What Strange Beast is This?

Wow, I’m pretty damn tired. When I think of it I didn’t sleep much the night the tsunami hit Hawaii, then there was the red-eye flight home last Monday. Tuesday night I was up past midnight entering orders. Wednesday was an anxious night waiting for orders approval and Thursday began a 30 hour trip from LA to Japan via the ROK. I imagine many of my friends and family have visions of me working in a destroyed landscape looking like something out of a bad Hollywood sci-fi movie. The reality is much more mundane. Yokota is a drab Air Force Base just East of Tokyo. It’s surrounded by the Japanese equivalent of suburbs. The houses here are much smaller and closer together than stateside. The weather this time of year is best described as dreary, temps in the 30’s to 50’s with days of drizzle. I’d love to report what the locals think of this tragic occurrence but I haven’t made it off the base yet. Hell in truth I may not ever make it off base if the tempo continues at the current pace.

I am an augmentee to a Joint Headquarters. Now before you read my impression of what this means realize most big contingency operations are triggered by military action. Those are not surprises and units have time to prep for them. This was a massive natural disaster in a 1st world country. There was no “ramp up” time to prepare so my comments are not meant to disparage the command, just to illustrate what it’s like to jump into this fray.
I’ll be honest the 30 hours of travel time and three room changes in 8 hours had be kinda hating life my first day here. I arrived to find no one knew what I was supposed to do, who I was supposed to work for, where I was supposed to sit, etc., etc. So, I nosed around a bit and found the J4 Shop (logistics shop). I was under the impression I was here to assist in fuels management. Apparently not so. I found there were issues getting sufficient reporting from the fleet. As a HQ Command in an HA/DR operation tracking the quantity/location of supplies (for the victims) is pretty high visibility. I was tasked to try and fix that. I found there was not much of a well organized command structure. This happened because the first priority was SAR and relief supplies. Unfortunately, by initially ignoring structure, nearly a week into this op things were dysfunctional. So I felt quite discouraged that first day. Here I was far from my family, going to miss my son’s black belt test and for what? Were we doing any good? Jet lag and lack of sleep factored in as well.

Day two went better. I began to get a better picture of what was going on. I decided to start organizing the Supply section of J4. By that evening I sent an e-mail to all the Supply Officers assigned to this Op and suggested some things we could do to get better organized and become more interchangeable. I prefaced it by noting I might be way off base and overly affected by jet lag. I still had major issues with the lack of organizational structure. So, don’t like it? Change it! By this point I was being asked to sign up on the watch bill by the night shift leader in J4 (I’d been working days). I ignored that and took advantage of the lack of structure.

Now unless you have served on a large battle staff you have no idea what it’s like. I had some taste from my days on other HQ staffs and naval exercises I’ve been part of. This was different though. This is a staff trying to address a real world unfolding tragedy. The HQ is the coordinating agent of the effort. It doesn’t go to the stricken area. It coordinates the efforts and removes roadblocks for the units and people who are going forward. To accomplish this it requires a great deal of information. This information is then digested in a series of meetings and decisions are made. It is a very unwieldy beast. This HQ is still morphing and isn’t sure what it will become just yet. This makes for a very uncertain environment. You just work what comes your way and hold on for the ride.