Category: Big Army

Paul sends us a link from USAToday which reports that the pentagon is about to destroy billions of bullets because no one knows how to count them properly. Singing a familiar song, their accounting systems between the services can’t talk to each other;

The result: potential waste of unknown value.

“There is a huge opportunity to save millions, if not billions of dollars if the (Pentagon) can make some common-sense improvements to how it manages ammunition,” said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “Despite years of effort, the Army, Navy and Air Force still don’t have an efficient process for doing something as basic as sharing excess bullets. This Government Accountability Office (GAO) report clearly shows that our military’s antiquated systems lead to millions of dollars in wasteful ammunition purchases.”

The Army and Pentagon, in a statement, acknowledged “the need to automate the process” and will make it a priority in future budgets. In all, the Pentagon manages a stockpile of conventional ammunition worth $70 billion.

Well, that’s reassuring – they’re going to make it a priority in the future, you know like the information systems between the Department of Defense and the VA has been a priority.

Of course, DoD could do like the Israelis and the Russians do – they could sell the surplus to private users…like me…and recover some of their money. But then, the Bradys and the Bloombergs would just shit themselves. So let’s just destroy the ammo. We can recover the cost from veterans’ surplus from paying their increased premiums on TriCare while we promise some nebulous fix to the system sometime in the future. Way in the future. In the meantime, we can just blame Bush for making us go to war and buy ammo, in spite of the fact that when he came into office, there was no ammo surplus.

The above slide is from “leader guidance” on implementation of the new “Wear and Appearance” regulation AR 670-1 for the Army. Now, i have no idea what is going on in those pictures, but then, I don’t have any female soldiers, so I’m not really motivated to figure out what the Army wants or what kind of thought went into the regs. But, i do know y’all want to talk about it, judging from the emails I get about it. I also know that somehow the new regs are “racist” because Fox News tells me that female soldiers say it is.

Apparently, some folks started a White House petition to influence Big Army into changing the regs.

More than 11,000 people have signed a White House petition asking President Barack Obama, the commander in chief, to have the military review the regulations to allow for “neat and maintained natural hairstyles.”

Some black military women, who make up about a third of the women in the armed forces, feel they have been singled out with these new regulations.

“I think that it primarily targets black women, and I’m not in agreement with it,” said Patricia Jackson-Kelley of the National Association of Black Military Women. “I don’t see how a woman wearing three braids in her hair, how that affects her ability to perform her duty in the military.”

First of all, I don’t think all of this petition bullshit that has erupted in recent years is worth my time or yours. I haven’t, and I won’t post petition links on this blog, because to me it’s just populist, slacktivist pablum. Secondly, I think that if black women have a problem with this, there must be a better way to oppose it than some demonstration of mental masturbation on the White House website. Thirdly, I think it’s just delicious that the PC-enamored Pentagon is now faced with being branded as racists themselves.

However it turns out, I don’t give a rat’s tiny, furry ass. I don’t think the outcome of the next war will turn on how many braids female soldiers have in their hair. Maybe they should all be required to conform with male standards and that would end it all.

Shocka! David sends us news that Bragadier General Jeffrey Sinclair, that fellow who was accused of sexual assault, was sentenced today and he got off with a fine, a hefty fine for you and me, but a lot less than what you and I would got.

Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair — who struck a plea deal after being accused of sexually assaulting his former lover — was sentenced Thursday to pay $24,100 in fines and restitution, but not jailed or demoted.

Sinclair, 51, smiled after learning his fate.

“The system worked. I’ve always been proud of my Army,” he said outside the Fort Bragg, N.C., courthouse. “All I want to do now is go north and hug my kids and my wife.”

Yup, the system worked. The LA Times reports on his behavior at the sentencing hearing yesterday;

Choking on his words and wiping his eyes, Sinclair apologized to the judge, the captain, his wife, his two young sons and to an institution he has served for 27 years. He begged to be allowed to retire at a reduced rank so that his family may collect military benefits “they have earned serving alongside me all these years.”

I’m disappointed with Judge (Col.) Pohl. I grew to like him while I watched the Guantanamo hearings, but this is really a joke.

Someone dropped off the slide show for the Army’s new uniform policies, and generally, I agree to the majority of it. But I hate to think of the poor platoon sergeants who have to deal with the new tattoo policy. Since tattoos are generally “grandfathered”, leaders will have to record the tattoos that exist before the restrictions become effective and a record of the tattoos will go in the soldier’s military records. And the soldier is subject to annual inventories of their tattoos to make sure that that the tattoos didn’t reproduce;

Yeah, I know it says that the commander will record this stuff and do the annual inspections, but we all know who will do the actual work. It’s almost as if the brain trust at the Pentagon have never been platoon sergeants before.

But, anyway, here’s the slide show in .pdf if you’re interested; Uniform Policy Leaders Training

Our buddy, Rick Maze, called a few months ago and asked if I wanted to contribute to his piece about whether the Army can listen to the soldiers, you know, the soldiers who faced the enemy down in the latest wars and had to actually pull the triggers. Rick just moved to Army Magazine (the Association of the US ARMY publication) to become their Editor-in-Chief, from his many years at the Military Times, so I answered in the affirmative. Here is his piece in the April edition.

Here’s my portion of the interview;

I don’t think that the Army’s inability to listen to the troops is a new phenomenon. It’s always been like that. If you’re not a War College graduate, everything you say will fall on deaf ears. Of course, it’s like that in every professional field. After the Gulf War, there were several sessions of brain storming over friendly fire with which I participated and usually, my input was dismissed quickly by staff officers who didn’t happen to be anywhere near the action and were forehead defilade in their M577 command tracks.

Their “lessons learned” were only valid if they were in the official accounts of combat. The same unit that awarded a Sergeant Major a BSM w/V for taking out an Iraqi tank with his pistol and a Sergeant First Class a Purple Heart for getting hit in the eye with an RPG fin as it flew over his head was depending on reports and not on the people who were on the ground.

I can only imagine the bullshit that you younger guys have to plow through to teach the Army what you learned by doing, not reading. But, at least you can see that eventually you’ll get your revenge like I did in this article.