Marines and sailors on the West Coast are expanding efforts to fix chronic barracks issues such as leaky sinks, drywall holes and broken window screens as units between California and Arizona tout success from last year's Operation Clean Sweep -- an on-the-ground initiative that saw individual service members take housing repairs into their own hands.
Dubbed Operation Clean Sweep II, troops are continuing to make repairs to their own barracks through the middle of April while West Coast units have roughly doubled the amount of money going to housing necessities such as air conditioning units, maintenance backlogs, washer and dryer repair, and supplies.
First begun at Camp Pendleton, California, Clean Sweep has spread to four other West Coast installations including Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow, and Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in California, as well as Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona.
Read Next: 4 US Soldiers Who Died in Lithuania Swamp When Their Vehicle Sank Are Identified
While installation improvement initiatives are not new to the military, the effort by Marine Corps Installations West and I Marine Expeditionary Force represents a striking response to the service's overall barracks improvement endeavor, in that the units are leveraging significant -- but largely in-house -- resources to meet one of the major priorities from the Corps' top officer, and that it is poised to spread beyond its local origins.
"I would very much desire to see it institutionalized," Lt. Col. Robert Hillery, an operations officer for I MEF's logistics cell, told Military.com in a phone interview Wednesday, adding that other units on the East Coast and even in Japan have reached out for information on the operation.
The original Clean Sweep, which Military.com reported on last October, included multiple lines of effort to fix issues, but generally fell into two categories: the first being providing tools, supplies, training and expert oversight to Marines and sailors so they could tackle barracks issues within their general control, such as pouring concrete and caulking bathrooms, which resulted in the completion of more than 4,500 self-help projects, according to I MEF.
The other category included putting money into big-ticket items such as air conditioning installation, reviewing barracks policy and streamlining systems that allow troops to report repairs more efficiently. Hillery said that Pendleton procured 6,177 portable A/C units with more on the way to fill the more than 11,000 barracks rooms in time for the hot summer weather.
The air conditioning effort, which Military.com previously reported was lacking, leaving Marines languishing in their barracks rooms, was also bolstered with more than $380,000 allocated from Headquarters Marine Corps.
"I would love for the other MEFs to be able to learn from the lessons that I MEF has learned and get something like this off the ground to foster enhanced ownership over our barracks, because our Marines and sailors deserve it," Hillery said. "They deserve nothing less. It's where they live."
A spokesperson for Marine Corps Installations-East told Military.com in an emailed statement Wednesday that, "while II MEF is continuing to review the Operation Clean Sweep concepts, there are no definitive plans [to] adopt it currently."
Senior Marine Corps leaders have pinpointed unaccompanied housing, where junior Marines and sailors live in barracks, as a top priority for the service, recognizing that, after 20 years of fighting during the Global War on Terrorism, barracks quality took a hit as other pressing operational concerns took priority.
The result was that roughly 17,000 Marines were living in substandard housing, according to a 2023 Government Accountability Office report, as service members contended with mold, cockroaches and general squalidness in their living quarters. The reports, not unique to the Marine Corps, resulted in consternation from the public and senior military leaders getting grilled by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
On the ground, junior leaders like Sgt. Tyler Putt, an intelligence specialist with 5th Marine Regiment and the noncommissioned officer in charge of his intelligence section, are leading the charge for self-help repairs during the operation. He said that it is incumbent upon noncommissioned officers to take on the responsibility to ensure that their Marines live in adequate housing in a way that lasts beyond their tenantship.
"It's a big buy-in thing," he told Military.com in a phone interview Wednesday. "As the Marines living in these barracks, we need to really buy into this process. It can't just be higher leaders saying, 'Hey, you got to go to do this,' and you just be looking at as an annoyance. It's stuff that needs to be done."
He explained that different sections of his unit are scheduled to tackle housing issues during the multiweek operation. Instead of going to a normal workday, Marines post at the duty hut, where officers and facilities Marines trained in barracks repair hand out supplies for fixing drywall, touching up paint, replacing light bulbs or caulking bathrooms, for example.
The Marines then get to work on fixing those issues with help from other troops who were trained in those types of repairs. With experience in pumping concrete and growing up in a household where trade skills were prevalent, Putt was able to teach his junior Marines to do many of these tasks and said that they are able to pick up these repairs on their own, adding that he taught one Marine under his charge caulking, and now "going into the future, he'll always know how to do that basic caulking job in a shower."
"It's a big thing for operational readiness, just the recovery aspect," Putt said, alluding to returning from deployments or working long days common to Marines. "Nobody sleeps well when their room is dirty; you're not going to sleep well. If you have a water leak in your room, your mind is going to be thinking about that water leak all night long."
And the repairs are not just limited to Operation Clean Sweep. Marines can request their own supplies when needed, and "it's immediate," Putt said.
"The big thing I noticed since they've been learning to do it on their own with the guidance that's given, they're excited to report a problem -- it's not something that's going unknown and they're keeping quiet about it," he said. "Now they're seeing the benefits of it, so they're excited to report these things and get them fixed because that's their living space."
Military.com previously reported that West Coast Marine officials were looking at funneling money toward hiring trade specialists to help contend with some of the barracks issues there, but due to a Pentagon-ordered general hiring freeze, that has not happened yet, Hillery said. Those roles, including HVAC specialists, plumbers and other civilian specialties, are often critical to managing, preventing and completing housing maintenance backlogs.
"Unfortunately, no, we've not been able to get that one moving, and it's primarily due to the hiring freeze," Hillery said, noting that the service anticipated a federal freeze. "If we had money dropped to us to hire, and we couldn't hire, that money would get stuck, and we were in the middle of a continuing resolution, so it was actually smart to hold on that. We didn't get any additional money to hire tradesmen because, and it came true, the hiring freeze occurred, and we can't hire any more folks right now."
Hillery noted that the continuing resolutions -- stopgap budget measures that hold spending at current levels -- that have plagued the congressional budget process have not affected the effort, and that in addition to the more than $6 million Operation Clean Sweep received last year, Headquarters Marine Corps was able to allocate $6.27 million for the second iteration of the effort.
Between the two operations, Hillery said that leaders honed tenant rights policy so that Marines and sailors had more say in whether to reject a room that did not meet standards. He also said that, in order to clear out maintenance backlogs, technicians took a more localized approach: Instead of doing a blanket sweep across the base, they adopted a "surge model" to address areas one or two at a time to tackle work orders before moving on to the next.
One "huge effort" during the operation was streamlining maintenance reporting systems "to make them more user friendly, to make them more modernized and ultimately, make them more efficient, so that the data is more accurate and we save our folks time," while leaders regularly meet to discuss said data and progress.
"I'd say the biggest challenge was with Clean Sweep I, where it was a new thing. New things are sometimes hard. There's problems that come with them," Putt said. "I think we're overcoming it. It's still a new thing, but it's working, and we're seeing that down at all levels."
Related: Marines and Sailors on West Coast Take to Cleaning, Fixing Own Barracks as Money Flows into Housing
