Napoleon Bonaparte once said that “an army fights on its stomach.” On today’s battlefields, Soldier-chefs deploy a mobile food service system that meet the challenge presented by Soldier’s stomachs in a matter of hours.
Unlike the singular movements of large armies of Napoleon’s early 19th-century Europe, many of today’s U.S. troops are deployed as modular units in a fast-moving, world-wide environment. This creates a challenge to get hot, quality chow to Soldiers on the move.
The Army’s Field Operations Training Branch has answered the call to serve rapidly-deployed troops with the Containerized Kitchen – a seven-ton, compact mobile trailer that is twice as efficient as traditional, much larger mobile kitchen trailers used in past decades.
“It took two of the older mobile kitchen trailers to serve 700 Soldiers,” said Sgt. 1st Class Charles Ray, an instructor at the Field Operations Training Branch, Army Center of Excellence, Subsistence, Quartermaster Center and School, Fort Lee, Va. “With one CK, we can serve 800 troops in less time, and with greater mobility than ever before.”
The CK is a self-contained system for food preparation – cooking and warming by utilizing a griddle, steam pans, cook pots, roasting pans, or sheet pans in the oven. Food is kept fresh in two refrigerators or warm in a holding cabinet. Hot and cold water are provided for food prep and clean up.
“Four Soldiers and one supervisor man the CK, and once they reach their destination, it takes less than 45 minutes to get a CK up and running,” Ray added. “The CK is a very efficient system that is mostly beneficial to division-sized elements.”
For the teams of Soldier-chefs who operate these state-of-the-art systems, precision-timing is critical to enabling CK’s and their crews to prepare nutritious meals for hundreds of hungry troops on the move.
“Once we get it unpacked, we simply hit a button, the system comes alive and we are ready to feed up to 800 Soldiers within three hours,” Ray said. Keeping the systems up and running is just as easy, according to Ray.
“The CK’s come with a solid collection of maintenance tools to troubleshoot almost anything that might go off-line. Most of the components of the CK are made in such a way that the teams who operate them will be able to troubleshoot and affect repairs on site.”
At a cost of $150,000 each, more than 200 CK’s have been put into operation at forward operating bases around the world since March 2001.
