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

Author: Poetrooper

  • Obama’s Politics Put our Navy in Harm’s Way

    The Obama administration has held up the deployment of the nuclear carrier, U.S.S. Harry Truman to the Persian Gulf as a result of the sequester. Rather than cut fat from elsewhere in the federal budget, Obama chooses to play brinksmanship on the backs of our service men and women as this article from a month ago explains. Further, by keeping the Truman berthed at its homeport of Norfolk when it should be deployed, Obama is playing another very dangerous game. There’s a disturbing email circulating in the veteran community discussing this dangerous breach of strategic security that has occurred under this clueless commander-in-chief. The problem is a concentration of five aircraft carriers at Norfolk Navy base for a period that now extends to several months. These super-carriers are the heart of America’s ability to project immense naval air power forward to virtually anywhere on the globe.

    The presence of a carrier strike group throws a wide, cautioning shadow over such disruptive regimes as Iran and North Korea. Their offshore presence has long been America’s big stick in geopolitics. The problem is such strike groups are not in endless supply. We have but eleven and of that number some are always in the naval shipyards for refitting and nuclear refueling. So when five of the eleven are docked side-by-side in Norfolk that gets the antennae quivering among those who know what a hugely foolish strategic blunder this is. To have forty percent of your nuclear carrier displacement concentrated in one docking area where escape to the sea in the event of an impending threat is extremely limited, seems incredibly stupid to those vets aware of the situation. The emails are replete with references to the possibility of a second Pearl Harbor.

    Truly, those emails are not far off the mark. A single pleasure vessel, paid for by some Islamist millionaire, a sail boat or motor yacht, with a bootlegged Pakistani nuclear weapon aboard, or even a large enough, non-nuclear, high explosive dirty bomb, could easily maneuver within range to take these powerful but defenseless sea-fortresses off the board. A nuke could do that permanently-a dirty bomb for the many years decontamination would require. Losing five of eleven of these behemoths would cut our Navy to its knees and leave America scrambling to decide where, upon the globe, to project our now very limited power, a position the Chinese, the Russians and even the Islamists would relish.

    It would seem that while we possess colossal power, we also harbor colossal stupidity in our command structure. There are unprovable, as yet, rumors flying that this situation only came to be over the outraged protests of the upper Navy brass overruled by an always politics-first White House. We’re left to wonder if this is another one of those signals to the Islamist tyrants of the Middle East, and oppressors worldwide, that the U.S. will not be a looming threat to their ambitions. Looked at realistically, this is nothing more than a sheathing of our weapons, pulling them home to port, holstering our most potent projection of force, a signal to the world that at the first hint of budget constraint, Obama’s Navy is standing down, and you despots are free to pursue your despotism. Measured against everything else coming from this administration, it is difficult to believe that this is anything more than a calculated move to portray Republicans as culprits and America as a weakened force in the world, both typical Obama targets.

    Benedict Arnold was but a treacherous general who betrayed this country in a much more limited world and war; that the current commander-in-chief might engage in the undermining of the nation’s strategic strength to petulantly belittle his domestic political enemies, or worse, to level this great nation to parity with the lesser nations of this world, is a travesty that makes Benedict look like a patriot compared to Barack Obama. If the commander-in-chief overrode the wisdom of the admirals in this situation and has put this country’s strategic naval forces in peril, he has proved beyond doubt that he is a political posturer for whom the fortunes of the Democrat party come before those of the nation. He is, in truth doing precisely to our Navy what he has done to our economy: Sinking it.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • A Food/War Story

    Zero’s piece on weird food items made me think of a story from the past. We were living in a subdivision out the back gate of NAS Pensacola in the late 70’s where many of our neighbors were naval and marine aviators. I was the southeast regional military sales manager for a pharmaceutical company and had invited one our military broker reps to an “Atta girl” dinner. Since we were going to a seafood restaurant nearby, she and her date, a retired Air Force O-6, came to the house for pre-dinner drinks.
    As she came in the door she mentioned that she couldn’t have much to drink on her empty stomach as she hadn’t stopped work for lunch, the very work ethic that had earned her the Atta girl dinner. I told them we’d just have a quick one in the kitchen and be on our way. A few minutes later, as we were standing in the kitchen with our quick drinks and learning something about the colonel, I saw the lady reach out and grab a handful of snacks from a black-lacquered oriental saucer sitting far back on the countertop. Except it wasn’t snacks but those little, multi-colored pellets of moist cat food that come in foil packets. My wife had hastily picked it off the kitchen floor just before our guests entered the room and shoved it back where she thought it was out of sight.

    I gotta tell you I would have given anything for a video of what followed. Before I could say “No!” the lady had tossed the stuff in her mouth and chewed perhaps three times before her eyes went wide, her cheeks ballooned and she ran for the sink where she finally managed to gag and rinse it all out. Once she got over it she joined in the laughter and we laughed about it all through dinner that evening. After seeing her response I have never ever been tempted to taste-test anything we feed our cats.
    The story has an interesting sequel: over dinner the colonel revealed that as a very young pilot he had been flying one of the B-17 bombers being ferried from the mainland to Hickam Field on the morning of December 7th, 1941. Short of fuel, they’d had to land while the field was under attack. Realizing I was hearing living history, I asked him if he would be so gracious as to retell his story to some of my aviator neighbors and he agreed.

    As soon as we got back to the house I called some of them and soon had a full living room of strangely quiet and respectful young officers listening intently and occasionally asking polite questions. The colonel had flown bombers on a series of hairy missions throughout WWII in both the European and Pacific theaters and had one great war story after another. Even a marine major, who’d flown Phantoms in Vietnam, and who had a reputation as a real hotdog, was respectful and attentive. The colonel kept that usually loud and boisterous bunch mesmerized until well into the wee hours by which time they had, in typical aviator fashion, consumed all my booze. But this time they did it much more quietly than usual. In fact, even though we lived there several more years, I never saw them so well-behaved ever again.

  • Another Unintended Consequence of Females in the Infantry

    The other day I wrote here that an unintended consequence of females being allowed to serve in infantry units was that their inability to keep up physically with their male counterparts could hamper their prospects for promotion. One of the commenters (I always read comments on my writings because someone inevitably points out something I’ve missed) noted that there could be a much more basic physical reason for women to avoid serving in the infantry. And as anyone who has ever served in the infantry well knows, he made a very valid point.

    And that point is simply this: For anyone who wants to maintain a youthful visage, the infantry is probably your absolute worst career choice. The cumulative effect of all those years in the woods, the mountains, the desert, and always in the sun, leaves the average infantry senior NCO with a face that looks twenty years older than its true age. The accounts among infantry veterans abound of NCO’s in their thirties who look like they are in their fifties or even sixties. My own anecdote:

    An old buddy from the 101st came to visit in Pensacola in the late 70?s. I’d gotten out after six years to get my degree on the GI Bill. He’d stayed in the intervening ten years and was now an E-8 first sergeant. When we met him at the airport, I was stunned by how lined and weather-beaten his face was at the age of 35, a year younger than me. He looked to be in his fifties. At the house, while he was unpacking in the guest bedroom, my wife’s first words when we were alone was, “He’s younger than you are? You’ve got to be kidding. He looks more like your father.”
    Another commenter recounted the story of a hard-living, hard-driving, SFC platoon sergeant in his combat engineer company, whose subordinates were so convinced the old geezer had to be at least in his sixties that they got up a pool to pay whoever could guess closest to his age. The “geezer” won. He was thirty-seven.

    Mind you now, this doesn’t happen to everyone but it does so frequently enough that such stories are quite common in the combat arms units, particularly in the infantry. When I joined the Army in 1959, I was trained by a series of NCO’s who had served in the Korean War and a few who were WWII veterans. Most of them looked like they could have been WWI veterans. The infantry is a hard, hard life that extracts a high payment from those who choose it. Perhaps recruiters should be required to issue an aging-related health warning of sorts to young female prospects:

    We are required to advise you, prior to your signing this contract of enlistment, that a career in the infantry can result in your resembling this before age forty.

    That should really shorten the lines…

  • An Unintended Consequence of Females in the Infantry?

    There is a great deal of discussion going on right now concerning whether or not women should serve in designated ground combat roles. Should women be infantry soldiers or not? Articles such as that posted at American Thinker by Elise Cooper present numerous pros and cons, but, as with most such writings, the comments by readers are almost uniformly negative. Most of those responding cite various problems that will arise if the Obama administration insists on pushing through this politically correct social experiment. And most of those problems they cite are quite likely to occur in the opinion of this old combat infantryman.

    However, there is another problem that I foresee: senior female officers have pushed this issue of women serving in combat because they see the lack combat duty and combat command in their military résumés as an impediment to further promotion. They may be correct. But just because that is true in their situation, it does not mean that it will be so for female junior officers or enlisted personnel serving in infantry units. The reality may just be the opposite.

    The lowest leadership position in an infantry platoon is that of fireteam leader — usually a junior NCO, corporal, or sergeant (and, too frequently in the real world, a specialist fourth class). The fireteam usually consists of the leader and three or four lower-ranking soldiers. To get that first leadership promotion to fireteam leader, a soldier must demonstrate performance that his superiors believe sets him apart from and above those other members of the various fireteams in an infantry platoon and company. While many criteria go into promotion decisions, such as intelligence and can-do attitude, leadership ability is the most sought-after quality.

    And that holds true all the way up the promotional chart. For once a soldier has been singled out by his superiors as worthy of being a fireteam leader, from his very first day on the job, his performance is being observed to see how well he leads his team and how well he stacks up against the other two or three fireteam leaders in his squad, as well the three or four fireteam leaders in each of the other two to four squads in his platoon. That competition for promotion never ends, and the importance of the ability to lead only increases with each step up.

    And therein lies the rub for young women aspiring to serve in direct infantry roles. Even the most ardent liberal proponents of women in combat will generally concede that it will be a rare female soldier who possesses the same physical strength as her male counterparts. The most important quality for promotion down at the ground level where the infantry operates (it is called ground combat, after all) is leadership, and that leadership means out-front physically leading, setting the example for soldiers operating at the very limits of their physical endurance. How is a physically weaker female soldier going to meet that leadership requirement?

    As any infantryman can tell you, superior physical strength generally equals greater endurance. So if a female soldier lacks the strength and endurance to set the example for other soldiers, how is she to get promoted? Having spent six years in the infantry, serving from private to staff sergeant, I can tell you that being able to set the physical pace and set the proper example is essential 24/7 in leading soldiers. They have zero tolerance for weakness, physical or otherwise, in their superiors, and they are quick to exploit it. It then becomes a short path to disciplinary problems — and poor discipline is, in and of itself, the shortest road to poor unit cohesiveness and combat performance.

    If, as we can anticipate, the Pentagon insists on socially promoting females in infantry units on a gender -quota basis, regardless of their ability to lead from the front, then we at some point in the future will have ground forces that have a sizeable portion of their leadership positions filled by people who were promoted without possessing the full ability to lead their subordinates. That will systematically redefine and degrade the role of unit leadership. In a future ground war, then, this nation will be at a disadvantage when engaging forces where the principle of strong, physical leadership has been maintained.

    I mentioned senior female officers complaining of a lack of combat experience. Since we do now have female field grade officers commanding battalions and higher in combat zones, they had to arrive at their commands via promotion through support units, where female ability to compete with male soldiers is not dependent upon physical strength. However, under these new rules, many of them would begin their careers as second lieutenant/platoon leaders in an infantry company, where they must compete against the other, mostly male, lieutenant/platoon leaders in their company as well as all the lieutenants in the several other companies constituting their battalion. Since many junior (male) infantry officers are recruited from college athletics programs, this promotion-physical leadership discrepancy could become even more pronounced for female officers. Rather than facilitating female promotion in the senior ranks, this move could result in female officers being weeded out early in their careers because they simply lack the ability to physically lead.

    This truly is a policy that needs to be thought through to all its unintended consequences by those politically correct liberal hip-shooters running our government prior to its implementation.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Dems Clueless About Combat

    Warfare has progressed geometrically since I was a young sergeant on the ground in Vietnam. The huge advances in computer and electronic capabilities have given our American forces capabilities never before possessed in any of our previous wars. Among the most widely known of these is drone warfare, wherein an unmanned, armed, aerial vehicle enters enemy airspace guided by an office-based pilot somewhere many thousands of miles from the actual conflict and launches lethal missiles against detected targets.

    To this old infantryman’s way of thinking, that is a great concept. The idea of being able to win wars from the air goes back to WWI and was used to greatest effect in WWII when strategic bombings in Germany and Japan greatly degraded the fighting ability of both those countries and undoubtedly saved tens of thousands of American servicemen’s’ lives. I can’t begin to express my gratitude to those Air Force and Naval aviators who flew over my ground positions and delivered lethal ordinance on my enemies in the hills, mountains and rice paddies of South Vietnam. But for them I might not be writing this.

    So keep all that in mind when evaluating my take on this new Defense Department medal for those who pilot the drones. We are going to create a new class of combat award for a group of technicians who through the incredibly complex inter-connections between their U.S.-based control centers in the docile deserts of Nevada or some other undisclosed remote location and the combat zone, are able to provide close air support for our ground troops or air strikes deep within enemy territory. Let’s picture this:

    Somewhere in Afghanistan a small team of American soldiers, commanded by an Army captain, occupies a forward outpost. They are so far into hostile country that they must and can only be supplied by helicopter. That means then that they only get the minimum necessities of their needs. They have no running water source so by the time they have been there to attract an attack from the enemy, they have become persistently and continually hungry and hygienically ripe indeed. At 2:00 am on a cold morning they get hit by a large enemy force which has every intention of overrunning them and killing them to the very last man.

    They inform their headquarters of the attack and within minutes that headquarters is busy directing an armed drone to assist in their defense. On the other side of the world, some Air Force captain, who slept comfortably at home last night with his spouse in military quarters somewhere in the Nevada desert, and who had a full, hot breakfast this morning, sips his coffee and views the information coming in through his computer. With a few strokes on his keyboard he is able to re-direct the mission of an armed drone hovering somewhere over Afghanistan to the beleaguered outpost which by that time has endured many casualties and is in very real danger of being overrun.

    Through damage inflicted on the assaulting enemy forces by both the Hellfire missiles fired from the drone at the command of that comfortably ensconced Air Force captain somewhere in Nevada and the perimeter defense directed and coordinated by the Army captain in command on the ground, the attack is beaten back with but a few American troops killed and several more wounded.

    As all the after-action reports are filed and this minor event gets logged into that bottomless swamp of history of American military combat, there will be those singled out for their performance under fire and recommended for awards for valor. Seldom in the history of the United States Army or the United States Marine Corps has there been such a ground fight when some brave soldier or Marine did not distinguish himself with exceptional valor. They, justifiably, should have that valor recognized by a grateful nation in the form of a medal.

    But what about that Air Force captain back there in Nevada who entered the proper sequence on his keyboard to launch those Hellfire missiles that did in fact help break the back of the Taliban assault? Did he contribute to the victory? Without question he did. Were his actions valorous in the way we understand that term to mean courage in the face of a lethal threat? Of course they were not. Does he then deserve an award for service and valor in the face of the enemy equivalent to that which those who faced that enemy on the ground under extreme duress and hardship do?

    That’s pretty simple to answer for anyone with a lick of common sense. Apparently however, our uninformed, never-uniformed, Commander-in-Chief and his equally uninformed and never-uniformed Secretary of Defense do not possess that lick. In their eyes, the comfortable, coffee-drinking young officer lounging in front of his computer console in Nevada, what airborne troops would call chairborne, is entitled to an equivalent or superior award for valor as those guys who fought it out on the ground. Should there be an award for drone pilots? Sure, but it should be to recognize their technical proficiency not their valor; with one exception: if that drone pilot is operating within some sort of mobile command post in a forward operating area and his post comes under fire in the course of battle, then a ”V” device could be awarded in recognition of that reality, as we now do with the Bronze Star.

    Doesn’t this fiasco say it all about how clueless liberal Democrats are about the realities of combat?

    Crossposted at American Thinker.

  • Lanza Sought Easiest Target

    Difficult as it may be to believe, a major liberal media outlet is reporting that one of the reasons that the Newtown shooter, Adam Lanza, targeted the elementary school was because it was an easy target. CBS News reports law enforcement sources are saying that Lanza’s motivation for the slaughter was violent video games and an obsession with killing more people than the Norwegian mass-killer, Anders Breivik. From CBS News online:

    Two officials who have been briefed on the Newtown, Conn., investigation say Lanza wanted to top Breivik’s death toll and targeted nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School because it was the “easiest target” with the “largest cluster of people.”

    Evidence shows that his mind, sources say, Lanza was also likely acting out the fantasies of a video game as he killed 20 first graders and six adults at the school. For Lanza, the deaths apparently amounted to some kind of “score.”

    Do you suppose this might give any of those gun-grabbers on the Left pause for thought about the insanity of their so-called gun-free zones?

    Nah…

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Downsizing Defense with a Trojan Elephant

    Can anyone seriously doubt that when we have an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, Euro-socialist president serving as the commander-in-chief of our armed forces, that America’s military, as currently constituted, is in serious trouble? While fundamentally changing America’s economy to follow the downward trajectory of those various but failing socialist experiments collectively known as the European Union, do you suppose it hasn’t occurred to the nomenklatura of the Obama regime that those countries have downsized their military forces to help fund their workers’ paradises? The biggest, Britain, France and Germany, have significantly reduced their forces since embarking on their socialist paths.

    The shrinking of those formerly powerful militaries is the major reason for America’s being policeman to the world. Consider for a moment that our current president doesn’t even want to police our borders, much less the world. Why then, if he wants to emulate Europe economically, would he not duplicate their military policies and shrink our standing forces leaving the world’s policeman role to some other country, one with a growing economy and military, say China for instance?

    Beginning with the Bolsheviks, the Left has always realized that many of their goals are not palatable to the ordinary folks, so deception and manipulation are necessary to implement their policies. Blaming your own misdeeds on the political opposition is a proven tactic and made infinitely easier with a gullible and compliant media eager to do precisely that. As Sequestration, with its huge military budget cuts, looms, Obama and the Democrats, aided by the media, are trying to convince Americans that evil, intransigent Republicans are entirely responsible for whatever hardships befall our armed forces. When you have the New York Times giving you cover, it becomes much easier to carry out your blatant deceptions right under the collective nose of the American people.

    Speaking at the Brookings Institution, Army Chief of Staff, General Ray Odierno, has outlined what is in store for our Army; from Army Times:

    Odierno told Congress earlier this week that sequestration might force the Army to cull another 100,000 troops from its ranks. Speaking at Brookings he went further, estimating that beginning with the 80,000 already scheduled, “in the end, it’ll be over 200,000 soldiers that we will have to take out of the active duty component National Guard and Army Reserve” if sequestration is implemented for the long term.

    “We’ll take almost a 40 percent reduction in our brigade combat teams once we’re finished,” he cautioned.

    When looking at the Army’s bottom line, Odierno said that if the fiscal 2014 budget is implemented without sequestration, the Army will have taken a 45 percent reduction in its budget since 2008, a number that rises to over 50 percent with sequestration.

    And that’s just the Army; the other branches are to get hammered as well. Those are reductions of European proportions, exactly what the left wing of the Democrat party has long sought. So what better way to accomplish all this than put a useful idiot Republican in charge of the Defense Department to preside over the debacle? Is there any other possible reason why such a totally partisan president as Obama would pick a totally unqualified, former Republican senator with absolutely no large institution executive experience, like Chuck Hagel, other than the fact he will make an excellent scapegoat when at some future date America finally wakes up and realizes she’s been neutered? If you were truly concerned with America maintaining her military readiness during a downsizing of such huge proportions, wouldn’t you want the best executive you could find, perhaps someone with experience in such reductions in force? Wouldn’t strong managerial skills be the pre-eminent qualifier for the job? Aren’t there plenty of Democrats out there with the requisite credentials, far better qualifications than the current nominee? Yet Obama insists on Hagel? Shouldn’t alarm bells be going off all over Washington as to why?

    It is for that reason Senate Republicans should be opposed to Hagel, not the content of his past speeches in which he expressed views inimical to Israel or favorable to Iran. Obama and Harry Reid are trying to roll a huge Trojan elephant right through the doors of the Pentagon to tear down the walls of our national defense from the inside, and our team is focused on the usual political nit-picking. Don’t misunderstand me, Hagel’s positions on Israel and Iran, as well as getting at the truth of Benghazi, are important, but they are nothing compared to the damage Hagel will do as Obama’s inside-the-Pentagon hatchet man.

    Can’t you just picture what’s coming? Suppose Israel is attacked by enemies emboldened by America’s military weakness and lack of commitment to our long-time ally? And we’re caught totally unprepared to respond. Who’s going to be the fall guy do you think? Even if that catastrophe never occurs, every time Republicans and conservatives complain about another announced military reduction, the media will provide the true culprits, Obama and the Democrats, cover by pointing out that the SECDEF, who recommended the cut, just happens to be a Republican.

    But you can bet the farm they’ll never acknowledge that he’s a deliberately planted Trojan Elephant.

  • Fundamental Change Equals Rotting from the Head

    A buddy out in Guam sent me this link to an article at PacificFlyer.com outlining the Navy Department’s new “21st Century Sailor and Marine Program.” Go here and read it for yourself:

    Navy’s New Plan to Halt Re-enlistment

    Reading this steaming pile of cockamamie, liberal do-goody BS, then factoring in departing SecDef Panetta’s recent elimination of DADT and the latest announcement about including women in infantry and special ops, one can only wonder if there is a deliberate, multi-pronged assault under way to impose political correctness on our entire military system from top to bottom by the Obama Administration. After all, Obama did tell us he intended to change this country fundamentally; what he didn’t say was that he was going to start with the military.

    But it makes sense when you consider that the military, led as it now is by a disgraceful bunch of politically-correct, perfumed princes of the Pentagon, General Dumpster being the most notable of them, is the largest segment of the American populace that is helpless to resist even the most ridiculous of these liberal social experiments. Regardless of how foolish a new Obama-mandated policy may be, service members must comply under penalty of less than honorable discharge or even imprisonment. Those currently serving can only resist by beating feet from the service, thus leaving their positions to be filled by those who too-willingly submit to such political thought control, giving Obama the manipulable military he desires. Since Obama hasn’t been able to carry out his plan for a civilian security force as large as and as well-funded as the military, perhaps he’s decided on a different tactic.

    Consider that for a moment then ask yourself, “Could the Obama administration be reforming the military into a compliant, politically-correct weapon to be used to enforce further, unpopular, fundamental change on the nation as a whole? The question has always been, would American forces fire on their own people in the event of a government versus the citizens confrontation. If you then couple that thought to the current federal gun grabbing campaign, seeking to disarm those who most oppose them, suddenly, the political odor wafting from this White House is beginning to take on the reek of something very, very, unconstitutionally rotten.

    We’ve all heard that proverb of the fish rotting from the head down. Well, so does a nation, which is precisely why our founding fathers gave us a Bill of Rights, to protect us from such internal political rot. Isn’t it just so amazing that who the liberals disparagingly characterize as a bunch of old rich white men had the foresight to anticipate just what sort of treachery these socialist usurpers of our basic freedoms might attempt some few hundred years in the future.

    I’d say those old white guys were a bunch of very wise old men.
    Hmm?