A couple more bloggers

I've added a couple more Navy IA bloggers to the list on the right side. Jessi, Bob and the Monsters is a blog by a deploying chief and her reservist husband. And Djohn's Djibouti Djournal is a blog by a Navy doc on an individual augmentee vacation in Djibouti.


I've received my orders to Afghanistan. I'm not sure how much I'll write about my time, but for now I'll keep gathering links to the stories being told by other IA sailors.

Update: Forgot to mention Deploying in a Sea of Sand and Ron's Rants.

"We could not have fought this conflict without the reserve force"

As I mentioned when I started collecting these links, the story of the Navy IAs is one that I hope is written some day. When it is, I think the following quote from Admiral Mark Ferguson, Chief of Naval Personnel, should figure quite prominently: "We've had 55,000 individual mobilizations for IA deployments compared to 20,000 deployments on the active-duty side. We could not have fought this conflict without the reserve force."  In the same speech, the admiral predicted that numbers of IAs would begin to wane in 2011 or 2012.

A significant point not reflected in the Navy Times article, in my opinion, is that many of these reserve mobilizations have been people who did not have to go. It is now more than seven years after the invasion of Afghanistan and six years after the invasion of Iraq. I suspect that most reservists who are currently serving in either location have passed up at least one opportunity to walk away before they were called up for their current deployments. Despite the fact that it became clear years ago that this was no longer a one-weekend-a-month reserve force and that being a Navy reservist means the very real possibility of a year in the desert carrying a rifle, our reserve Navy keeps at it. And I have it on good authority that the Navy actually has more reservists volunteering for IAs right now than they have billets to put the volunteers into.

Hello, everybody

Okay, it's not quite an Instalanche, but the clustrmap says that 13 people stopped by yesterday. Which is about 12.5 more than most days. I'm not sure where you are coming from, but glad that you found the blog.

USFF IA Website MIA

I've removed the link to the Fleet Forces IA website from the sidebar. The link's been dead for a few days. They had been advertising that they wanted a reservist to spend the summer overhauling their IA web presence, so I'd guess that the site is undergoing an overhaul as part of that planned process.

There are a couple of new IA bloggers around linked on the right.  Uncle Cobs Joins The Narmy is a j.g. recently deployed. I've also added Dirt Sailor to the bloglist.  (Not to be confused with the other Dirt Sailor, who is on the "Radio Silence" list since his return from Iraq.)

He who plans early plans twice

Those sage words were uttered by a mentor of mine when I asked why he had not yet begun an inspection checklist a month before the "assist visit."  (His other advice: "If it can be inspected it will be feared.") I must have forgotten that first one. Thinking that it could never hurt to get an early start on my deployment checklist, I've been plinking away at it for a while getting things done here and there. The checklist, published by ECRC, was a combined medical and administrative readiness checklist that could be submitted online. No more. The ECRC checklist is gone, replaced by two separate checklists. Both of which must be hand carried to NMPS. Should have known better.

Back to line one: Member Name...