Military Role In Aid Program To End

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
European Stars and Stripes
October 6, 2008
By Charlie Reed, Stars and Stripes
A longstanding State Department humanitarian program is losing its military manpower.
Since 1992, Operation Provide Hope has upgraded and established hospitals in former Soviet bloc nations using hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the military’s medical surplus.
The State Department coordinates the logistics through the Army’s Medical Materiel Center-Europe — where supplies and equipment from around the world are stockpiled — and each branch of the services has taken turns delivering the stock and training locals how to use it.
The military provides the troops. The State Department pays their salaries and temporary duty compensation, but can’t afford to anymore, said Jerry Oberndorfer, director of humanitarian assistance at the department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.
"We have to pay an awful lot for those military guys to come and work for us," Oberndorfer said last week on the heels of the completion of the latest mission to Moldova. "It’s very, very expensive."
The missions are not one-time drop-and-go schemes. Troops spend weeks, if not months, in the field as part of Operation Provide Hope.
Annual operating costs are about $1 million, roughly 10 percent of the overall State Department aid program budget established by the Freedom Support Act after the fall of the Soviet Union, Oberndorfer said.
The State Department will continue shipping surplus military medical supplies to the countries, but non-governmental organizations will likely take over the jobs once done by troops, he said.
The State Department has steadily scaled back the military’s role as funding for the program has dwindled in recent years, he said.
"We had to cut out the military airlifts," Oberndorfer said. "We’re trying to do the best with the funding we have."
The military has also been hard-pressed to lend the manpower as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue straining the services and downsizing further reduces force numbers, said Lt. Col. Owen Hardy, deputy commander of the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Center-Europe in Germany.
"Just the bodies to fill those taskings are in short supply," Hardy said. "It’s also a personnel issue. It’s harder to get that technical expertise to go on these taskings because the doctors and nurses are downrange."
Active-duty and retired troops who returned earlier this month from Moldova — one of the poorest nations in Europe — say the experience gained during the mission is invaluable and that the program will be missed.
"I come from a third-world country myself. So I know what it is to have and not to have," said Tech. Sgt. Wade Sinclair, a surgical technician from the 48th Medical Group at RAF Lakenheath, England, and native of Jamaica.
"But you forget what it’s like in countries like that, how they struggle with medical care," Sinclair said
He was part of an 11-man U.S. Air Forces in Europe team that delivered $21.7 million worth of medical supplies and equipment this summer, training Moldovan medical workers along the way.
"You come back and you’re so much more appreciative," said Sinclair. "I used to complain about Tricare but not anymore after seeing what it’s really like to be without everything."
What’s more, said retired troops working for the State Department at the Army materiel center, the military’s impact in the program is a boon for diplomatic efforts in the former Soviet republics that struggle with political, economic and military reforms.
To emphasize the humanitarian nature of the mission, troops do not wear uniforms or address one another by rank.
"That’s because there’s this huge sensitivity on the part of the Russians and [the former Soviet republics] don’t need the flak," said Lou DeAndrade, chief of humanitarian assistance at the Army materiel center and an Air Force retiree. "The sensitivities in those countries are still very great."
Still, participants are ambassadors for the U.S. military, he said.
Along with greatly improving standards of medical care, troops also demonstrate the benefits of a highly trained enlisted corps, DeAndrade said.
"They’re always extremely surprised that it’s young people and they’re flabbergasted at how competent and well-trained they are … and that they’re actually allowed to handle such high-tech equipment," DeAndrade said.
"A 20-year-old trying to even touch an X-ray machine 20 years ago would’ve been shot."
Operation Provide Hope cannot take credit for the strategic military gains the U.S. has made in the former Soviet republics — such as in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan where the U.S. now operates air bases — but it has been a factor in the overall American diplomatic and military headway in the region, DeAndrade said.
DeAndrade and his team at the materiel center already are planning the next mission to Tajikistan in 2009, the first that will not include a military component.
Retired Army Master Sgt. Paul Campbell, an operations officer at the materiel center, was among the team of troops who carried out the inaugural Operation Provide Hope in Georgia in 1992.
"This has been going good for more than 15 years and it wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t a good thing," Campbell said. "The interface between the soldiers or the airmen or the Marines or the Navy, that was a good part of a program. The interaction between them and the locals, that’s what’s going to be missed the most."
 
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