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

Category: Big Army

  • Twenty Percent of Army Generals not Deployable in 2016

    This was the status as of 2016. Given the scandals that were occurring, involving Generals and Admirals, this study was inevitable. One of the things that they found was that out of every five generals, one was not eligible to deploy.

    This is only a part of the overall readiness issue, where officers, warrant officers, and enlisted personnel have nondeployable Soldiers among them. From USA Today:

    Data for 2016 showed that 83.5 percent of Army soldiers were deemed medically ready to deploy, the lowest rate among the services. The Marine Corps led with 90.2 percent followed by the Navy at 90.1 percent and the Air Force at 88.8 percent. The rate for active-duty, ready-to-deploy generals, not including the Reserve or National Guard, was 79.6 percent. For active-duty soldiers overall, the figure was 84 percent, and the Army’s goal is 85 percent.

    The top factors for failing to meet the standard was being overdue for an annual physical or dental exam, a relatively easy fix.

    Readiness is a big issue. As indicated in the quote, simple things like being updated with regards to medical and dental exams is important to being declared “able to deploy”. This is also a concern among the reserve components.

    Service members being deployable is one of the things that the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, is tackling. You can read more here.

  • Army Retro Uniform OKd for 2020

    Well, it’s official: the U.S. Army is going retro to its World War II “pinks and greens” for officers by 2020, as was discussed on TAH last year.  The remainder of the force has until 2028 to change from current blue uniforms to the Army greens.

    https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/11/11/for-veterans-day-the-army-has-a-present-a-long-awaited-new-service-uniform/

    The Army Blues will revert to being strictly a formal dress uniform.

    From the article: The standard uniform set-up will require pants and brown leather oxfords for both men and women. Women will have the option to wear a pencil skirt and pumps. Everyone will also be able to buy a leather bomber jacket as an outerwear option.

    The rest of the Army would have until 2028 to pick up the new uniform, the release said.

    I’ll take the bomber jacket and change the pencil skirt to an A-line skirt, which is more attractive of chubby girls, and you’ve got a hit.

    Now if we can just persuade the Army that Hello! Kitty pink camo will keep everyone safe from The Bad Guys, we’ll be fine.

  • Pentagon Wants Army, Marine Corps to Select Higher-Caliber Grunts

    Pentagon Wants Army, Marine Corps to Select Higher-Caliber Grunts

    We don’t make this stuff up,  there are people who do it for us.   From military.com

     The Close Combat Lethality Task Force is trying to identify “best-of-breed science and programs” to find young Marines and soldiers who have the right mix of physical and mental endurance to excel in close combat, according to Sgt. Maj. Jason Wilson, the senior Army enlisted representative for the task force.

    WTF is a Close Combat Lethality Task Force?   Do they get a Patch, Tab, Pin or some kind of Tiera?  The thought of this CCLTF makes me tingle in naughty places.

    “We want to be able to get those soldiers identified early, to find out, ‘Do you have the leadership potential to be in the infantry, do you have the mental stability to be able to be in the infantry’ and do they have the resilience and the mental capacity to be able to handle some of the things that they may see in the infantry — to be able to overcome that adversity and bounce back,” Wilson told a group of defense reporters Wednesday at the Pentagon.

    Defense Secretary Jim Mattis launched the task force in March to find ways of helping the services as well as Army Special Operations Command become more lethal at their craft.

    “Close combat is an environment characterized by extreme violence within line of sight of the enemy, where historically the vast majority of military combat casualties occur,” Wilson said. “It is a tough job for anybody, to be able to … close with and destroy the enemy. … That is our purpose.”

    There we have it, we need to fix this combat environment so it’s not so scary.  Who wants to be so up close and personal with the enemy anyway?  And, all those casualties…that is just uncalled for.

    But the infantry has often been characterized as a career field that does not require high intelligence.

    “We are looking to get the infantry to where it is not a place where we send soldiers that don’t have the mental capacity to do other jobs,” said Wilson, who has been an infantryman for 23 years. “I’m not saying that everybody in the infantry is bad, but we want to get away from close combat forces, you know, being a place for soldiers that don’t meet the requisite criteria to be an intel analyst.”

    I have been a Platoon Sergeant in Combat Arms, you can not imagine the wasted intellectual might that hides in reserve.   I had some real Einsteins in the crowd.  I figured there were a couple of Ph.D.’s hidden in those Platoons.  When they were not licking the urinal cakes I had them practicing the manner in which they were going to charge an enemy machine gun nest.  We used to sit in the field at night, nestled in the swamp with the fog of mosquitoes swarming about and regurgitated  Nietzsche quotes.  I used to thank an imaginary God every night that those Grunts had not figured out how to lick their own balls or nothing on the Lt’s fictional training schedule who have been accomplished.  The horror, the horror…

    Yep, bursting with covert Intel Analysts…that’s the plan.  Who is going to burn the shitters in this new age of intellectual giants?   Every Grunt is really just a bag of brains.  FMTT

     

     

     

  • Army’s Ranger School set to graduate first enlisted woman.

    Army’s Ranger School set to graduate first enlisted woman.

    U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Amanda F. Kelly will graduate from the Army’s Ranger School on August 31, 2018. Kelly is the first enlisted woman to graduate from the grueling leadership school.

    Staff Sergeant Amanda F. Kelly, 29, from Easley, South Carolina will receive her Ranger tab in a graduation ceremony at the Hurley Hill Training Area at Fort Benning, the U.S. Army base located on the Alabama-Georgia border next to Columbus.

    Faye, an electronic warfare technician by trade, is currently assigned to the 1st Armored Division, Combat Aviation Brigade out of Fort Bliss, located in both New Mexico and Texas. Prior to undergoing the grueling 62-day training curriculum at Ranger school, Faye previously served in South Korea for two years before later deploying to Iraq for nine months. She returned to the U.S. back in March.

    To date, 12 women have successfully graduated from the course—Army Captain Kristen Griest and 1st Lieutenant Shaye Haver, 25, became the first women to graduate from school back in 2015 before the school was opened to women on a full time basis, according to The Washington Post.

    Congratulations to Staff Sergeant Kelly.  She earned the TAB, she should wear it with pride.

  • Mikey Weinstein and same-sex couples

    Mikey Weinstein and same-sex couples

    The Army Times reports on Mikey Weinstein, of the misnamed Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and his tilting at windmills. It seems that a chaplain, Army Major Scott Squires was conducting a retreat for married couples and a same-sex couple wanted to attend. However Major Squires’ religion didn’t allow for him to minister to same-sex couples.

    An Army investigator later concluded Squires discriminated against the service member.

    But Squires was following the requirements of his chaplain endorsing agency, the North American Mission Board (NAMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention, according to Mike Berry, an attorney at First Liberty Institute, the religious liberties group representing Squires in his appeal.

    First Liberty sent a letter to the Army urging it to reverse the investigator’s decision…Squires said he feared bringing the same-sex couple on the retreat would cause him to lose his chaplain endorsement.

    The Army has training guidance — although not an official policy — telling chaplains to adhere to their endorsers’ religious tenets in order to keep their endorsement, while also finding alternative solutions for situations like this, Berry said.

    Squires found an alternative for the same-sex couple, but that wasn’t good enough for Mr Weinstein;

    Weinstein said the refusal of certain military chaplains to accommodate same-sex couples was comparable to refusing to accommodate mixed-race or mixed-religion couples.

    “If you’re going to view same-sex couples as a sin against god, you can either hold your tongue, change your attitude, or get out of the military,” he said.

    “This chaplain did not put his hand on a copy of the Constitution and swear allegiance to the New Testament,” Weinstein said. “He put his hand on the New Testament and took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.”

    Again, Mr Weinstein, show me where Congress has made a law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. MRFF has done more to prohibit the free exercise of religion than any agency of the Defense Department.

    I suspect that Mikey would be fine with an Islamic chaplain tossing same-sex couples from the roof of a building, though.

  • Army seeks solutions to generals gone wild

    The Army Times reports that the Army is looking for ways to teach generals to be more ethical in their behavior, after a number have been disciplined in recent years for misbehavior and conduct unbecoming flag officers;

    In the past nine months, the Army found two senior officers guilty of misconduct, forcing them out of their jobs and demoting them as they retired. One lost two stars; the other lost three.

    “We recognized senior executive leaders, with varying amounts of stress, lacked a holistic program that focuses on comprehensive health,” said Gen. Mark Milley, the Army’s chief of staff. The military has strived to combat stress disorders, suicide and other problems, he said, but the focus often has been on enlisted troops or lower-ranking officers.

    Yeah, it’s odd that these delinquents can recognize poor behavior in their subordinates, but not in their own public lives. Maybe it’s because they figure they can get away with it. “Losing stars” is no real punishment, but losing their entire pensions and benefit packages sends a message to the others. Good old boy handjobs under the table don’t send the message that the Army should be conveying.

    These “men”, and I use the term loosely, haven’t learned about ethics in their decades of military service, a flag officer drum circle isn’t going to do it, either. Hammer a few dicks flat and the whole crowd will clean up their acts.

  • Army colonel awarded $8.4 million for blog defamation case

    The Washington Post writes about Colonel David “Wil” Riggins who was being considered for his first star in 2013 when Susan Shannon of Everett, Washington accused him of raping her when they were both West Point cadets in 1986 in her blog, Short Little Rebel.

    According to the Post, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) investigated the case and could find no evidence to support either party. Shannon had resigned from the military academy soon after she contends that the rape took place, but at the time “she denied any sexual assault to West Point officials”. however, a jury decided that it should cost her for posting about the rape on her blog;

    Riggins sued Shannon for defamation, claiming that every aspect of her rape claim on the West Point campus was “provably false,” and that she wrote two blog posts and a Facebook post “to intentionally derail [his] promotion” to brigadier general. During a six-day trial that ended Aug. 1, a jury in Fairfax County, Va., heard from both Riggins and Shannon at length. And after 2½ hours of deliberation, they sided emphatically with Riggins, awarding him $8.4 million in damages, an extraordinary amount for a defamation case between two private citizens. The jury ordered Shannon to pay $3.4 million in compensatory damages for injury to his reputation and lost wages, and $5 million in punitive damages, “to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again,” according to one of the jurors.

    Colonel Riggins is now retired from the Army after a stellar career, except for the rape allegation and he’s currently a pilot for the FAA. The Army wouldn’t let his nomination for Brigadier General go forward because of the environment in 2013;

    Riggins’s nomination for brigadier general was returned to McHugh, the secretary of the Army, who wrote that “I do not have faith and confidence in Colonel Riggins’ judgment and character. Consequently, I do not support his promotion to brigadier general.”

    So, Shannon is paying the price.

    Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.

  • Brigadier General Ron Lewis keeps his security clearance

    Brigadier General Ron Lewis keeps his security clearance

    Bobo and David send us links to USAToday which reports that Brigadier General Ron Lewis who has been admonished for using his government credit card to pay for his tab at sex clubs and his habitual drunkenness while accompanying the Secretary of Defense.

    “You are reprimanded for unprofessional conduct while serving in a position of great trust that impugns your personal and professional judgment,” Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Daniel Allyn wrote in a letter to Lewis in December that was obtained by USA TODAY. “Specifically you engaged in a pattern of inappropriate behavior that included patronizing establishments of questionable character, drinking to excess in public venues, and inappropriately interacting with female civilian and military personnel.”

    Despite all of that, Big Army is recommending that he keep his security clearance;

    “Maj. Gen. Lewis was suspended from his job by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and was under investigation by the Department of Defense for nearly a year,” said Army spokesman Michael Brady. “During that time, DOD allowed him to retain his clearance. Given that DOD deemed him fit to retain his clearance, and that there were no allegations of mishandling classified materials in their investigation, the Army did, in fact, recommend he be allowed to retain a clearance. However, the decision is not the Army’s to make.”

    I wouldn’t trust him to clean my cat’s box let alone with our nation’s secrets.