Actual question. By the end of the 1970s, field artillery units stationed in Germany were training without ammunition (source: Dad was a captain in the artillery). It sounds like by the end of the 1980s, there was plenty of ammo to go around. How did the situation under Carter and the rebuilding compare to the situation today?
This will be a long effort post, but hopefully you find it interesting.
After The Nam, the whole thing was an absolute shit-show. The Harvard Business MBA's were still in charge of the Pentagon, where they pretty much had spreadsheets that determined the value of conflicts. The ammunition wasn't paid attention to and a lot of equipment was being ignored. (Funny aside, this was when Rumsfeld had his first tour as Secretary of Defense) For the most part, the US military was in deep shit till about Carter. Carter actually started having the DoD take a good honest look at the military when he took office.
Shit was fucked. Units WAAAY under manpower. Military Occupational Specialty manpower at critical levels in dozens of critical MOSs. Training facilities falling apart. Toxic as fuck leadership. Low morale. Lack of equipment. Low maintenance schedules. Corruption. Drug problems. (The piss test wasn't in full effect until under Reagan)
Operation Eagle Claw blew its load out its ass (everything from the press reporting on it while it was enroute to massive equipment failures to bad training and targeting) resulted in a commission that found out horrifying lack of training, lack of gear, rotting bases.
The US government at the time was hostile to actually rebuilding the military, still holding a grudge over the "military losing Vietnam" so the grift ended.
But, shit started to change.
First of all was just looking at it realistically, not on paper, but as in Congressional Aides and Senatorial Staffers going in and taking pictures, interviewing the lower ranks, examining barracks, vehicles, and stockpiles.
It was a wreck.
Carter tried to get the ball rolling. I'm not too clear on all of that (too young), but I do remember the Air Force actually having fuel so they could rack up training hours.
In the 1980's the US military started to rebuild. (I am GROSSLY oversimplifying what happened) The first thing they did was look and see what units were actually activated and which ones were paperwork princesses. (A trick was to keep the Headquarters Company under colors, case the rest of the unit's colors, then put it up as "Kiwi Battalion - [Fill in Blank]" and act like there was an entire battalion there) That resulted in the MASSIVE 'surge' in the early 1980's as units were uncased and had the Table of Organization and Equipment updated.
And holy shit were the TO&E's terrible. Units that had a manpower minimum of 100 troops had 'waivers' from the DoD to drop it to 20, shit like that.
So, massive influx of troops into Europe in the early 1980's. Then Equipment part of the TO&E was, frankly, embarrassing.
But three things changed everything:
A) The deployment of new weapon systems, built for Europe
B) Grenada
C) Gen-X finally getting old enough to join
These new weapon systems were the Bradley, the MRLS (AKA The Grid Square Removal Device), and the M1/M1A1 series tank. The Bradley to replace the shit-tastic and ancient M113 (which are STILL in service) for the line slime, the MRLS to (theoretically) offset USSR human wave tactics, and the M1 to take on the T-series tanks.
This meant: New ammo. (In the middle of the M1's deployment, the tank was upgraded to the M1A1 series, which meant that the 105mm cannon rounds had to be replaced enmasse) New unit training. New vehicles. Upgraded barracks. This meant places to store the vehicles, ammunition, fuel, and troops.
Grenada was a fucking SHIT SHOW. You really have to research it to see just how big of a shit-show it really was. SEALs drowning (Irony, right there), radios that couldn't talk to each other, no maps of the area, and some really interesting people involved saying interesting things. That resulted in commissions that then saw how bad Europe was. This called for a whole new restructuring, from the top down.
Shit had to be fixed, and fixed fast.
To top it off, another commission subcommittee finished their report.
Estimates were wrong: The bunker loads at the FSTS and ASP and FATPs were less than 9 hours of ammunition at the new estimations. The law came down: 30 days. Thirty. Fucking. Days. of ammunition. Minimum. Preferable for 90 days of ammunition at consumption rates assuming hard fighting, a fighting retreat, then a counter-offensive.
This meant Europe needed ammo, manpower, vehicles, and everything. and they needed it fast.
Languishing depots were rescouted (some of them had literally been lost), rebuilt, refit, repaired, or just plain built.
Gen-X had finally gotten old enough to join up. For a lot of them, it was a way out with Corporate Raider Culture having starting the gutting and selling off of American industries to overseas concerns and offshoring just starting. It was a way to get college, get out of your situation, and, well, fuck it. Why not? The stock market crash, the S&L Scandal, businesses getting gutting, why not join the Green Machine and maybe get a chance to take your anger out on the world?
(This is from a Senior NCO I knew who had done time as a recruiter talking about it when he got drunk)
During the latter days of Carter the recruiters literally couldn't get people in the door. Basic Training units sometimes started with as few as 50 recruits for the entire cycle.
Gen-X came in in a rush. At some points it was a YEAR LONG waiting list just to go to Basic Training, much less get your Basic Training and AIT (Advanced Individual Training) scheduled with only a week or two, no longer than a month, wait time. Some guys, Active Duty, did Basic during the Summer between their Junior and Senior Years, reporting to the National Guard Armory in the weekends, then going to AIT after Senior Year.
Attitudes were different. No more 'The Nam' lethargy and 'we can't beat them', but Gen-X was a weird generation. We didn't care. About anything. We were dead men walking and we knew it, the news and schools and parents let us know every. fucking. day. that we were going to die.
Join the military and die with your boots on rather than cowering under the kitchen table like a fucking hippy.
Let's see Ivan talk all that fucking smack when I'm watching an M1A1 drive through his fucking house. Sure, I'm going to die, but I can die with my hands around someone's throat.
OK, in the 1970's, we had the same shit going on that we have now. A complete failure of morale, of citizen support, of government support. (This repeated in the 1990s when Clinton decided to gut the fucking military and sell off a shitload of stuff to 'balance the budget' and crack down on low level expenditures like toilet paper and light bulbs at a unit level) The bill had come due for The Nam and nobody wanted to pay it. Empty bunkers, units shut down or shuffled around, all kinds of fuckery as the DoD got looted and everyone ran off. Like now, bases were ignored during Vietnam and then nobody wanted to pay to fix them. Units were ignored and nobody wanted to allocate the money (training funds, logistical funds, upkeep funds) to train them, fix their barracks, or feed them.
Ask your father, he'll tell you about how the unit he was in had massive manpower issues, there were food issues, his barracks were a fucking wreck, the leadership was toxic as fuck, dudes fucked off all day smoking pot and drinking, his weapon was probably fucked from The Nam and he hardly got to go out and train with it. The training areas were dicked. His unit didn't have fuel, parts for vehicles, anything.
All that had to change.
The early 80's were just getting people in place, placing ammunition orders, vehicles being brought in on ship to Bremerhaven, shit like that. The first thing they had to do was rebuild and restock the major ordnance storage and logistical areas. Graf, Miessau (sp?), Wildflicken, Fulda, Rhien-Mien (sp?), Rammstein, Dardstahdt (sp?), Nuremberg, all that shit. First thing, the roads had to be fixed at the ASPs and massive storage complexes.
Then came cracking the bunkers for a REAL inspection and inventory.
The ammo was fucking rotting in place. Holy shit, was it rotted. Ever seen 30 year old dynamite sitting on a wooden pallet in a bunker that the vapor/water seal was busted? That glimmer? That's not Elsa's jizz. That's nitro-crystals. Cracked artillery shells. Rusted out rockets.
The ammo had to be pulled and locally destroyed. It was too damaged to send back.
Then the bunkers rebuilt. Not the small little bullshit ones.
The big ones.
Enter Crazy Uncle Johnny as a buck private.
There's no way to really describe what my first 2 years at a unit was like. (I got stoplossed as mission critical and not allowed to PCS when my time came up. I was stuck there till they cased the colors after The Storm) When I went to Desert Shield, I literally had more free time than I did in garrison. Ever seen 10 million of something? I have.
First thing to hit Bremerhaven were the artillery rounds. Not some bullshit number like 10,000. No, try 10,000 pallets. Try 250 Conex containers. All loaded onto a train or onto trucks and sent to my happy ass. At one time I was dealing with 1,000 Conex containers, semi-trailers, and/or train cars a week.
All full of ammo, separated by lot number and munitions type.
Mortars, from the little ones all the way to the big honking 4.2" bad boys. Artillery shells. 105mm 155mm 8" rounds. And not just one type, everything. I mean EVERYTHING. Even the Gray Ladies. Rifle ammunition by the fucking truckload and traincar load. M60 and .50 ammo. By the truckload. H104 MRLS pods. By the THOUSANDS. (The general in charge of the MRLS units wanted his shit staged in 90 days. My unit did it by running shifts so that the ammo was moving 24/7) Hawk missiles. Stingers. Fuzes. Prop charge. Engineer demo kits. Det cord. Grenades (hand & 40mm). 105mm tank rounds, then pull all of those and replace them with 120mm ones. (Fuck me running, I wished I was dead more than once) You name it, if it could be fired from a gun, thrown at someone, or blow someone up, I had it.
This whole time, everyone's getting vehicles, parts, orders to go down the wrecking yard and drag back any vehicle with an intact frame so it can be rebuilt. Tanks are coming in. Bradleys are coming in. New CUC-V's.
We got new forklifts in the middle of an ammunition shipment.
You know the scene in the movie where the guy looks at the suddenly hot girl and the music plays and everything goes bright and pretty? Yeah, that's how it felt seeing those brand new (less than 100 hours on the odometer) forklifts sitting on that railcar. We pulled those fuckers right there.
New radios. Still the old PRC-77, but NEW ones, manufactured AFTER The Nam.
Night vision gear and training on it. (NVG-7's for my unit because we needed binocular so we could drive forklifts in the dark under blackout conditions)
EVERYONE is suddenly training. Not going out for 2 days to fire your weapon then fucking off to the barracks again.
Oh no.
Here's the 1987 schedule for my unit.
Pre-ARTEP. ARTEP. Summer Support of Field Units. Pre-staging for REFORGER. REFORGER. Reconstitution. WINTEX. ARTEX.
Each of those were 30-60 days.
Some of went to schools in the meantime. Air Assault, not to get our badge, just 2 weeks of learning to sling load. Everyone, as fast as possible, whole platoons went. Airborne. Not to learn to jump out of a plane. No. Learning to palletize and load a plane. Anyone who was Airborne in the unit had to learn to inspect and/or repack the chutes for the airdrop. Armorer's school, one person in each squad (my unit). NBC School at Darhstahd or Baumholder (sp?) for anyone not already qualified.
Holy shit. No wonder I was always drunk when I wasn't working.
But I still was working to reload the bunkers, make sure everyone had their ammo, doing local EOD work to destroy unstable ammo from the 1960's or before.
This shit was so critical, sometimes I had infantry or artillery dudes detached and sent to me just to provide the sheer manpower I needed. I was sometimes swapped out to another unit for 30-90 days to help them get their shit up and running. My unit was operating with less than 75% TO&E manpower for my first year. (We never got 100% before our colors were cased after The Storm)
There were days everything hurt when I woke up. I was so tired all the time that more than once I would get one boot off and wake up laying down with one boot on. I guess it made it easier to just put my boot on, run my hand over my hair, and go back out to work.
Funny thing, a lot of the older NCOs and Officers didn't like this "New Army" because they were suddenly expected to work, not live off the Green Machine. LOTS of them fucking quit (I knew of a couple SNCOs who went to the CO screamed "I QUIT! FUCK YOU AND THIS BULLSHIT UNIT!" and we never saw them again. Good fucking riddance) or just made everyone miserable until command sent them somewhere to fuck off. I heard dudes who had like 10 years in bitching that they never had to work this hard before and it was bullshit for someone with their time in service/rank/time in grade to have to do this shit.
The description doesn't do it justice.
The chow halls on a lot of posts that supported the refitting were open 24/7. Lots of guys had separate rations even though they lived in the barracks, with waivers that they could eat at chow halls too, just to make sure we were always fed. Supply had uniforms and would give them out if you ruined yours (You didn't have to pay to buy them, Clothing Allowance was only for aging wear and tear, not because your sleeve got ripped off by a fucking engine belt)
It wasn't uncommon to sleep in another unit's barracks. Hell, I slept on the floor of people's rooms more than once, or in their Day Room on the chairs. The EOD guys were so overworked that when they got to a site, if it wasn't time critical, they'd take a nap on a cot for a couple hours, then go down and handle the problem. (Which was how Crazy Uncle Johnny was OJT crosstrained limited EOD, so I could just supervise it myself)
For me, for 2 years, sleeping inside was a luxury. I lived in a tent or out of my truck for months at a time. I had 2 shelter halves and the tent poles and ropes on my ruck. I slept more than once for a week or more in that little tent. The rest of the time was in a GP Medium or GP Large tent. For months my shower was either jury-rigged or just a garden hose. (I remember it started raining one summer day and we all stripped naked and stood in the rain, using soap to clean off. Body modesty had been turned in to Supply months before) Those first 2 years were like nothing I'd ever experienced before and only once after.
The rebuilding we did was a MASSIVE effort. We literally retooled the entire US Army from the fucking ground up, WHILE we all went mission capable and stayed that way. I didn't take leave for 4 years and when I cashed in 30 days of leave, it didn't count against my max number of times because it was command mandated that I was not able to take leave.
The above doesn't do it justice.
Irony, after The Storm, when my unit was shut down, all that effort? Yeah, we emptied the bunkers, pulled the doors off, blew a shitton of ammo in place, railheaded the vehicles, and disbanded in 90 days.
All of that.
For fucking nothing.
OK, so, now how does it compare to nowadays?
THAT doesn't.
We had food. There were problems with barracks. (Fuck you and your 'winter in your vehicles, they have heaters' speech, Dick Cheney, I hope you choke on a cock and Biden mistakes your corpse for a little girl) Mainly because a lot of them were built by the Nazis. But we had food, and there were workarounds for the barracks. (54 Combat Engineers repaired a lot of barracks on the back hook) Everyone had ammo to train with, the training areas had been repaired and refit. Morale was pretty good, the "YOU DON'T KNOW, YOU WEREN'T THERE!" assholes had pretty much gotten out, leaving the guys willing to share the real shit with you for training. They didn't Article-15 (non-judicial punishment) you for every tiny thing, it had to be pretty egregious to end up in front of your CO or someone had it in for you. It wasn't zero-tolerance, lots of guys fucked up but straightened their shit out and had good careers.
Nowadays looks more like after The Nam. Shitty food. Fucked barracks. No training. No ammunition. No vehicle parts. Bad morale.
I'm not busting on the rank and file. Sure, lots of people are all "Oh, they won't be able to fight shit", but they said that shit about us and we did all right.
But command is fucked. Civilians have taken everything over. Contractors are everywhere, and are largely the problem with Ordnance and the chow hall and barracks and on-post housing situations.
When people go "Oh, they doubled the output a month and will reach triple output in 2 years!!!" (insert sound of choking on their own spit) I want to slap them. When they tell me "oh, they'll get the production lines for the ammo up SOON!" I want to smack them. When they say the rockets and missiles are all there, I want to smack them.
They spent a 20 year war burning through ammo that they didn't replenish. A fucking 20 year war where they were using artillery, and the lines were barely functioning (The CAPACITY was 10K a month, not the actual output. The actual output numbers are fucking abysmal) then. Remington and Winchester asked the DoD REPEATEDLY if they wanted to commit to more ammunition during the GWOT and the US government kept going "Naw, it'll be fine", which meant that rifle and SAW ammo started getting pretty fucking thin.
Which is why units are hardly training now.
The fuel? Well, like Clinton before him, Biden (and, to a lesser extent, Obama) has been busy draining the fuel reserves, including the massive tanks on posts, to sell them.
Manpower issues mean that IF your unit has cooks, they are overworked because civilians are lazy shits who don't like working weekends or long hours. Which is why you see all over Twitter and Facebook guys who are in bitching that they aren't getting fed.
Not getting fed was the ONE thing that would piss us off quicker than fuck. Sure, I ate a SHIT-TON of MREs, T-rats, and had a driver run to one of the nearby posts to pick up mermite cans of hot food, but we ALWAYS had food. Even during a week long blizzard, they kept out stupid drunk asses fed.
Now, they have fucking self-serve kiosks that run out in a few hours on the first day of the weekend.
The Chain of Command is so out of touch, senior leaders said the black mold and maintenance issues in the barracks were a 'discipline problem', rather than the fact that there isn't a guy in the unit any more whose job it is to maintain the barracks, it's outsourced to a civilian contractor and you have to do a shitload of paperwork and even then they probably won't do anything to fix it.
The self-sufficiency of the Army I was in has been replaced by civilian contractors, leadership who micromanages everything, zero tolerance policies, and toxic leadership. It's hurting readiness. There's a lot of shit that would be hard to explain that's hurting morale and readiness, because soooo many of the current leaders are slick sleeves (like after The Storm, the political desk jockeys managed to push out the war-fighters and get high positions. General Milley is a perfect example of someone who just did combat tourism. Notice that his Wikipedia bio was adjusted to add in supposed deployments after people started pointing out he had over 40 years in the military and only a single actual deployment, and that was to the Green Zone in Iraq just long enough to get his ticket punched)
To top it off, there's a lot of stuff going on. Beards are back on the table, with the "LOL, nobody is going to use gas" and "This one study, done by a dermatologist with 100 participants, with standards I never read, TOTALLY proves that you can have a beard with a mask! The FRENCH do it!", and the fact it makes them look like a fucking hobo and will be great fun to deal with in an actual deployed condition is ignored. There's calls to eliminate leadership schools, because obviously just pinning on rank means you can lead. (PLDC and BNCOC are called something else, and they taught you how to be a leader as well as the upper level skills of your MOS). The grooming standards have changed.
Part of it is, it's being assumed that the logistical lines and the semi-permanent FOB system will work for the next war too. That there won't be logistical shortages or people living in the fucking mud, or living out of a vehicle, by slick sleeved leadership who couldn't tell you where the motorpools were if you put a gun to their head.
A lot like after The Nam.
Hopefully that long rambling overly detailed power-level screed answered your questions.