Kalos,
Ah, I understand what you’re asking. I’m also getting an idea of why you are finding yourself bogged down in your creative ventures. The sorts of details you’re asking about do little to advance the story, in my opinion. They come into being after the fact of the jobs getting done is established and set to simmer. Nevertheless, I’ll try to provide what detail I have.
Civilians do the majority of work on Fort Huachuca. This is common throughout the Army—any Army—in 2000. Heck, even the Gunryo is mostly civilians supporting the fighting men. I believe that in the v1 chronology there is reference to hiring local civilians to do a lot of the administrative tasks. To put it in Army terms, there are three categories of jobs necessary to field and fight the force: combat arms, combat support, and combat service support. These were the terms used in the 1990’s, as any rate. There is some movement towards new categorization in the modern US Army, but in the Twilight: 2000 world we’d be stuck with the leftovers from the 1990’s.
Combats arms is fairly straightforward. The combat troops include the infantry, armor, artillery, air defense, and combat engineers. Combat support (CS) includes troops who fight alongside or directly behind the combat arms: military intelligence, military police, and many others. Combat service support (CSS) troops do jobs that are essentially civilian jobs, just done for the Army: finance, adjutant general, legal, quartermaster, ordnance, and others. The line between CS and CSS is fuzzy, since some quartermaster types are right up there with the boys, and some MPs serve far to the rear with the gear, regardless of how they are officially classified. At Fort Huachuca, as at many other locations, the CSS jobs are almost all in the hands of civilians. A few folks in uniform provide oversight, but at Fort Huachuca in 2000 the soldiers doing these jobs are soldiers who are no longer fit for field duty—usually due to wounds.
The organization is very civilian in nature, albeit with government service (GS) grades attached to each position. There is a department in charge of physical plant, a department of logistics, a department for manufacturing, and so on. Each of these departments ultimately reports to the post command. The post command structure retains most of its pre-war characteristics in that there is a G-1 (personnel), a G-2 (intel), a G-3 (operations), a G-4 (logistics) and others. The post staff is quite, although only a few of the staffers are soldiers. Since Fort Huachuca is the de facto capital of SAMAD, there’s a great deal of information to be organized and a lot to be done that isn’t typically done on an Army post.
The dividing line between the responsibilities of the troops and the responsibilities of the civilians has been in motion since 1998. When Thomason reorganized virtually his entire command, 306th MI Battalion was turned into a support organization. Civilians were brought in to round out the capabilities of the battalion. Very soon, though, Thomason’s chief of staff saw the need for people in uniform to conduct missions like supply runs to the battalion strong points at Nogales and Naco. Given the inclination of the Mexicans to lay mines and conduct ambushes along the American MSR in late 1998, these jobs were deemed worthy of uniformed service members. Therefore, as circumstances allowed, certain supply functions were turned back into jobs for soldiers, while other jobs were held for civilians only. A good example of how this runs is NTC, where civilian contractors do a great deal of the work men and women in uniform would do in the field. While one must wonder whether a civilian contractor receiving twice or three times the pay of a soldier is cost-effective. In Twilight: 2000, though, using civilians who are too old or not fit for duty to perform CSS jobs is a good way of making the most of the available supply of young, fit troops.
Beyond this general overview, though, I haven’t mapped out things like how each department is structured, how many warm bodies it has at each pay grade, and the like. Honestly, I don’t intend to go into that much detail on the support side of things. If doing so helps you visualize your work, then I endorse investing the time and the energy. You have to figure out where you are going to draw your lines. I understand how an internal combustion engine operates, though there are plenty of details I don’t know about my own car. Knowing or not knowing them neither aids nor prevents me from driving to work each day, so long as I take care of the basics. I can always go back and learn the model number for a part in my alternator. Knowing the alternator is in there and what it does is good enough for me.
Webstral
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