“Our” Stockpile

There is a familiar and old joke about certain Supply Sergeants in the Army that Commanders at all levels have experience with: When a Supply Sergeant evinces reluctance, or flat-out refusal, to distribute supplies to the troops, we all say “Why would they give it out? Then they’d have less on the shelf.”

Then a Commander gets involved, and, in my experience, that Supply Sergeant quickly is made to understand who paid for ‘his’ stockpile (taxpayers) and who is entitled to it (troops). And if he doesn’t do a 180 on the spot, he is negatively counseled, demoted and/or fired. This is because we all know the large degree of truth behind German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s comment: “Battles are decided by the quartermasters [supply guys] before the first shot is fired.” Rommel again? It’s Rommel month!

That’s one type of Supply Sergeant, encountered frequently enough for us to all know the occasional juvenile human impulse to husband resources and blur the lines between possession and ownership once things are under one’s control. Fortunately, this is not a frequent occurrence, and Army supply experts are usually of another type:

This second type are those that take enormous pride in using all of the resources under their control and their logistics training and acquisition skills to make their units the best supplied units in training or on the battlefield. And when I say ‘acquisition skills’ for this second type of logistician, I can tell you that we’ve all been amazed by the creativity and tireless effort that often surfaces when these guys try to make things happen to benefit their Commander and the troops. I saw this in action everywhere and can still remember specific efforts and results of logisticians from the National Training Center in California, to Katrina in New Orleans, and in Afghanistan. I remember countless ‘situations’ saved by logisticians and have great respect for them to this day ̶̶ and I’m delighted to give these Supply Sergeants a shout-out in this obscure blog post today.

Jared Kushner said on camera yesterday that “The notion of the Federal Stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.” Well . . . he’s that first type of Supply Sergeant, ain’t he? If he gives it out to the states, he’ll have less in ‘his’ stockpile. And he resents it. You could see it in his face; you could see him straining to be polite about it when in his heart he wanted to really shout “Don’t take my stuff!”

If an Army Commander had heard that said by a Supply Sergeant in their presence, everything would stop. People in the room would all look around with knowing ‘uh-oh!’ glances and then the senior guy would ask most of the people in the room to leave. Then, the slap in the head (I mean the ‘re-training’) would happen: that guy would be given one chance to re-learn who pays for the stuff and who it belongs to.

So. What type of re-training should Kushner receive? It didn’t help that his administration tried to back up his thinking by changing the purpose of the National Stockpile in their website. But, the media is helping to course-correct his notion of who owns the stuff and what it is for. And, there is of course the statute that his comment violates, and there is the logic question I’d personally ask him: “Who are the people you reference by ‘our’ that don’t live in the states?”

But a good Commander would also go to the training records to see what Kushner’s training record is, how he became qualified to manage the greatest and most important logistical asset in the country. Was he the Quartermaster General of the United States Military prior to this post? Was he the Chief Logistician for Boeing, or IBM, or GM?

No. There is only one document in his training file: a marriage certificate. He married the President’s daughter.