A House Divided (The Second Civil War) by Adam Yoshida

Author:Adam Yoshida [Yoshida, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Yoshida Media Company
Published: 2013-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

At the Pentagon, General Richard Hall sat in his office and flipped through the latest reports coming from Central Command as he sipped a cup of coffee. The Army Chief of Staff had long favored reading reports directly, rather than simply being briefed on their contents by subordinates. In the course of a thirty-four year career in the United States Army, beginning with a stint at West Point where he had graduated second in his class, his keen eye for details had been critical to his progressive advance from one success to another.

The 4th Infantry Division, Hall noted, had left its positions near Tehran and had now moved south to Qom. There was nothing particularly unusual in that, given that the US Army was still engaged in fighting off desultory efforts by the remnants of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other elements to carry on the fight on behalf of the dead regime. With a quick click he flipped through some of the other reports that had had been copied on. It was five minutes later, when reading fuel consumption reports by the Third Army, that he saw something to give him pause. General Hall opened Excel and began cutting and pasting figures across reports that spanned several weeks. When he was done, he checked the figures a second time before saving the file and forwarding it to a subordinate.

Mike, he wrote, these fuel consumption figures for the Third Army look off to me. Can you have someone double-check them and see what's up?

A few hours later, the report he had requested hit his inbox. Quick calculations indicated that, in fact, the Third Army was using nearly twice as much fuel as its operational reports suggested it ought to be using. Curiouser and curiouser, thought Hall as he read the back-of-the-envelope figures. He briefly considered writing General Mackenzie directly but he knew, based upon long and tortuous experience, he would receive an other-than-welcome response to an inquiry that some, especially the officious CENTCOM commander, would regard as an invasion of their exclusive prerogatives. Instead he sent another e-mail, this one to a different subordinate, asking him to take a look and see if it were possible to reconcile the reported pace of operations by the Third Army with higher consumption of not only fuel but other goods as well than were suggested by the official reports.

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