Having taken the time to mull it over, read it, and then observe the back-and-forth between the guys who are still in, some of the things in this article needed to be said. I hate to say it, but getting adequate gear and training is a fucking crap shoot. It was when I was in, and it looks to be the same way now.
Army EOD has been in this administrative purgatory for ages. The Navy treats their EOD guys as SOF assets and trains accordingly, and the Air Force has money, period. Army EOD, however, is basically a GWOT foster child. We get funding, but we don’t see it. Our “foster parents” are the various branches that only see the JIEDDO dollars. The engineers keep trying to absorb us, our officers fall under the logistics branch, and CBRNE’s gonna CBRN. It’s my understanding that there have been various pushes by SF to absorb EOD in past years, but FORSCOM et. al. has shot it down every time.
Right now, a lot of the bitching coming from the community is directed at 20th CBRNE. Money that should go towards EOD training and equipment gets forwarded to other aspects of the CBRN field. When someone raises hell, they get told that they have no business asking for that secret squirrel shit, so either make do with what you have or shut the fuck up and color.
Army EOD has had to deal with “make do with whatcha got” for decades. We’ve become damned good at it (there’s a reason Macgyver’s backstory included a stint as an EOD tech), so now it’s come to be expected out of the career field. Several times, I’ve heard of EOD being referred to as prima donnas and that we’re just a bunch of hopped up geardos with really big firecrackers that wanna act like SOF, so we don’t need (deserve?) that equipment. Hell, sometimes EOD leadership comes out and says “If I didn’t have it, and I made do, then you can too, fucking snowflake.” With attitudes like that, how does one expect to change the outdated MTOE’s that dictate what outdated equipment we have to beg for?
Training?? Fuhgeddaboudit. Big Army thinks that Big Army training is more than adequate for bomb jockeys to attach to SOF units. I don’t know the details regarding the palace intrigue at the time, but standing up the 28th was a giant pain in the ass, and I’ll bet it was because of training and standards. Like I said, that’s just speculation on my part. The sad part is that when EOD expanded during the surge, the plan originally was for one EOD company to support each BCT, and one company for each SFG. However, nobody actually planned for how to bring each EOD company up to the standards for those groups they’d be supporting. Apparently, Big Army Training was supposed to be good enough.
Adequate training can be had; it just takes some initiative at the company and battalion level once it’s known that an SOF support mission is coming up. The EOD ops guys have to reach out to whatever SFG they’re supporting, introduce themselves, and work a drug deal to get the kind of training they need. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it gets shot down, and the tactical knowledge becomes OJT in theater. Sometimes they find out they’re supporting SOF mere days before wheels up, because Big Army training is good enough for Big Army.
From what I’ve read, Joey and JJ weren’t killed performing RSPs; they were killed in gunfights. The SF guys know that drill, the 28th guys know that drill, but SGT. Snuffy from the 7xxth Ord Co (EOD) may very well be shit out of luck because he’s never been to a shoot house and his command just couldn’t spare the funds for him to go. His first deployment becomes his last, and we get to comfort his parents next May at the Memorial.
That’s not to say that EOD is as innocent as a babe in the woods on this. The community has its share of fat asses that would rather walk to the bar than do a 12-mile ruck march, and see no need to deviate from whatever Big Army brainwashing —oops, I mean “standards”— they carried over with them from their prior MOS. The Big Army APFT is good enough for them.
That’s not to mention some high speed officers that made damned sure the supply cages were stocked with enough office supplies to last five years, but only a single RTR-4 that only half-ass worked because the company had raped all the other machines for all the spare parts they could cobble together. Some companies nowadays don’t even have that. Some are blessed with a command that can finagle supplies to perform a mission, some are cursed with 100 tomahawks sitting in the supply cage, and no mission to use them on.
It was a clusterfuck before and during my time on the teams, and it hasn’t changed a whole lot since I got out. I was fortunate enough to have landed in a decent company that understood the future of SOF support, but that was right before I got out. Not every company will have driven individuals that can tell Big Army to take their standards and get fucked while arranging the training they need.
There needs to be a fundamental change in understanding what EOD’s mission is at echelons above corps, and then EOD can begin selecting for that mission. I just don’t think Big Army has the mental capacity to do it.
As an aside, if it seems like a hit piece, that’s because one of the writers is a former tech. He’s doing what he can to effect the changes EOD needs to evolve into something more than TDY funds for chem dawgs.
And thanks for posting it because helmet cam videos make me jones for the rush.
