This is all too familiar....
The logistic back up for troops out fighting was absolutely shit. No two ways about it. We were consistently told not to worry, and that the kit was in theatre. Well done the loggies (and I'm not slagging the capbadge, but the whole organisation, our Sp Sqn was excellent, and started deploying back to the SPOD to pick up stuff which should have been outloaded).
Maybe the reason why it didn'y get forward was because the weasels who should have been sending it were too busy themselves in pilfering the stocks bound for the front. And before people atsrt getting defensive, I base my case on the box of 300 GPS, which when it arrived contained 175. On the boxes of 700 sleeping bags, arrived - 400. And even our Bn t-shirts? 75 missing. I mean, who else was going to wear them?
What is going to piss me, and probably everyone else towards the pointy end will be the mutual back-slapping about how it all worked out and that wew did what we were sent to do. The fact that had any more oraganised resistance been afforded us by way armour etc, then the 2 turret stocks of ammo we had across the BG (in theatre!!!!!) would have been tight. Our mortar platoon fired off almost all of the reserve ammunition available to us, leaving no more in theatre (or so we were told).
Ammunition did indeed arrive late, and we were nearly caught out, in that we had to deploy a couple of days early in case Saddam was indded heading south. As I have said before on other posts, we had only 8 hours of NBC consumables. Furthermore, and we all had to laugh about this least we cried, we were told that detectors were only to be switched on post first-strike. What the????? And this was against an enemy who had WMD at 45mins NTM.
As for Hoon. Couldn't agree more. He had the gall to turn up to our Bn and not to want to speak to the troops. How dare he? That said all we would have received would have been duplicitous bollocks anyway.
That said, troops on the front line with 5 rounds. Unlikely I'm afraid, and certainly not in the Bde I worked in.
Someone needs to be shot.