Category: Big Army

According to Military.com, notices have gone out to 2500 officers and NCOs that their services are no longer required by the government.

The non-commissioned officer-turned-officer knew the service was downsizing after more than a decade of war. But he figured he’d be one of the lucky ones, in part because of his tours in Bosnia, Kosovo and, most recently, Afghanistan. What’s more, he had just received orders to move to a new duty station.

So he and his wife, who’s newly pregnant with their first child, signed a lease and put a deposit on a home at the family’s next location. A few days later, he was called into his post’s commanding general’s office and informed that, effective almost immediately, he would no longer be in the military.

“It really is disheartening to see the Army engaging in force shaping in the manner that it is,” one said. “I’ve seen many of my fellow company-grade officers decide to get out because of the uncertainty over pay and future promotions. We’re losing those who can get jobs, which means the Army is losing the talent it should be retaining.”

Yeah, at least when the Clinton Administration drew down, they asked for volunteers first and bought us off. I guess that won’t happen this time around. But then, the people who should be leaving are most likely the ones who are making the decisions about who will leave.

If I was making the choices, I’d send letters to every senior NCO who hasn’t been in a first sergeant or command sergeant major slot – especially those who declined assignments to those positions. Then I’d cull the officer ranks using the same measure (although that might be a little more difficult to apply). But infantry officers like our buddy Robert Bateman who had last served in an authentic infantry slot as a platoon leader would be out on the street.

Having been through these before, we all know that it will be the guys who worked their jobs among the troops, the folks who deployed every time they were ordered to deploy, no matter where, no matter how “no notice”
who will pay the price for this draw down. It won’t be the people who avoided deployments through more than a decade of war.

Those are not my words, but those of a veteran working as a contractor with the same Army division from which Bowe Bergdahl deserted. This young veteran could not possibly have stated the predominant view of our men and women in arms, still out there, spread round this globe, protecting us round the clock, more clearly. Regardless of all the whitewash the Obama spinmeisters try to put on this Bergdahl situation, the troops know the truth: the man is a deserter, a traitor, and a collaborator with enemy forces – enemy combatants who killed the very Americans seeking to free him. In our troops’ eyes, he is not deserving of the red carpet, brass band, and ticker tape reception our clueless administration had planned as a political triumph and photo-op for our Anointed Leader.

Here is what that veteran has to say about all the Defense Department fanfare surrounding Bergdahl’s release, ginned up, no doubt, by the White House political machine:

When a soldier deserts his post, when he writes that he is ashamed to be an American, when he gives the enemy secrets (and he did), he is no longer “one of us”. He is a traitor. He is not a brother-in-arms.

Soldiers risk their lives for each other every day on the battlefield, there is a trust and respect they have for each other. For Bowe Bergdahl to break that trust and the Secretary of Defense to announce a hero’s welcome instead of a court-martial is a huge let-down.

He isn’t one of their own. He is one of them. He is the enemy.

That’s not something to celebrate.

That, pure and simple, is a concept the never-serving wienies in the White House simply can’t grasp. Chuck Hagel, to his everlasting disgrace, should have been able to pick up on this brewing military sentiment and warn his clueless civilian boss away from such a public relations disaster. But no, old suck-up Chuck, despite his honorable service as a combat infantry NCO in Vietnam, chose the politically expedient, screw-the-troops course of action. Congratulations, Chuck: you could have served honorably, yet just like Bergdahl, you went over to the enemy.

This old infantry sergeant from that long-ago Vietnam War cannot fathom for the life of him how a man who had served honorably and responsibly in that war as an infantry non-com could now serve so dishonorably in this one. But then I must consider that he is an embedded part of an anti-military administration that demonstrates to the world that it values treason more than honor.

Do these inept fools not have a clue as to how demoralizing that is to our own forces and energizing to our enemies?

Our ship of state is a ship of fools.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Apparently, in 2007, the Democrat Congress increased general officers’ pensions in order to entice them into staying in the service. The change hiked some pensions by 63%. Apparently, some unnamed dude in USAToday‘s article was scraping by on a mere $272,892 per year. So the Senate is moving to change that;

“Cutting the special pension enhancement is a no-brainer,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan government watchdog. “This dubious provision was enacted at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a means of retaining senior flag officers; however, there is little evidence that it realized its intended effect. It should be revoked as soon as possible.”

Well, not only that, if they appeared in front of Congress and testified in favor of personnel cuts to defense spending, they should give up 10% of their annual pension for each time they told Congress that. It should also affect the pensions of any Sergeant Major who does that, too.

I’m pretty sure that general officers don’t need an incentive to stay in service longer, in fact, in many cases they need a disincentive.

The committee directed the Pentagon, at the request of Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., to study the effectiveness of the bolstered pensions in keeping senior officers in the military. This year, she questioned the need for the larger pension payments during a hearing about military compensation and the need to rein in costs.

The change was tucked into the massive National Defense Authorization Act, which the committee approved on a 25-1 vote late last month. The full senate will vote on the bill this year.

Yeah, I’m sure a Pentagon study will recommend a pension cut. While they’re at it, the Senate ought to investigate their own pension system. Not holding my breath for either.

Thanks to Chock Block for the link.

That lukewarm reception Barack Obama received at West Point last week was indicative of the widely held view among the troops that the man is a truly incompetent commander in chief, or as the language-mangling Al Sharpton might say, “the Commander of the Chiefs.” Notice that I said the troops, not their senior leadership. If our Pentagon weren’t currently occupied by the perfumed princes of political correctness, we might be seeing some courageous generals and admirals falling on their swords and exposing this failure of leadership instead of enabling it. Those ambitious cowards should ponder the reality that neither “I was only doing my duty” nor “I was only following orders” is a viable defense.

It is this failure of courage by our military leaders that has allowed this dilettante president and his inexpert staff to make one unwise military decision after another, with a compounding effect of weakening and endangering America’s forces around the world. The latest example is this political stunt of releasing five high-level terrorists in exchange for one American soldier who most likely is a treasonous deserter who should be in Gitmo himself. In doing so, this lawless “Commander of the Chiefs” has ignored another federal law that was passed precisely to prevent this sort of executive overreach.

There is no way that the White House could have pulled off this “wag the dog” stunt without considerable acquiescence from the highest levels of our military leadership. Those perfumed princes, led by their secretary of defense, have made themselves complicit in the crime by carrying out an order that they all knew to be unlawful. Moreover, they had concluded that Bergdahl was a deserter back in 2010, according to media reports that broke yesterday. They had the testimony of PFC Bergdahl’s fellow paratroopers that he was a deserter, supported by the content of e-mails sent to his parents. Does packing his clothes for their return to his parents in the days preceding his desertion not imply premeditation, rather than spontaneous disorientation or capture? And in spite of that knowledge, our vaunted military leaders went along with this administration’s foolish stunt that now will endanger yet more of our warriors by encouraging kidnapping by terrorists.

What is truly disheartening is that not a single one of the perfumed princes had the courage or honor to resign in protest.

Democrat strategists in the administration, watching their president getting hammered by scandal after scandal, were no doubt encouraged by this lack of opposition from the lie-down leadership of our military. It also likely fed the confidence of the Screw the Constitution Cabal in this administration that they could proceed to ignore the law and that Obama could once agian flip a defiant bird to effete Republican leadership in Congress. And that confidence in turn reinforced their belief that this prisoner-swapping stunt could be pulled off, distracting the president’s critics and providing some respite from the building wave of disillusionment in the electorate regarding Democrat leadership.

A single, public resignation by a single honorable four-star could have stopped this executive branch arrogance in its tracks, like a kitchen light breaking up a roach-fest.

Thus, the overconfident political strategerists encouraged their exalted leader to defy a clearly drawn congressional red line, which requires the secretary of defense to provide Congress with thirty days’ prior notice of any such prisoner exchange. If our Republican congressional leaders roll over on this act of defiance, then they will have proved their red lines to be as meaningless as Obama’s.

Let us hope there are some braver souls in Congress looking at Obama’s unlawful action as the basis for yet another indictment in a growing body of charges to support articles of impeachment. And yes, I’m fully aware that there is virtually no chance that Obama could be both impeached and convicted, but the reality is, he can be impeached. It would be a significant repudiation and disgrace for both him and his party.

Should this country regain enough political sanity to elect a Republican president in 2016, high on that president’s list of things to do should be a clean sweep of the Pentagon, starting with the service secretaries, then the Joint Chiefs, the service chiefs of staff, their staffs, and then all the generals and admirals advanced to major commands around the world appointed by this corrupt Obama administration. They should then be replaced with warfighters who recognize that their sworn loyalty is to the Constitution, not the tenets of political correctness. Pick leaders who fully comprehend that the primary mission of our military is to defend our nation, not to be an incubator of socialist experimentation. The process should be dubbed Operation Spinal Implant.

At this moment, while writing, I am listening to this traitorous deserter, Bergdahl, being applauded as a hero, which truly sickens me. And even now, as this is happening, not one of our military leaders has the courage to step forward with the truth and prevent the liar in the White House and his Democrat loyalists from foisting another huge fraud on the American people. Thank goodness the troops are speaking out, undeterred by the spinelessness of their leadership.

One has to wonder if there’s mandatory neutering for these former dogs of war upon being assigned to lapdog duty in that five-sided kennel of cowardice.

Postscript:

Senator John McCain, when asked by Greta Van Susteren about Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey’s role in the prisoner exchange:

General Dempsey is irrelevant in any discussion of national security.

The author rests his case…

Crossposted at American Thinker