This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: NSOM

  • JBLM loses “hundreds” of optics sets

    It seems like a Company in the 4th Stryker Brigade on Fort Lewis have had their optics go missing. How thefts of this magnitude happen are beyond my understanding. The whole Company is on lockdown until they locate the gear while the PR Major at I Corps sent out this amusing statement to the public:

    “You have to have other stuff to make it dangerous, and you have to know how to use it,” Ophardt said Sunday. “It’s not something the average Joe can attach to their gun and become instant Rambo.”

    I’d like to know where they’ve been hiding the just-add-attachments Instant Rambo Gear.

    They’re also offering a $10,000 reward so if you see that shifty Supply SSGT who lives next door in housing unloading crates full of optics at 3 a.m. I’d say give the MPs a ring.

  • Laying the political groundwork for devastating security disinvestment and defense sector job cuts

    They’re coming. They’re real. After the initial rounds of cuts initiated by the Democrats and then the bi-partisan failure to insulate our national defense from indiscriminate slash and burn budgeting we are now on the precipice of the enfeebled 90’s military with 21st century commitments and enemies. The cynical tilling of the field for these cuts by the anti-military Left has been deliberate and systematic.

    Not to say that the adolescent libertarian Right is without blame. Welcome to the hell paved with stupid intentions. Any doubt about the cross-cultural nature of this stupidity can be quickly remedied by simple Google searches. Yep, that’s the perennially useless Barney Frank side by side with Chemtrail hero Ron Paul. Go get ’em guys!

    We should start with the testing ground of all new talking points in politics, the internet. Here we have on the “Real News Network’s” hosting the unbiased Jo Comerford of the “National Priorities Project“, going on about military cuts:

    A significant yet tired piece of propaganda emerges from this video. Comerford begins with, and ultimately relies upon, the idiot’s impression of the federal budget: that federal discretionary spending constitutes the most important, even most substantial, portion of government spending. It’s important to note that after her tired charade, which attempts to impress on the viewer that the portion of federal spending which constitutes military spending is the lion’s share, the circus master chimes in around the 3:00 minute mark with the reinforcing: “…because the military represents such a bigger portion of the overall budget.”

    Oh, really?

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  • An aside for those of you with college age kids

    Please forgive my deviation from the regular theme of this blog but I figured it behooved those of you intending to send your children onto college to take a look at this particular series of events I’ve seen unfolding. Following a post from Roger Kimball, the editor and publisher of the excellent cultural review The New Criterion, on the sad state of affairs at Williams College, I fell into an interesting set of student postings.

    It’s a rather bittersweet series, really, in that a pionering student at the arch liberal institution of Williams College uncovered one of the many veins of politcal cooruption within American “higher education”. The student, “David Michael”, discovered a former admissions officer and current head of the Multicultural Center at Williams College, Lili Rodriguez, making this facebook post:

    Sigh…same thing would happen to me when I was reading applications for admission. So many listed Ayn Rand as their favorite author..I would set those apps aside, clearly they were lacking in critical thought abilities.

    This clear violation of her duty as an admissions officer was countered with this nervous attempt at levity (with some grammatical formatting on my part):

    No one admissions officer can make a decision on a student or “Black List them”. Decisions are made by the whole committee, and yes, we are people with our own likes and dislikes…Ayn Rand enthusiasts were one of many pet peeves I had as a reader, others included essays written about Prom, Pets, favorite historical figures, etc. Other readers were annoyed when students wrote about video games, comic books, or dungeons and dragons (hobbies I totally dig). Luckily, apps are read by two readers and hobbies matter significantly less than academic achievement, writing quality, and recommendations. So long and short of it is this: Ayn Rand sucks in my opinion (unless you are a 12 year old seeking individuality and needing to complete your summer reading list) and even as a college employee, I do have the right to hold that opinion and voice it to my personal friends on facebook–which clearly I need to be much more careful about. Luckily, the opinion of one person cannot make or break an admissions decision at this college. Otherwise, we’d have no Ayn Rand enthusiasts able to start this WSO post or the awesome people that play D&D weekly. Go Dungeons and Dragons! Boo Ayn Rand!

    Cute, no?

    It’s clear that as both an admissions officer and as a “multicultural” leader Rodriguez has grotesquely failed in her duties. It’s revealing to me that she’d so effortlessly discriminate against students who deviate from her own political and ideological prescriptions regardless of their SAT scores, GPAs or the actual content of their essays. Or even, gasp, ethnicity. It’s even more revealing that she would make these comments in full and clear view of her both her friends and professional peers, without the slightest self consciousnesses.

    All of this is not to say that I’m an Ayn Rand devotee, far from it. It’s not even to say that Rand typifies the conservative or right wing of the spectrum, doing so would be lazy and inaccurate. It does make clear, though, that those who oversee their children’s admission process would be well advised to consider having their children be intellectually dishonest or even flat out lie in order to stand their best possible chance of admission to the widest range of academic institutions in this Republic. The very same institutions which are supposed to provide a conductive environment for varied, honest and robust intellectual discourse. Sad, isn’t it?

  • Panetta: Our post-cuts military a “spoiler” force

    The front page of my New York Times greeted me this morning with this headline above the fold:

    Panetta to Offer Strategy Cutting Military

    Oh, good. Panetta, who I really don’t think is all that bad a guy, testified in November that forcing the military to take an additional $500 some billion cut, past the already pending $450 billion, would be “devastating” to the military and pose a “substantial risk” to national security. He underscored the point that our defense budget is reflective of the threat we face and reducing military spending by a trillion dollars won’t reduce the threat level, only create an enviroment were we are unable to respond to it. His most prophetic statement was this:

    …we would have to formulate a new security strategy that accepted substantial risk of not meeting our defense needs.

    Fast forward less than two months to today where the unholy alliance of “burn it all down” libertarian Republicans and anti-military liberal Democrats have produced an environment in which the sabotage of our military and its members wasn’t significant enough incentive to reach a deal. According to the NY Times:

    In a shift of doctrine driven by fiscal reality and a deal last summer that kept the United States from defaulting on its debts, Mr. Panetta is expected to outline plans for carefully shrinking the military — and in so doing make it clear that the Pentagon will not maintain the ability to fight two sustained ground wars at once.

    Instead, he will say that the military will be large enough to fight and win one major conflict, while also being able to “spoil” a second adversary’s ambitions in another part of the world while conducting a number of other smaller operations, like providing disaster relief or enforcing a no-flight zone.

    Pentagon officials, in the meantime, are in final deliberations about potential cuts to virtually every important area of military spending: the nuclear arsenal, warships, combat aircraft, salaries, and retirement and health benefits.

    For those who remember history it was our “peace dividend” post World War Two “spoiler” force which was left to defend South Korea as an avalanche of North Korea soldiers flooded the peninsula before finally being stopped at Pusan by an ad-hoc fire brigade of old World War Two Marines brought together from every naval garrison and motor pool in the world. Once you get over the 100,000 wounded and 37,000 dead Americans it was a triumphant spoiler of a conflict. The millions of North Koreans living in a waking nightmare this very moment might have some other thoughts but hey, guns or butter, right?

  • The looming Obama/Paul military massacre (Part 1)

    An unholy alliance has been formed in Washington D.C.

    Libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats are moving to both destroy the military and cut off at the knees the families who have given the most this past decade. The first person to sound the alram in the mass media was former President George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the UN John Bolton in July of 2011:

    Every indication is that the debt-ceiling negotiations are leaving the defense budget in grave jeopardy. By exposing critical defense programs to disproportionate cuts as part of the “trigger mechanism,” there is a clear risk that key defense programs will be hollowed out.

    While the trigger mechanism comes into play only if the Congressional negotiators fail to reach agreement on the second phase of spending cuts, it verges on catastrophe to take such a national security risk.

    Defense has already taken hugely disproportionate cuts under President Obama, and there is simply no basis for expanding those cuts further. Republican negotiators must hold the line, since the Obama Administration plainly will not.

    He spoke out again making it clear that if (when) the so called Super-Committee failed the DoD and its membership would be left devastated.

    In the deal’s second stage, the yet-to-be-named Congressional Joint Commission will have wide discretion on what to agree on, but if no agreement or only partial agreement is reached, the deal’s sequestration mechanism will be triggered. Broadly speaking, if that happens, defense spending will bear fifty percent of the total cuts, with non-defense spending bearing the remaining fifty percent, up to the amount necessary to raise the debt ceiling by the minimum $2.4 trillion required by the deal. This approach risks grave damage to our national security.
    There is no strategic rationale whatsoever for cuts of this magnitude. There is, in fact, every strategic rationale to the contrary. While the appropriations process may still be able to decide which specific programs will be cut, this is no consolation. Cuts of this size are effectively indiscriminate.

    It’s at this point in which I know I don’t actually need to remind this readership of this blog where the true burden of our tax dollars rest. I’d hope we all know where the rest of this is heading…

    I’ll sound the alarm now for the 6.1 million of you whose jobs are tied into defense. Your time is coming in what is referred to by insiders as the coming train wreck. Entire US companies are looking to get out of the business of defending the United States and taking their people elsewhere.
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  • A surprising divorce statistic

    For us those who have served in the in the Naval components of the military divorce has become a near punchline. Since the start of the seemingly endless 12-18 month deployments of the post-9/11 Army I’m sure it’s much the same on that side of the house (if not before). People in the military often discuss their first marriages as a fairly regular phenomenon.

    So it comes as a bit of a surprise to me to read this headline in the Military Times: Air Force divorce rate highest in military.

    The divorce rate among airmen today is almost 64 percent higher than in 2001, and is the highest in the military, according to a recent Defense Department report.

    A decade ago, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the rate stood at 2.5 divorces per 100 marriages. In 2011, the number jumped to 3.9. The rate has climbed steadily in the past decade except in 2005 and in 2008, when it dropped ever so slightly, according to Air Force statistics obtained by Air Force Times.

    Bizarre, no? But here’s where they lose me:

    Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force James Roy said that multiple deployments and the stress of two wars have contributed to the rise in Air Force divorces.

    “Deployments do take a toll on families. What we do is not easy, and separation can be difficult. It can also be a challenge when our Airmen transition home after their deployments,” Roy said in a statement to Air Force Times.

    You know what? Bullshit.

    There’s something going on in the force that extends beyond the regular stress of deployments. I’ll double down on that statement knowing the quality of life and “homesteading” efforts they’ve made over on the Blue Side. I gratefully recognize that the components of AFSOC gets worn the hell out. The reality, though, is that for the overwhelming majority of the Air Force is that they’re looking at four to six month deployments, per year, MAX. Absolute max. I’d be flat out shocked to see a significant demographic of non-SOCOM Airmen who were deployed more than a quarter of their time in.

    The average divorce rate today in the US stands at about 3.4 per thousand. In other words higher than the military average during times of non-conflict but lower than the AF average now.

    The article goes into further sociological conjecture but I’m not really buying most of it. For our tuned in readers I ask: what’s going on?

  • The Rambo remake gets to be based on a “true” story

    If you haven’t yet girded yourself for the post Iraq/Afghanistan round of “crazy vet” movies and other slanderously anti-military entertainment narratives coming out of the liberal enclave of Hollywood you better start now. The latest unfunny anecdote which will no doubt trump the mountain of evidence about vets is a story out of my backyard in Seattle. From Fox News:

    Authorities are conducting a manhunt at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State after a park ranger died in a shooting Sunday following a routing traffic stop, authorities said.
    Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said late Sunday afternoon Benjamin Colton Barnes, a 24-year-old believed to have survivalist skills, was a “strong person of interest” in the slaying of Margaret Anderson. A parks spokesman said Barnes was an Iraq war veteran. Authorities recovered his vehicle, which had weapons and body armor inside, Troyer said.

    Barnes was also a suspect in the early Sunday morning shooting of four people at a house party south of Seattle, police said.
    Authorities believed the gunman was still in the woods, with weapons. They asked people to stay away from the park, and for those already inside to leave.
    “We do have a very hot and dangerous situation,” Troyer said.
    Troyer said authorities were following tracks in the snow they believe are from the gunman, and crews planned to bring an airplane through the area with heat-seeking capabilities.
    “We believe we have a good track on him, but he’s way ahead of us,” Troyer said.

    The local Fox affiliate (via the Chicago Tribune here) is circulating a short bio, and this rather unflattering photo of Barnes:

    They also assert he was picked up for DUI in 2009 and has a restraining order by the mother of his child. They also speculate (without an evidence) that he’s a currently serving member of the Reserves or Guard. The family and friends of the victims have my sincere condolences. I’m not sure if they’re actually aware of any evidence of his “strong survival skills” aside from being a vet. At this point nobody even seems to know what it is he did in the military.

    I hope that those in positions which can make a difference make the best effort to keep things in perspective as they discuss our community.

  • Where history is the polemics of the losers…with tenure

    The richly quotable William F. Buckley Jr once said, “History is the polemics of the victors.” Like much of what dear old WFB said it’s delightful but not really true. At least not anymore.

    To rail against the inherent bias in our modern academia serves little purpose; the cat is out of the bag. The people who care already know and the guilty are overtly satisfied with the status quo. We all know how in the early and mid 1960’s university campuses were “taken over by the protesting youth of the New Left” to quote dissident Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfeld, who was there to see it. We understand that the halls of higher education were beset by radical political groups which then festooned lifetime, tenured positions of power on the campuses, creating entirely new academic disciplines engineered from the beginning to beget new left-wing academics, long after the political movements which spawned them died out. We understand that many our liberal arts programs are simply factories for contemporary American cultural liberalism, nearly devoid of academic rigor or practical education.

    Now the new wave of delusional reconstruction of history is beginning, at your literal expense. According to the Associated Press a bevy of institutions, many funded by your tax dollars, are falling over each other to snap up Occupy memorabilia for new exhibits. To quote from one of our publically employed arbiters of cultural heritage:

    “Occupy is sexy,” said Ben Alexander, who is head of special collections and archives at Queens College in New York, which has been collecting Occupy materials. “It sounds hip. A lot of people want to be associated with it.”

    Indeed. I’m sure the members of the Sociology Department at CUNY are scrambling to be the most legit Occupier in the faculty lounge. Or at least of those on the email list as being on sabbatical.

    Or how about this fine archivist, so intent on approaching our living history with a critical eye:

    “We want to make sure we collect it from our perspective so that it can be represented as best as possible,” said Amy Roberts, a library and information studies graduate student at Queens College who helped create the archives working group.

    If you’re not sure what’s wrong with that perspective I have a fabulous piece of property in the Sun Belt to show you.

    Another publically underwritten pop culture activist from George Mason University had this to say about the screaming discrepancy in her department’s interest in enshrining Occupy:

    “This kind of social movement is probably more interesting to me, to be honest about it. And also so much of it is happening digitally. On webpages. On Twitter,” said Sheila Brennan, the associate director of public projects. “I guess I didn’t see as much of that with the tea party.”

    That’s right. The Tea Party constituted the most powerful and change affecting electoral force since the Republican Revolution 20 years earlier but, hey, they’re totally not on Twitter. Like, am I right or what? Besides, middle class people showing up to town halls and participating in the democratic process? Bor-ing!.