Guess I can understand not having them on the boAT with limited storage space and all. But why not at the home drome? Our "blivets" (travel pods) were nothing more than a napalm canister with a hole cut in the side. I think made locally? Eeach squadron had a pant load of them. So on a a 4 ship cross country you could each have one, a larger deployment you might have to share.
Back in my A-model (F-16) days, we had an empty bay in the avionics compartment that our maintainers had made a vinyl bag insert for. It held a gym bag for a weekend cross country. That rocked as we had fairly severe G and airspeed restrictions with the travel pod. Although I happen to know the pods were good at least 1.5 Gs / 50 Knots over the printed limit -- maybe it was more of a guideline. Anyway with out having the pods, you could fight full up on your cross country.
As to the CATMs....we're always short, but not as bad as when HJ was describing. My AF buds tell me (true or not) that their jets have CATMs on them "all the time". We end up swapping our out from jet to jet. A 14 plane squadron will probably rate about 8 (guess), of which about 4-6 will work properly.
As to the blivets, I've looked into their origin several times and always ran out of interest before I got any real answers. They are definitely converted NAPALM canisters, but how they became blivets and who did the work is unclear. I've seen the air force ones up close and they're the same design as the ones that we have, but ours are just ghetto. They're bent up, scratched beyond belief, and the doors are jerry-rigged. There are probably 5 or 6 per squadron and only about half of them are safe to fly with.
We have nobody to blame for this generally except ourselves. We could fix up our blivets, but it takes time, manpower, and parts that are scarce and we have more pressing issues to attend to. Blivets are a "nice to have" vice a combat necessity. It's just not surprising that the air force is overflowing with "nice to have" itmes like this. But that's a mainly envy.
We have the same G and airspeed issues (I think it's 450 kts and 4.5 Gs, but I forgot) with them anyway, so most of the time it's better to just cram stuff under your seat.