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U.S. Military Teaches Living Off the Land to Feed Future Warriors


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U.S. Military Teaches Living Off the Land to Feed Future Warriors

 

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CRIPPLE CREEK, Colo.—On the first day of training in the mountain forest on a recent fall day, Army Spc. Jennifer Evans struggled to properly sharpen a butcher’s knife. Two days later, she was expertly slicing roasts and steaks off a cow carcass and had learned to boil down the bones to make broth.

 

Spc. Evans was with a handful of military cooks being trained to butcher and prepare meat in austere conditions, skills that have the potential to make the U.S. military more nimble and combat-effective in the event of major conflict. The training, which began a few years ago as a pilot program for Green Beret cooks, recently expanded to include conventional units.

During two decades of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has largely come to rely on bulky truck convoys or air resupply to provide soldiers not only bullets and fuel, but also every morsel of food, even at remote combat outposts.

Military leaders say such lengthy supply chains may not be workable in a potential future large-scale conflict and are preparing troops to be more able to live off the land. They are rolling out lessons on how to source all sorts of food, including meat, through local means.


The shift to foraging, the military term for sustaining a unit using local agricultural products and supplies, means military cooks like Spc. Evans need to know more than how to reheat prepackaged food. They need to know how to find and prepare meals for soldiers in remote locations who need protein-rich nutrition. And in a remote Colorado camp near Pikes Peak, she moved on from boiling beef bones to learning how to slice a fresh pork chop from a pig that had been butchered the day before.

Cooks can be considered afterthoughts in the military, she said. “But it’s not just opening a bag of rice and boiling water.”

The first field-butchering class came about in 2014 because the Green Berets were repeatedly getting bouts of diarrhea, according to Master Sgt. Myron Billingsley, a senior culinary specialist assigned to the Green Berets.

 

Special Forces often work in small teams in remote locations, where getting resupplied can be difficult. And the American gut sometimes isn’t prepared for local hygiene practices. Leaders realized they could bypass resupply headaches—and troops lost to dysentery—by teaching their cooks how to identify and purchase healthy livestock from local farmers, and then ethically slaughter and expertly butcher them. When those meats were combined with locally sourced items like rice and beans, Green Beret teams could be fed on the local economy.


So Master Sgt. Billingsley decided to resurrect specialized training for their cooks, a skill that hadn’t been taught for at least a generation. At the time, he was stationed at nearby Fort Carson, Colo., when he sat down at a local restaurant with a local civilian butcher, Jason Nauert, and helped devise a weeklong crash course for cooks attached to Special Forces units to teach them butchering skills.

 

“That’s a lost art,” said Master Sgt. Billingsley. “If I’m in the middle of nowhere and someone brings me an animal, I can break it down.”

 

Since then, hundreds of troops have come through the course, including teams from the Air Force and Marine Corps.

On a recent day in the mountains of Colorado, Spc. Evans and the other Army cooks gathered around Mr. Nauert.

“Are you going to teach us how to use every part of the animal?” asked Sgt. Brenden Leal, a cook with the Fourth Infantry Division, a conventional Army unit that has recently begun training its cooks.

 

“Uh, yes,” Mr. Nauert replied to the group, most of whom said they had never learned how to cut a steak off a carcass.

Master Sgt. Billingsley said it wasn’t uncommon for Green Berets to leave cooks behind when they deployed, lacking respect for what a skilled chef can do. But in the years since he helped launch the field-butchering course, units often now ask for cooks who can leverage local sources of food and prepare healthy, protein-rich meals for the elite troops.

 

Some Marines have also taken Mr. Nauert’s course. Lt. Col. Julian Tsukano, who until recently was in charge of the school that trained Marine cooks, said reliance on contractor-run chow halls—which were the norm in Iraq and Afghanistan—could leave a huge gap in readiness if there is another global conflict.

 

“We used to have butchers and bakers in the Marine Corps but they’ve gone away as we’ve gone to an industrial model of logistics,” he said.

 

It is a model where just about every bite for troops in Iraq or Afghanistan was trucked or flown into big bases. “We could build bases where we owned lines of communications and our supremacy was unquestioned,” he said.

But even in those countries, deployed troops darkly joked about the absurdity of driving convoys of supply trucks on bomb-laced roads so chow halls could have crab legs and ice cream.


Freshly butchered steaks cook over a fire during the austere-butchering course in the wilderness near Cripple Creek, Colo.

Jason Nauert, lead instructor of the austere-butchering course.
In other conflicts, like a potential war in the Pacific, Marines might be spread over thousands of miles and just as many islands and can’t depend on regular convoys to deliver ice cream, or even Meal, Ready-to-Eat rations, known as MREs, Lt. Col. Tsukano said.

“This is kind of back-to-the-future,” he said. “Open up the old books.”

In other conflicts, like a potential war in the Pacific, Marines might be spread over thousands of miles and just as many islands and can’t depend on regular convoys to deliver ice cream, or even Meal, Ready-to-Eat rations, known as MREs, Lt. Col. Tsukano said.

 

“This is kind of back-to-the-future,” he said. “Open up the old books.”

 

 

 

 

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I have eaten a few snakes back in the day.  And a burlap sack full of chickens on one of our supply drops.

And a porcupine. Snake is better. ;) 

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There for a bit it seemed that Army cooks & bakers were going to go the way of the dodo bird. It seemed every operation overseas used contractors which relied on locals...shades of hooch mamas making pencil drawings for the VC LOL. Recently, I saw a video on social media that detailed current training for Army cooks & bakers. I fondly remember a couple of Master Sergeants who ran mess halls where I was stationed and thought that was the exception. Apparently, not today. They aim to excel and it sure looked to me like they are doing just that!

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11 hours ago, Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984 said:

What? No Navy? They should know how to butcher a shark.

When the guys on my ship caught fish the Philippino cooks would cook ‘em up for the guys that caught them.
Once we had a bunch of guys, Bosuns, tie off new dungaree pants to lines to drag behind the shop to soften and fade them in the salt water. They must have had 25 pairs of pants on this line and they had the line secured to a capstan. 
I don’t recall how long they had the dungarees dragging but when they reeled them in there was a 7’ shark tangled up in the line near the end of the run. I don’t recall the breed. We were in the Indian Ocean. 
A whole bunch of us got to have some shark for dinner that night. The Boatswains Mates were kind enough to share. 
 

I wouldn’t have wanted to live off what we caught at sea as we spent a lot of time moving at higher that trolling speeds. ;)
 

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26 minutes ago, Forty Rod SASS 3935 said:

What's the Air Force gonna do?  They can't even open a can and I can't imagine what they can catch or shoot way up there in the wild blue yonder that would be fit to eat.  What do Russian bomber pilots taste like do you suppose?

Imagine strafing a herd of reindeer.  Oh, fighter planes don’t have guns anymore.

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3 hours ago, Trailrider #896 said:

Tastes like chicken.

No. Tastes like snake to me. :lol:

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7 hours ago, Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984 said:

Imagine strafing a herd of reindeer.  Oh, fighter planes don’t have guns anymore.

Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen

Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Venison.

(That one got me in all kinds of trouble in third grade.)

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10 hours ago, Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984 said:

Imagine strafing a herd of reindeer.  Oh, fighter planes don’t have guns anymore.

The F35a (Air Force) has an internal gun. The F35b and c models (Navy Marine) do not but can carry the 25mm GAU in a pod depending on mission requirements.

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This is a long overdue move by the military. Way too many civilian cooks were being used when I retired in 97. I always questioned that slowly evolving trend and wondered if someone would ever get a clue.

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18 hours ago, Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984 said:

Imagine strafing a herd of reindeer.  Oh, fighter planes don’t have guns anymore.

 

During Vietnam, the lesson was soon learned that a fighter armed with missiles only not very effective. Adding a gun pod was only marginally better as it was very inaccurate because the alignment could not be maintained when mounted on a pylon.

Before the end of the war all US fighters were fitted with an internally mounted variant of the M-61 Vulcan rotary cannon.

AFAIK all fighters currently in use by any branch of the US military except the A-10 are armed with a variant of the M-61 Vulcan. Variants of the M-61 Vulcan are also in use by many of our allies.

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On 10/11/2022 at 11:23 PM, Tennessee Trapper Tom said:

This is a long overdue move by the military. Way too many civilian cooks were being used when I retired in 97. I always questioned that slowly evolving trend and wondered if someone would ever get a clue.

Dining by Halliburton? LOL. I'm sure there was a well-reasoned need for civilian contractors to replace the "traditional" unit mess and not just to line the pockets of politicians.....LOL

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So a 150 year set back to foraging is being trotted out as a good thing.

 

It's one thing to teach bakers and cooks to take care the soldiers but to look forward to having to glean and forage in the field seems a little defeatist. Pre civil war tech level.

 

I understand socom soldiers needing this training but general field kitchens should have supply chains and 4 to take care of them.

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