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

Category: Big Army

  • Sinclair walks on sexual assault charge

    Wat sends us a link from the New York Times which reports that Brigadier General Jeffrey A. Sinclair will plead guilty to lesser charges, disobeying a commander’s order not to contact his mistress, using demeaning language to refer to female officers and using a curse word when confronted about that conduct, and misusing his government travel charge card, but he skates on the sexual assault charges. Yeah, I know, none of us saw that coming, right?

    The new guilty pleas…would end an embarrassing two-year case against one of the military’s rising stars that was derailed this year after prosecutors concluded that their chief witness, a captain who was the general’s mistress, may have lied under oath at a pretrial hearing.

    The pleas could still set up a showdown. Defense lawyers say military prosecutors may call the captain — as well as her parents, who are from Nebraska — as witnesses at a sentencing hearing this week, in an effort to persuade the military judge to impose tougher punishment on General Sinclair.

    Apparently, the deal was offered because the chief witness against Sinclair may have lied to prosecutors. They claim there were discrepancies in her statements to them. The judge, Colonel James Pohl (the Guantanamo judge), will set the sentence, but the deal includes caps to Sinclair’s punishments. Defense attorneys said that Sinclair has agreed that he will retire as a Lieutenant Colonel, two steps down from his current rank.

  • “You can run. You can hide. But you can’t run and hide forever.”

    Kudos to the US Marshals Service.  Due to their efforts, an Army fugitive on the run for more than 36 years has been captured.

    James Robert Jones was captured yesterday in Pompano Beach, FL.  Jones committed premeditated murder and aggravated assault while in the Army.  In 1974, he was tried by court-martial, convicted, and sentenced to 23 years in prison for his crimes.

    Jones escaped from Leavenworth in 1977.  Four years later, he surfaced – under an alias – in Florida.  He’s apparently been living there, quietly, since.  He’s known to have lived in Deerfield Beach, FL, since at least 2005.

    This January the Army asked the US Marshals Service for assistance in finding Jones.  Using facial recognition software and other techniques, they located him.  He’s now in custody and will be returned to Army control.

    Had Jones simply served his sentence, he’d have been a free man 16+ years ago.  Now, he’ll likely die in prison – deservedly so.

     

    Note:  this article’s title is a quote from US Marshals Service spokesman Barry Golden.  I thought it was fully apropos here.

  • Army’s sex-assault prosecutor suspended for….

    Yep, you guessed the rest of that sentence, didn’t you? The Stars & Stripes reports that Lt. Col. Joseph “Jay” Morse has been suspended from his job as the supervisor of the Army’s “special victims” prosecutors because of allegations that he groped one of his subordinates.

    Morse, chief of the Trial Counsel Assistance Program at Fort Belvoir, Va., was responsible for Army prosecutorial training and assistance worldwide. He also was lead prosecutor in the case against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who pleaded guilty to the mass murder of 16 Afghan civilians in 2012.

    Sources told Stars and Stripes that the Army lawyer alleged that Morse attempted to kiss and grope her against her will. The alleged assault reportedly took place in a hotel room at a 2011 sexual assault legal conference attended by special victims prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., before he was appointed as chief of the Trial Counsel Assistance Program.

    The lawyer reported the incident in mid-February, and Morse was suspended shortly thereafter, according to one source.

    He’s not guilty, yet, and there’s an investigation underway. But, WTF?

  • 558 soldiers removed from their positions

    The USAToday reports that someone in the Army trolled through the records of 20,000 soldiers and found 558 who were fir to serve in the positions that held; recruiters, drill sergeants, and sexual assault counselors by reason of illegal activities in their past, such as child abuse, sexual assault and drunken driving. Of those 558, seventy-nine were earmarked for separation. It’s not clear if any of those illegal activities happened before their military service.

    [Secretary of Defense Chuck] Hagel called for the review in May after a Pentagon study found troops reported that incidents of unwanted sexual contact had risen 35% from 2010 to 2012. Hagel has “been exceedingly clear about the need to continue stamping out sexual assault from our ranks,” said his spokesman, Rear Adm. John Kirby.

    “He was happy to learn that the Army widened the scope of their review and he is grateful for the work they have done to get a better grip on a very difficult issue and hold people accountable,” Kirby said.

    I don’t think it should have taken a review ordered by the Secretary of Defense to find these guys, they should have been weeded out long before this. Drunk driving has been the ultimate sin for over 30 years, so I don’t know how they got by with that one, although it’s not fair to lump that in with child abuse and sexual assault. I’d be more interested to see how the numbers were broken down between the various offenses rather than express my outrage at the big number. I mean, was it 580 cases of drunk driving and 8 cases involving abuse or assault?

    The Navy dropped three of 5,125 recruiters it had reviewed, and two of 4,739 counselors. None of its 869 recruit instructors was disqualified. The Air Force and Marine Corps reported that none of their servicemembers had been disqualified.

    I’m guessing that the services were all looking at different measures for their review, given the disparity in the numbers.

  • Dempsey’s keen eye for the obvious

    The Associated Press reports that nothing that’s too obvious gets by the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, General Martin Dempsey;

    America’s top military officer said Wednesday that the impasse over a security agreement between the U.S. and Afghanistan is encouraging the enemy to take bold actions and could lead some Afghan forces to cooperate with the Taliban to “hedge their bets.”

    [,,,]

    Dempsey told The Associated Press in an interview that President Barack Obama’s order Tuesday to begin actively planning for a total withdrawal was making Afghan military leaders anxious and eating away at their troops’ confidence.

    Of course, AP and Dempsey really blame Hamid Karzai, who is partially to blame, but it’s not his job defend US foreign policy. It’s those incompetent boobs who are projecting our political power, all appointed by this administration, who are screwing this up, like they screwed up our withdrawal from Iraq. But, then, of course, their job, for this president, is write his bumper sticker slogans for the mid-term elections not to actually accomplish something that could be called a success.

  • Defense budget battle

    The Associated Press reports that the Obama Administration has a tough fight ahead if they try to adopt Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s plan to slash the Defense budget by cutting troops and aircraft that have no plan to replace;

    The skepticism from both Republicans and Democrats augured poorly for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s vision of shrinking the Army to its smallest size in three-quarters of a century and creating a nimbler force more suited to future threats than the large land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade. Tuesday’s advance of a new veterans bill also suggested Congress may be more interested in increasing military spending in a midterm election year.

    The cuts “will weaken our nation’s security while the threats we face around the world are becoming more dangerous and complex,” Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two leading GOP hawks, said in a joint statement. “Now is not the time to embrace a defense posture reminiscent of the years prior to World War II,” they said, without outlining substitute cost reductions.

    From Fox News, the Congressional Budget Office speculates that the whole reason behind the cuts is so that the administration can spend more money on domestic programs, ignoring defense needs;

    Rep. Chris Van Hollen , D-Md., told Fox News the draw down from two wars is a logical time to save defense money. “We do not need for the defense of our country to be able to have a defense doctrine that calls for fighting two land wars at the same time,” he said.

    But history is filled with hard lessons in disarmament. Churchill warned a pacifist Britain, worn out from massive loss of life in World War I, of its unpreparedness for war with Germany as early as 1934. In 1936, he said in a speech to a disinterested Parliament, “A lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes… until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong… these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”

    McKeon offers a contemporary reprise of Churchill’s words. “The price is going to be paid for this whether it’s in the Middle East, whether it’s in the Pacific, whether it’s in Europe,” he said. “I don’t know where. I don’t know when. I don’t know how, but some bad actor is going to challenge us.”

    The capability for fighting two land wars existed long before 9/11, it existed because we had an enemy that was a global threat, much like the threat, on a smaller scale of al Qaeda which is gaining ground in the middle east and fighting, with some success in Africa. They’ve already secured portions of Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t far behind, as well as Syria. Did I mention that Iran is flexing it’s puny muscles off of our coast?

    My Obama apologist friends on Facebook tell me that this proposal from the Obama Administration isn’t his fault – that he’s getting bad advice from his generals who are secretly working for the defense industry. I’d almost believe it if they could show me just one instance when Obama ever listened to his generals in regards to anything. Well, that and the fact that I predicted this very scenario way back in 2008 before Obama ever took office.

  • Few women want combat jobs

    This is not my shocked face as I read the article sent to us by Ex-PH2 in regards to a survey taken by the Army and published by the Associated Press which reveals that women might not be inclined to join the military so they can function in combat roles.

    Less than 8 percent of Army women who responded to the survey said they wanted a combat job. Of those, an overwhelming number said they’d like to be a Night Stalker — a member of the elite special operations helicopter crews who perhaps are best known for flying the Navy SEALS into Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011.

    Last year top Pentagon officials signed an order saying women must have the same opportunities as men in combat jobs and the services have been devising updated physical standards, training, education and other programs for thousands of jobs they must open Jan. 1, 2016. The services must open as many jobs to women as possible; if they decide to keep some closed, they must explain why.

    I’m pretty sure that the result of this poll won’t influence the social scientists one whit – they’re determined to increase the number of women killed in combat in the next war as well as their male battle buddies. I expect pressure will be put on recruiters to influence new female recruits to join the combat arms specialties, and because they really don’t want those jobs, they’ll begin failing in large numbers which will make Big Army to lower standards in order to accommodate their political masters.

    When have I been wrong in this discussion so far?

  • Hagel proposes to shrink Army to pre-Pearl Harbor numbers

    Ex-PH2 sends us a link to MSN which refers to a New York Times article published yesterday which gives a peek into Chuck Hagel’s plan to ask Congress to cut the numbers of the Army to pre-1940 size.

    The proposal, described by several Pentagon officials on the condition of anonymity in advance of its release on Monday, takes into account the fiscal reality of government austerity and the political reality of a president who pledged to end two costly and exhausting land wars. A result, the officials argue, will be a military capable of defeating any adversary, but too small for protracted foreign occupations.

    The officials acknowledge that budget cuts will impose greater risk on the armed forces if they are again ordered to carry out two large-scale military actions at the same time: Success would take longer, they say, and there would be a larger number of casualties. Officials also say that a smaller military could invite adventurism by adversaries.

    Yeah, well, I guess we figure that everyone on the planet is so impressed with Smart diplomacy that we’re no longer a target. I remember when we cut the number of troops in the early 90s, operational tempo (OpTempo) didn’t decrease along with the numbers. In fact, the administration that depended heavily on the use of cruise missiles to project our political goals was able to deplete our stocks of missiles without replacing them. I also remember an MP company at Fort Hood which had no training ammo for their M9s.

    There are History Channel documentaries which show US troops in the 1940s training with wooden rifles because there weren’t any real rifles available. Of course, the US was able to call up troops to swell it’s ranks quickly in 1942 because we had a draft, not an advantage Hagel could draw upon in this day and age.

    How ’bout we draw the EPA down to pre-Nixon numbers, or we reduce the Education Department to pre-Carter days? Or Health and Human Services Department to the pre-Johnson era? Makes about as much sense to me.

    From Fox News;

    Officials told the Times that Hagel’s plan has been endorsed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and protects funding for Special Operations forces and cyberwarfare. It also calls for the Navy to maintain all eleven of its aircraft carriers currently in operation. However, the budget proposal mandates the elimination of the entire fleet of Air Force A-10 attack aircraft, as well as the retiring of the U-2 spy plane, a stalwart of Cold War operations.

    Good. We should reduce the Joint Chiefs to pre-1940 numbers, too, if they truly think that this is maintaining our defensive posture.