More command-level stupidity

from PBS' NewsHour:

GWEN IFILL: What do you mean?

LT. COL. RALPH PETERS: Well, what mystified me when I heard about this, Gwen, was that even in maneuvers back in the Cold War days when you were just playing war, you got your chow and you dispersed because in war if an artillery shell would hit you wanted them to kill two or three or four soldiers at most, not forty or fifty or sixty or eighty.

And what's clearly happened in Iraq is we violated our own rules about troop dispersion in wartime. I suspect it has to do with outsourcing. This mess hall, mess facility, chow hall was run by a contractor.

And, instead of security, what we saw was convenience and efficiency. But it just baffled me that this base and this chow hall specifically, dining facility as we term it now, PC version, it had been attacked before with rocket fire, with mortars.

And we were still crowding these troops not even staggering the schedules. It just astonished me.

Is this an example of simple negligence by the MPs at the camp? If so, someone needs to get busted down a couple of bars for it. Were orders given to favor the contractor's mess hall procedures as they pertained to troop dispersion? This is a stickier issue because what you have is a military subordinating the importance of basic force protection to maximizing contractor process efficiency, i.e., profit.

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