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Comisario_Principal |
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Registrado: 19 May 2007 13:28 Mensajes: 12531 Ubicación: Achnacarry, Escocia
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Hola:
Os copio y pego una carta escrita por un miembro del equipo de seguridad que sufrió el ataque anteriormente mencionado. Espero os resulte interesante y complementaria de los enlaces anteriores.
Saludos !!!!
5 APRIL 05
To: George, Country Manager, ERSM From: Scott Traudt, Operator-Weapons QM Re: Apollo 1 Mission failures and project status
Dear Sir:
Having been advised of my legal duties and keenly aware of the ongoing Blackwater wrongful death litigation in North Carolina, I am formally requesting executive action to remedy extreme leadership failures on the Apollo 1 project and/or a transfer from Apollo 1 to another ERSM project. The situation here is, quite simply, untenable.
What follows is an outline and loose timeline of repeated failures and dangerously negligent actions in just the past two weeks since I arrived back off leave on 18 MAR 05:
1. Apollo's number one protectee, Mr. Hindawi, was left at BIAP for a minimum of one hour without protection because he had been unable to reach Apollo's leadership. Apollo operators providing a PSD element to number two, Mr. Adil, were informed by Adil in transit to his home that Hindawi had called him personally to alert ERSM to his arrival at BIAP. Hindawi claimed he had been trying to contact Apollo leadership in the morning. Apollo's leadership was unavailable due to being in bed sleeping off another drinking binge.
2. Related to number one above, Apollo leadership threw together an ad hoc BIAP mission comprised of only 5 operators in two vehicles for the pickup of our number one protectee. Department of State regulations state clearly a minimum of 6 personnel as a security element are needed for all red zone moves. In addition to this critical failure, there was no medic - Apollo's sole medic was unavailable and passed out from yet another all nighter. It is believed that Apollo's contract with the United Nation also expressly provides that ERSM will provide at least one medic for all protectees in any red zone moves.
3.The 5 operators selected for the move described in number 2, above, proceeded with the mission anyway, with at least three of them - Barry Yeager, James Yeager, and myself getting less than two hours sleep the night before due to the loud stereo, all night drinking, and screaming. Through no fault of our own, our combat and protective capabilities were diminished by the actions of others.
4. In 17 days since returning from leave, there have been at least 11 heavy, heavy drinking nights and at least 7 all nighters. Operators have been drunk, walking around brandishing weapons, and other operators have had to remove them from them to preclude ND's. At a team meeting at the end of March, Operator Iain Findlay requested that Apollo’s drinking/leadership team refrain from having the stereo at full-blast after midnight. This was seconded by yours truly, and supported by well over half of the Apollo team. The leadership begrudgingly accepted this, and in true fashion that night set aside such considerations for the overall operational effectiveness of the team by drinking and carousing until 3:30am.
5. Money set aside for the food budget was supposed to provide better PX bought food for all operators, with the money saved to go for vehicle repairs. Instead, most operators have not seen any new food, and the money has gone for steaks for the leadership and management, and beer for the bar. The operators that do not drink are thus seeing less food, and paying to have their sleep robbed.
6. Tactically, Apollo's leadership seems divorced from practical military necessities in this environment:
a. Leadership positions are filled by two medics. In a tactical environment, this is insanity. They have to either lead the Apollo operators in breaking contact and protecting the client or treat the wounded. Moreover, management routinely places a medic in the rear vehicle - away from the protectees - on an M-249 belt fed SAW, so this individual is now either a team leader, a medic, or machine gunner. Even the most rudimentary tactical considerations would dictate that an assistant gunner be designated to assume SAW duties, but this would not be - nor can be - accepted because volume of fire must be sustained in any attempt to break contact. Quite simply, it is tactically unsound. A designated SAW gunner with no other duties makes simple tactical common sense. And there have been no attempts to configure tactical load bearing equipment for the SAW gunners.
b. The leadership refuses to routinely emplace a medic in proximity to the protectees. As per the current payroll here, the medics get extra money for this purpose - for the extra duties. Moves from the IECI building to the homes of the protectees are often without any medics at all. Moreover, the IECI building is a heavily targeted building, and the medics are only rotated in as part of their operator duties. So they are getting paid extra for virtually nothing. They also do no training for operators - refresher or otherwise. Operators from Apollo have sought medical refreshers and more advanced CCC training from Project Mars.
c. Weapons employment is chaotic. We have a designated sniper with a sniper weapon, but there has been no attempt to vette this individual's accuracy with the weapon, especially since there are other operators with long distance skills. The sniper, too, also has an issued M-249, so if he is employed as a SAW gunner, his SVD rifle stays home. It would seem this person must be one or the other, and makes no tactical sense to give up a SAW gunner to get a man on an SVD.
7. A $150K armored vehicle sit useless because its alarm system transponder keys were lost. Attempts by this operator to remove the immobilizer software pods have failed. The vehicle cannot be repaired without thousands of dollars in repairs. There is more:
a. This operator requested a vehicle inspection and repair day. It was granted, with each operator given a vehicle to wash, fuel, check POL fluids, check for spare tire status, tire changing equipment, lug wrenches, and vehicle cleanliness. Approximately 6 vehicles were done. The leadership did not check on the rest - that night, vehicles were discovered by other operators preparing for missions that one new SUV was completely out of engine oil, another had no fuel, and another had a door seal almost completely ripped off (another new armored SUV the client's ride in). There was no accountability, none. b. Prior to a BIAP mission, this operator was designated driver on a soft-skin BMW. Checking for a spare and jack, it was found to have none. On two prior red zone moves, the Apollo drivers hadn't done even the most rudimentary mission capability inspection of this vehicle, and had rolled into the red zone with no ability to fix the most common vehicle problem in Iraq: a flat tire. No attempt was sought for a corrective with the offending operators. 8. Despite having three weeks where the clients were out of the country, Apollo conducted no organized team training, shooting drills, foot drills, or enbuss/debuss drills. Nor was there any first aid training nor contingency planning of potential client moves. Instead, the time was used somewhat less productively in drinking pursuits. One Apollo operator – Joyce – was actually reprimanded for going to the range to train on additional personal weapons.
9. The operational scheme at Apollo does not reflect its operational deployment. On paper, Apollo has a CAT team, a SAP team, and a Main team, each with a leader paid more than the $600 per diem. Operationally, these teams exist only on paper, with all moves being comprised of operators drawn from each team and intermixed; in essence, the team structure as it exists now seems to have no capability other than providing for extra payroll for one operator, and in the case of two medics who are in leadership positions, the operational scheme if employed as it stands would lead to a tactical catastrophe as a leader in combat would have to break off from leadership/combat duties to tend to the wounded. A solution to this would be to have simply two teams that would work and train separately and be employed as cohesive units rather than the current mishmash that horrifies most of the more sober, situationally aware operators that are becoming increasingly bitter over being tasked to cover for those too drunk or too hung over to function.
10. Operators within ERSM have picked up negative comments from US Embassy and State Department personnel with regards to the members of Apollo and its obvious reflection on ERSM.
11. Management and team leaders are paid extra for leadership and administrative duties. As it stands now, payroll, stores, weapons, logistics, and communications have been assigned to $600 a day operators, leaving very little for leadership to do, in the estimation of many of the operators here. What little they manage lately seems to be aimed at the status of the Apollo bar. None of the operators with these duties minds doing them; its just that others should not be paid for what they aren't doing - and any savings realized by reducing the brass here could go to more pressing operational items such as vehicle repairs and maintenance.
There are other problems, but these pale in comparison to those described in the foregoing.
Signed,
SCOTT TRAUDT
_________________ United We Conquer Gran escena y gran mensaje: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ftWtv6-IOwI
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