make life better for the 332d, but sitting there in that conference room and discussing bread it was a bit hard to see. Too close and too emotionally attached I suppose.
In the end, we walked away from the meeting with the directive to procure some bread through NAF channels. The General assured us that he would accept any risk that came with buying the bread with NAF money, and I spoke with Technical Sergeant Carroll, the ECONS de-facto NAF Contracting officer. I assured her that the General was willing to assume the risk, and she promptly reminded me that it wasn’t his risk to assume. The General isn’t a contracting officer, and therefore cannot procure anything. This was sound logic, so with a sigh I told Sergeant Carroll that if she wasn’t comfortable buying the bread, I would do it instead.
Sergeant Carroll bought the bread, and it remained in the DFAC just long enough for me to grab a piece. I had to admit, it was quite good, especially compared to the thawed bread we normally had. Of course, the JAG came back from his trip that kept him out of the meeting, took one look at the new bread table in the dining facility, and put the kibosh on it immediately. We then had to start another long and bureaucratic process of ratifying the bread purchase, pointing fingers at whose fault it was for the illegal pastry purchase, which landed with the EFSS commander instead of the General.
And all I could hear was “eggs fried in fresh butter.”