(post for Saturday, 19 Jun) Another virtual Monday (Saturday starts our new week). We have our weekly planning meeting every Saturday morning at 0830. This week looks to be a busy one. As always, I'll share everything after it happens. I figure it's not good to advertise our activities ahead of time to whoever might stumble across my blog.
Everyone here works really hard on their assigned tasks, but one thing that just kills our ability to complete things is the turnover of personnel. I can't complain too much since I'm here for such a short time, but it sure is frustrating. Just when you think you have all the right points of contact lined up to accomplish a task, half of them rotate back to the states or are gone on mid-tour R&R leave.
This isn't new to me. It is the same problem anywhere the US military deploys people to. It even impacts places we've been for a long time. One of our jokes while I was stationed in Korea is that we've fought the Korean war 50+ times, one year at a time. I was in Seoul for only 18 months and saw a lot of people come and go. It's even worse in Afghanistan.
We visited the CJ-6 (Director of Communications) staff today about the new cost estimate for the IT infrastructure and computing support at the new NMAA site near Qarghah, and of course, the key person was home on leave. Predictably, they didn't fill anyone else in on the project details before leaving. Two steps forward and one step back... We re-educated the existing folks in the office and at least one of them seemed involved enough to continue helping us. The coalition countries here are spending more than $200 million building the Afghan Air Defense University (ADU), and it turns out that nobody planned for phones, networks, and computers. I think they at least remembered electric power. The current estimate is that this will add another $5M or so to the price tag. They broke ground on the foundations months ago, so we're scrambling around to make sure the buildings have fiber and wires pulled in before the construction is too far along.
Speaking of electric power. The current estimate is that the new ADU site requires 16-20 Megawatts of power. The power generation capability in Kabul can't support that much added demand, so we're installing diesel generators to make it a stand alone site. I've learned that the cost rule of thumb for diesel power generation is about $2.1M per year per Megawatt. That's a $40M+ per year budget requirement just to keep the lights on. Additionally, our IT infrastructure cost goes way up because we have to put back up power supplies on everything since the generators go up and down periodically. Our current NMAA site suffers at least 3-5 short power outages every day. After a while you learn to just tune out the incessant beeping of UPSs in the background.
I was a bit under the weather yesterday, so I went back to my room and "took a short nap." This nap turned into me sleeping till about one in the morning, eating a bit, and going back to sleep until this morning. I'll try and get back on track with blog posts tonight.
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