The Marine Corps component of the exercise consisted of various warfighting and logistics units under the 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade, the leader of which was Brigadier General Mattis, in charge of the whole shooting match. My combat engineer company was reorganized and become the Engineer Company, Brigade Service Support Group 1.

For large military exercises like this, and in fact, for large military deployments that are real world, things usually happen backwards from the way one would imagine. Long before the first infantry Marine gets off a plane, dozens of logistics personnel have been working at the port unloading gear, interacting with other agencies, building camps, maintaining equipment etc. The logistics side of the house is like groupies for the main event when the combat types show up. Even though I was a combat engineer, we were in the logistics part of the whole thing. So the upshot was that when we arrived in Egypt, we were among the first Marine personnel to get there.

It was fantastic. My small logistics unit, including our engineer company, set about building a base camp for 4000 Marines. We were the first there and we owned the camp. Being so few of us, there were few rules, and few needed. Over several days, more and more people arrived and began to live in the camp. We gradually began to fall along our normal functional lines; my equipment operators no longer had to pull guard duty at night because some MPs had arrived to take over. But there was an element of sadness to the whole thing as well. Once we had been on our own, relatively unsupervised, and doing just fine, thanks very much. Now more and more people were arriving, and bringing civilization with them, and with civilization came rules. Right around this time, about a week in, I was dispatched 20 kilometers south to the open desert, to begin building a living area for the tank battalion.

This was even better! I had seven others with me: four Marines, and three Seabees. For security, half of the tank battalion's TOW platoon was there, and they were led by another Second Lieutenant. So, two lieutenants, alone in the middle of the desert, responsible for a great deal. Over time, the tank battalion began to move in. After three days of stellar progress, with no negative incidents whatsoever, my engineers had finished about half of the project, a large triangular bermed area, with some serpentines in it for entrances (the triangle had been General Mattis' idea: he wanted us to use Soviet doctrine just in case the prying eyes of the Egyptians were watching every move). At this point, I was called back to the main camp, and told to let my troops finish it on their own. When I returned, I was told that my presence at the main camp was "indispensible to operations there." What BS. The reason was that I had made a mistake: I hadn't communicated frequently enough with the main camp. This was understandable to me: we were out of radio range and I had to send back a little message everyday, scrawled by hand in an MRE box, noting the progress. I thought that was good, but apparently not. (The project finished successfully, and four of my Marines and Seabees received Navy Achievement Medals -- from the Tank Battalion's allotment, no less.)

In any case, when I got back to the main camp, it had boomed in my absence. A new unit, the largest yet had moved in. Where we were once a few in the middle of nowhere, now we were packed in like sardines. Responsibilities began to lessen, especially for us engineers, as the camp was nearly complete. Hours became more normal. There began to be problems: Marines were bored, homesick, etc etc.

After a couple more days, my sergeant and I decided to go to the main part of the base where there was rumored to be a McDonalds to get some regular food for the platoon. It was not far; maybe ten minutes by humvee. But it was as far away psychologically as you can possibly imagine.

When we pulled up, we were in full combat attire: cammies, helmet, flak jacket, load-bearing vest, and of course weapons. Not only did I have my 9mm, but I had 15 rounds, one of them in the chamber, per General Mattis' orders. Not only that, but we hadn't showered in two weeks. McDonalds was basically a little strip mall on the Egyptian side of the base, with cinder block walls, built specifically so that Americans could have fast food when they visited once every two years. When we walked in, it was almost like a scene from a western film, where the music stops and everyone turns and stares. And I stared back: inside were dozens of Army and Air Force support personnel -- basically my logistics peers in the other services -- and they were dressed in sweats, with no gear save gas masks, and strangely enough, no weapons. What an odd sight! It was like being in an alternate universe.

I quickly learned several things that amazed me: the Army and Air Force logistics personnel didn't live out with the warfighters like we did, they lived here in Egyptian barracks (we had stayed there one night on the way out, at the very beginning). Moreover, not only did they not carry weapons, their weapons were locked up in a cargo container -- if they had even brought them! This was absolutely unbelievably to me. I'm pretty sure we would not have gone to Egypt if we couldn't bring our weapons, and I've never heard of a Marine unit so much as going on a hike without carrying them, much less to a deployment in the field in . . . the Sahara desert.

There was more: the number of young women present seemed incredible. There were maybe two or three women in our engineer company, but not enough to ever really notice. And they performed fine, for the most part. Here we saw tons of young women in uniform. The atmosphere was something like a campus.

Now I have nothing against the Army or the Air Force, and certainly nothing against women, and I could be exaggerating a detail or two in my four-year-old memory, but the fact is that I was absolutely disgusted: these were not warfighters. This was not a warfighting organization. I didn't know what it was, but it most certainly was not prepared for combat, and had no sort of offensive mentality whatsoever. If I was a terrorist, I thought, it being about a month after 9/11, I'd attack these people. What easy pickings! I'm absolutely certain that one reason why all of this disgusted me is because I had not even wanted to be a combat engineer. I had asked for the infantry. I didn't yet appreciate the incredible skills that engineers bring to a battlefield.

Anyway, I say all of that to lead in to this: I know exactly what David Graham means in the above TCS article when he says this:

This disparity between the front line and rear echelon is as old as war itself. The terms "front line" and "rear echelon" are now somewhat outdated, but the concepts remain the same. Our nonlinear battlefields in Iraq certainly have no front lines, but there are most certainly areas that are secure or not secure, where the differences are as well defined as the front lines and rear echelons of past wars. Bases where soldiers face a significant risk of being shot, mortared, or struck by enemy rockets are not secure. Large camps and bases that are cordoned off with berms and other protective obstacles, where soldiers are able to roam about without helmets or protective vests, are secure. The relationship between the frontline and rear echelon of the past has been replaced with the relationship between the secure and not secure areas of today.

While our troops who patrol the streets of Iraqi cities are more lethal, suffer fewer casualties, and cause fewer civilian casualties and collateral damage than in wars past, the troops in secure areas are becoming exponentially less efficient, turning our base camps into money pits into which our tax dollars quickly disappear. Peruse the publications put out by the military Public Affairs Offices in Iraq and you will see countless examples of our defense budget and manpower being put to gratuitous waste. A special event for the Soldiers now and then is understandable -- a church service, a visit from a celebrity, perhaps some better-than-normal food. But if you browse through the Anaconda Times or the Scimitar, to name only a couple examples, one will see that it is commonplace to hold tournaments for softball, basketball, and water polo in the summer, and to organize fun runs and competitive runs ranging from a 10-mile run to a marathon in the cooler months. There are education centers where soldiers can take college classes. There are radio stations, restaurants, coffee shops, beauty salons, massage parlors, and even post exchanges that sell lingerie, condoms, cologne, and perfume. On some base camps, most notably Camp Liberty, Camp Victory, and Logistics Support Area Anaconda, civilian attire is nearly as common as the starched military uniforms -- even among the troops -- and the pool, volleyball courts, and basketball courts are packed all day long.

The majority of soldiers, Marines, and airmen in Iraq enjoy a level of comfort that does not logically correspond to a military at war. Contrary to the sacrifices and hardships that most Americans envision our troops to be making, most of our troops are being only slightly inconvenienced by their tour in Iraq. As small units of dedicated Soldiers and Marines take the fight to our enemies, logistical functions are thinly spread amongst tens of thousands of troops on secure base camps.

Another anecdote, this one much shorter: upon returning to Kuwait after invading Iraq, I was charged with going with several other officers to inspect sites where we would wash down our rolling stock and other equipment before backloading it on ships and returning to California. One of the places we visited was a large base in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert. First we saw all of the facilities we needed to, then, since it was time to eat, the Major told us to go find the chow hall before we went to the next stop. Chow hall? We found an indoor shopping mall, a fenced-in Olympic size pool with lifeguards on duty (what's that specialty, I wondered) military women in bikinis (quite a change from the burkhas we had grown accustomed to seeing in Iraq) and an enormous dining facility. Unbelievable. I was once again, disgusted. Why are all these people here? How could they all possibly be needed? How much is this costing? What proportion of the logistics for the war is just for the purpose of supporting the logisticians? Those were my thoughts.

So, Mr. Graham argues in his TCS article, that one reason not to increase the level of troops in Iraq is because the tooth to tail ratio is so low. I've argued in many places, here, for example, that we can't increase the level of troops in Iraq because our current number is the maximum available given the maintenance of a rotation of sorts. But I think Mr. Graham -- which, TCS notes, is a pseudonym for a gentleman actually in Iraq -- has a pretty good argument as well.

And he is not alone. I've cited an article in the Wall Street Journal by Robert Kaplan numerous times, and now it seems fitting once again:

In months of travels with the American military, I have learned that the smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the international media, the more effective is the operation. One good soldier-diplomat in a place like Mongolia can accomplish miracles. A few hundred Green Berets in Colombia and the Philippines can be adequate force multipliers. Ten thousand troops, as in Afghanistan, can tread water. And 130,000, as in Iraq, constitutes a mess that nobody wants to repeat--regardless of one's position on the war.

In Indian Country, the smaller the tactical unit, the more forward deployed it is, and the more autonomy it enjoys from the chain of command, the more that can be accomplished. It simply isn't enough for units to be out all day in Iraqi towns and villages engaged in presence patrols and civil-affairs projects: A successful forward operating base is a nearly empty one, in which most units are living beyond the base perimeters among the indigenous population for days or weeks at a time.

I witnessed this first hand: from being alone in the desert, to being surrounded by other Marines, to being surrounded by deployable communities of little America. I think he's right on the money.