09 December 2002

Internal Bleeding

It is black out there this morning. We are still sliding into the depths of the darkness, losing another couple of minutes of sun each day. Sunrise today will be at 7:15. The moon is down, just beyond New, and brightest thing in the eastern sky is Venus, which rose at 0347. The sun will visit us only until 4:46 tonight, long before I leave the office. No wonder they had holidays this time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. It is cold, too. Below 30 degrees and yesterday’s melt has frozen in a thin glaze as black as a witch’s heart. The salmon rays of dawn are a long way off as I turn on my friend Bob Edwards from NPR. I always feel vaguely uncomfortable about not sending him a check. But pledge drive is over for now, and he doesn’t seem to mind my freeloading this morning.

The Bob’s are leading me through the road to winter and war. Last night Bob Ryan told me about the impending icy rain that will hose the commute tomorrow. This morning bob Edwards is leading me through the Persian gulf, where Bob’s lead story is about the establishment of a Central Command forward Headquarters at the capital of Doha, in the small gulf emirate of Qatar, and the construction of a vast tent city. The exercise is called INTERNAL LOOK at CENTCOM. Army Gen. Tommy Franks is the Commander and he described it in a Pentagon briefing back in October. He is a rugged warrior with a folksy manner. You would not want to meet him in a dark alley. He said:

“Combatant commands in our country have not, by and large, had deployable command and control capabilities like their smaller formations have for a long, long time.”

The Navy has command ships to perform that mission, like the mighty USS Coronado where I was assigned in San Diego. The ships give us the capability to up ready-to-go with large screen displays and white tablecloths and able to break out the silverplate if necessary. The big advantage is that there is no footprint, and nothing for a terrorist to drive a truck up next to. CENTCOM isn’t going to use one of the ships, though. General Franks deployed a tactical operations center from Tampa to the Gulf, what they call a “TOC,” or the other half of what a clock does.

General Franks described the TOC as “containers of communications gear, very large communications pipes that we’re able to put in the back of an airplane, fly it a long ways, land it on the ground and then set up a command and control complex.” And air conditioned tent cities. Not the ones the Army and Marines use, the ones where scorpions crawl in under the sides, but the first class ones, built to Air Force specifications.

According to the briefing, INTERNAL LOOK will happen for a week or so in December. Add deployment and tear-down time and U.S. forces will be involved in the exercise for a month to six weeks. But they aren’t going to tear it down, says Bob Edwards. It is going to stay right there “just in case.”

The last time we had something to do with the exercise series we called it INTERNAL BLEEDING because it was such a pain in the butt. It was held in March, 1996, at Camp Blanding, an Army National Guard facility near the town of Starke in northeast Florida, the part of the Sunshine State that is actually Georgia. It is a spare encampment, which is a charitable way of saying there is nothing to do there except watch the alligators do whatever it is they are good at.  The mosquitoes are huge and the nearest cultural center is Jacksonville, the Bold New City of the South on the St. John’s River. The eight-day exercise dragooned about 4,000 active duty and reserve soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and civilians from the Department of Defense and other supporting agencies. Last held right before the land phase of DESERT STORM, INTERNAL LOOK became a  biennial event. It is normally a command post exercise (CPX) designed to exercise C2 and connectivity, but this is the first time it has been conducted overseas.

For the happy participants who were dragooned from the components, cars were confiscated and locked in a central lot and everyone was likewise locked down in tents and bunkers for a month while they could have been doing something interesting back home. No shore-leave from the exercise. No beer after hours, since preparing for war is not something to be taken lightly, although in those days we weren’t, really, although CENTCOM wanted us to take it seriously.  The participants thought they could have a few beers and still play make-believe the next day.

I was very happy I wasn’t climbing into a jump seat on a C-141 to the Gulf this morning. Then Bob moved on to talk about the appointment of Mr. John Snow as the new Treasury Secretary, replacing Paul O’Neill, who talked to us at Harvard last summer. O’Neill was the subject of one of our case studies on management excellence, and was known in the current Administration mostly as the guy who traveled around with the Rock Star Bono. President Bush nominated CSX Corp. Chairman John W. Snow, a former Ford administration official from Virginia, to take his place. Presumably, he won’t be traveling with Mr. Bono. Officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Snow, 63, was chosen because the inventory of alumni from the Eisenhower Administration was fully depleted. Bob explained to me that O’Neill and White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey were canned as part of a shake-up designed to control political damage from the ailing economy.

I was concerned, as are most right-thinking Americans. I got an e-mail from my friend Mohammed over the weekend, who had cancelled his social plans to wait by the phone for a call from the Administration and it never came. Mohammed teaches economics at a community college up North, and he figured he was much more in tune with the current malaise in the capital goods industries. But Mr. Bush didn’t pick him. Snow is a railroad executive, and thus represents the sparkling new technologies that will get us out of the doldrums. Just kidding. He is from the freight side of the business, and they actually do make money rolling over the disintegrating infrastructure that our Great-grandfathers built.

Then Bob got me alarmed as he began to talk about the latest airline crisis. We all heard that the Aviation Transportation Stabilization Board’s rejected United’s request for $1.8 billion in loan guarantees last week. Company stock plummeted to less than a buck a share.  CEO Glenn Tilton is indicated that bankruptcy was the most likely outcome for the beleaguered airline, and Bob indicated a filing was expected later today. I began to panic. My usual airline was going into Chapter Eleven just when I got to Premier status on my frequent flyer miles. What were the implications for American, where all my other frequent flyer miles were banked? Why was this all happening just when the Federal government finally gave up and let us keep the miles we piled up on official travel?

Bob said American was going to leverage the crisis into additional concessions from their employees, continuing an industry-wide squeeze on skilled labor. I became concerned and looked for information on the web. I found a site called www.Untied. That’s right, I didn’t misspell it. They appear to be a pro-union site. Here is what they said was going on elsewhere in the company: 

“According to information provided by UAL insiders, following the seizure of 19 boxes of  evidence including various forged documents, the office of the U.S. Attorney General is preparing a lawsuit against the airline in connection with improper servicing of aircraft at the Charleston facility�.”

Damn! I thought. Just when I was going to press for the airlines to outfit their planes with active missile countermeasures. I guess I will just have to settle for a class-action suit for ejection seats.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra