Welcome back. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like I was in a place to write a lot, and I think I’ve gotten some of my mojo back in that regard. Today, I’d like to introduce you to the start of a new series, “Professionals Talk Logistics.” This will mostly be a part of my lived-experience series Realism for Writers, designed to help writers looking for more realism in their fiction work, but will also include some general explanation of certain aspects of life as a US Army soldier. Today, I’ll be going over the generalities of supply in the US Army during the late Cold War and during Operations Desert Shield, Storm, and Sabre.
To start with, let’s talk, in general terms, about how the US Army organizes supply items conceptually: Supply Classes. The Army sorts supplies into classes, a system that long predates my active duty service; some form of it goes back to at least World War II. These classifications are still used, and in generally the same way; what has almost certainly changed are the details of how they get delivered, and how they’re packaged.
Just by way of example, take the MRE—the glorious Meal, Ready to Eat. When I was on active duty, each MRE was in a dark brown sealed plastic bag, and items inside were mostly in laminated retort packages, some of which were also encased in a small cardboard protective cover. Currently, MREs appear to come in light tan sealed plastic bags, and the retort packages for food items are of more durable but lighter weight materials. MREs now also include a flameless ration heater (FRH), which ours never did. So, as this series progresses, keep those distinctions in mind: I will be speaking from the perspective of a soldier in the Army during the late Cold War and Desert Shield, Storm, and Sabre, and when I can speak with some reasonable certainty about what things have changed, I’ll mention them.
What are the classes?
The US Army breaks supply classes down into ten categories, along with an eleventh non-numbered “miscellaneous” category. Those classes are:
- Class I: Subsistence items like food and water, and some health and comfort items. Most soldiers will have seen the first two, and a lot of them. The latter, often distributed in “Health and Comfort Packages,” are less common, and usually only issued under circumstances where the theater commander has determined there is a lack of Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) coverage, which is where soldiers would normally get those items (toilet paper, menstrual hygiene products, toothbrushes and toothpaste, items like that).
- Class II: Clothing and individual equipment. Mostly, this is going to cover in-theater supply of individual clothing items (which would normally be the responsibility of the soldier to maintain when not deployed), and certain items of individual or unit issue under a unit’s Table of Organization and Equipment (TO&E or TOE, sometimes MTO&E or MTOE when that TOE is “Modified” from the US Army standard for that kind of unit). In the latter case, some of these would be items individually issued to a soldier under a Central Issue (or Issuing, or Issuance) Facility (CIF). In the article on this class of supply, I’ll go into more detail about what these typically were, and in many cases likely still are, because the differences can be confusing and deserve their own coverage.
- Class III: Petroleum, Oil, and Lubricants (POL). This covers the gamut of such products, from fuel to engine oil to grease for lubricating metal-on-metal parts or adjusting tank track tension. It also includes products like Fire Resistant Hydraulic fluid (FRH, different from the FRH in MREs 🤣 ), antifreeze, and others.
- Class IV: Construction materials and equipment. I do not have much personal experience with these items, and won’t cover them in the future posts. Really the only Class IV items I dealt with on even an occasional basis were concertina wire (the razor wire that was rolled up like a Slinky® and could be stretched fairly easily across short gaps like a two-lane road or whatever) and what we called “engineer stakes” (officially, U-shaped pickets), approximately 5’ long steel pickets. More details on this below.
- Class V: Ammo, and other things of that ilk, including the things that make things of that ilk detonate (primers, det cord, that kind of thing).
- Class VI: Personal Demand items—batteries, toothbrushes & -paste, toilet paper, writing materials including envelopes, snacks, all that kind of thing. When they’re free, these items are Class I; when soldiers purchase them, they’re Class VI. When I was serving on active duty, this included both alcohol and cigarettes; today, I’m not sure whether either of those items ever makes it into combat deployments but maybe they do. Think of this category as the US Army’s Dollar General or whatever.
- Class VII: Major End Items. Examples of this would be a whole M1 tank, a whole M2 Bradley, a whole M109 howitzer. There are other items in this category too, but that’s basically what we’re talking about. Although I didn’t deal with this side of supply often, I did have a very interesting experience during Desert Shield that involved new tanks arriving for the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, my unit in the Gulf.
- Class VIII: Medical supplies and equipment. I did not have any experience with these items for the most part; I was a Combat Lifesaver, and got certified as such in the weeks leading up to our deployment for Operation Desert Shield, but I didn’t handle the supply side of that, just the end-user side. I will talk about this a bit in one of the upcoming articles, however, because there are some good stories there.
- Class IX: Repair parts, repair components, repair kits. Mostly, this is the wide, wide world of parts … for a tank, things like track end connectors, track shoes, road wheels; bolts, nuts, washers in various sizes, threads, and lengths; pins, clips, connectors, electrical conduit, etc. ad infinitum. Of all the things in this list, this is probably the category units are carrying the most of. Many classes of supply are handled at a battalion/squadron or even brigade/regiment level, but these are some of the items that are pushed all the way down to the company/troop/battery level.
- Class X: Nonmilitary support items, like items used for economic development, agriculture, etc., if they’re not covered by other classes. This is a category I have no experience with.
- Miscellaneous: Captured materiel, salvage. Water is listed here in many references, but potable water is really more properly a Class I item, not a miscellaneous one. This may refer more to the procurement of sources of water for later use in making potable supply, but in any case this is another one I don’t have any direct experience with.
Class IV, engineer stakes: an aside
We didn’t use them all the time, but when we did we’d use them to mark certain locations for our tank to refer to, such as the left and right boundaries for the sector of fire, or the forward boundary of the turret- or hull-down position in a hasty firing position. We’d pull the tank up to the turret-down position, then the loader would hop out real quick with two stakes (one for each side) and hammer them into the ground just in the driver’s view within their left & right periscopes, then the driver would pull the tank up into the hull-down position and we’d do the same thing there. While in the hull-down, the TC would traverse left, identify the left edge of the sector of fire, and then the loader would drive another stake just on the edge of the gunner’s field of view, and repeat on the right side. If needed, the loader could pop out just as it got dark, put a chemlight inside each stake (on the friendly side, of course), and they’d be visible in night vision, too.
What’s next
From here, my intent is to give some background about the supply classes I have personal experience with, including anecdotes and specific events to the best of my ability and within the bounds of Operational Security (OPSEC). Fortunately for me, my experience in these fields is more than 30 years old, and so OPSEC is rarely an issue, but there are still aspects of US Army supply and especially resupply that might touch on that, so there will be times when I’ll be more reticent or discreet about my stories. Most of these posts will be available only to my “Notes from the field(s)” tier patrons, so if you intend to follow along, you will want to head over to Patreon and sign up!
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