What do we expect our country to do?

Mission Strength

Last year when the President sent some 30,000 troops to Afghanistan it seemed to be quite a large number. What most people don't know is that that number only provided for some 5,000 to 6,000 men and women engaged in combat. Why? Because of the numbers of people required to provide logistical support for those fighters. No one questions these numbers because it is the Generals and nobody wants to be accused of not supporting our fighting men and women. The Pentagon gets what it wants.

Fooled you!! I'm not going to talk about military policy and wars. I am, however, going to talk about logistical support and troop strength. My point will be that the same holds true for other things that require front line people. Those front line people require the logistical support to accomplish their mission. If we understand that it will require a given number of troops to accomplish the mission then we can also understand that it will require a given number to accomplish another mission, military or not.

Let's take Child Welfare. We know that there are thousands and probably millions of children out there who are not being properly cared for. If we define our mission as being one of ensuring that those children are properly fed and clothed and not mistreated then we understand that it will take a given number of Social Workers to accomplish the mission. How many children can we expect a single social worker to supervise? How many children will be protected by one person. Is it 10, 50 or more. Would it surprise you to know that a social worker will sometimes have hundreds of open cases to oversee. Would it surprise you to know that we often have to rotate front line people out because of the stress of dealing with the overload. Do you think the mission can be accomplished with these inadequate numbers any more than it was not possible to accomplish the mission in Afghanistan without more troops? And if we require more front line troops doesn't it follow that we need many more for logistical support? People to ensure that food is in the pipeline, education is occurring so that the cycle of abuse is broken, training and education for parents who either won't or can't provide what the child needs. It seems obvious but we don't do that. Instead we find it cheaper to just send a check and work our social worker into a nervous breakdown. But it is not cheaper because it ignores the long term reality of dealing with a person who is more prone to drug addiction, crime and a life that also requires support rather than contributing to society.

What about teachers? We ask them to prepare our young to take our place in the world and to ensure that we are cared for in our advanced years. We ask them to ensure that we have educated and prepared people that can carry our country's economy and vision into the future and to protect the values we hold dear. We often ask them to provide parenting and counseling to children who do not receive it at home for the aforementioned reasons. By every calculation we are failing to complete the mission and yet instead of sending in more troops we are cutting deployments. It is a strategy CALCULATED to fail. The budgets for education are some of the first to go when government fails to properly fund the services demanded by its citizens. Now we have those who say that our teachers are coddled, paid too much and receive benefits well out of reach for most people. Would it surprise you to know that our teachers are often paid less than they would be paid in the private sector? Would you be surprised to know that when you are sitting down to dinner there are many teachers who are still at school for extra-curricular activities? Yes, teachers are sometimes provided with good health care plans and good retirement benefits. Is that too much for people who are relied on to fulfill such a crucial role in our society? Or is it just possible that we don't pay them enough nor do we have enough of them?

When a person completes his or her education is it the best use of that investment to just toss him or her into the potential work force to sink or swim? Or could we provide some logistical support by partnering with businesses and other potential employers to see that that person's skills are given a chance to take root?

Here is my point. Just as it is in the military there are societal missions. They can be defined and the troop strength requirement can be calculated. If we can calculate the troops necessary to accomplish the mission then we can calculate the support troops we need to ensure that the front line people have the materiel to do their jobs.

This is not rocket science. If you decline to send enough front line troops, social workers, etc. then the mission will fail. If you do not provide logistical support for the front line troops, social workers, etc. the mission will fail. Then you have the costs of dealing with failure of the mission which is usually much more than ensuring success would have cost. Societies have missions and they require funding. Just as we have spent trillions in tax cuts and wars we have not adequately supported the missions of our government and we are experiencing the costs of failure and it is calculated to get worse if we don't turn it around.

We can ensure that waste and fraud do not exist in Medicare, Social Security and other missions but it requires logistical support to police. What we can't do is to continue to bray about being taxed too much when government is simply doing what we asked it to do.

My take on the lack of planning and logistical support for our societal missions.