Category: Big Army

USAToday tells the story of Major General John Custer and his friend, Marty Dempsey who covered for Custer’s bad behavior;

The two-star general had an inappropriate relationship with a woman and lied to investigators about it, made his staff buy sexy clothing for her, subjected his underlings to racist and sexist emails and allowed himself to be photographed with another woman licking the medals on his formal dress uniform.

After the report was received and signed by top Army officials in September 2010, Maj. Gen. John Custer, commander of the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., faced public shaming and the loss of rank.

That’s when Gen. Martin Dempsey intervened. Dempsey, then the four-star in charge of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, struck from the record the substantiated finding of Custer’s inappropriate relationship. That left the board of three generals deciding Custer’s fate with two relatively minor charges and the letter of reprimand that Dempsey had issued.

So because of Dempsey’s intervention, Custer was able to retire with a $160,000/year pension.

Dempsey, a little more than a year later, ascended to the top of the uniformed military: chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From that post, he would lament the ethical crisis in the military and the scourge of sexual assault and harassment. He and the chiefs vowed to root it out.

[…]

Stories in the last year by USA TODAY about the “swinging general,” Maj. Gen. David Haight, whose serial promiscuity killed his career, the demotion of the three-star adviser to the Defense secretary for drunken carousing at “gentleman’s clubs,” and the firing of another on the Joint Staff for adultery show that misconduct among senior officers has been anything but eradicated.

Ron Lewis was promoted to Major General in January 2015. He got his third star in June and started working alongside the Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter as Carter’s senior military assistant. Then this happened according to USA Today;

On the night of Nov. 5-6, 2015, on a trip to Hawaii with Carter, Lewis consumed 11 alcoholic beverages with a female enlisted service member, who was also drinking heavily, the report said. Witnesses said they saw Lewis and the woman on the beach near their hotel with Lewis’ arms around her. Afterward, another female official on the trip told Lewis he was “being really stupid” and tried to get the enlisted woman away from his hotel room, the report said.

Allegations about Lewis’ conduct in Hawaii were forwarded to Carter’s staff on Nov. 9, the report said. After a preliminary investigation, Carter was told on Nov. 10. Carter’s chief of staff told the inspector general a day later that Lewis would be fired, which happened on Nov. 12.

The article continues that in April 2015 the good general put a night on “Hooker Hill” in Seoul, Korea on his government credit card. That makes me wonder how he got the job alongside the secretary.

Anyway, you Army guys are all going to catch shit for this guy during SHARP training and Lord knows you deserve it.

Thanks to Jarhead, David and Devtun for the link.

The Army has nine Long-Range Surveillance companies, three active-duty and six National Guard, and now that they have to do things like train people who can’t do the job those people want and they have to spend money on healthcare that doesn’t improve combat readiness, they want to cut those combat assets so they can afford to culturally diversify the force instead. From Military.com;

Commanders identified operational LRS units as a low priority, he said, adding that the decision to cut LRS companies was aided by “extensive computer models using combatant commander plans to determine what the Army needs.”

Oh, well, that makes sense – computer models are telling commanders to slash combat units. The Army is betting on drones – but drones only give commanders a two-dimensional look at the battlefield while LRS team provide a three-dimensional view. There is a contextual benefit of having experienced combat troops observe the enemy instead of an airman in a swivel chair thousands of miles from the scene.

It’s more important, though, that the Army spends millions of dollars picking a pistol, picking a new uniform pattern every few years, diversifying the force with deviants, spending money to train people who can’t meet the standard. We can’t cut the flag officers’ transportation, kitchen or household staffs, let’s cut combat assets instead.

If there were two brain cells left in the Pentagon, they’d keep the National Guard companies in order to retain a cadre of folks with the expertise to train up some companies before the next war, but, well….

Chief Tango sends us a link to the Washington Post in which they analyze the Army’s decision to roll up sleeves on their combat uniforms entitled Guns out: Why the Army moved to allow rolled sleeves for soldiers. I don’t understand why it’s such a huge issue. Either do it, or don’t.

The practice was banned for years. Then there was a pilot program. The results were studied closely. And on Tuesday, the Army made its big decision: Rolled sleeves on camouflage uniforms are now completely acceptable.

The move gives a stiff-arm to recent history, in which the Army was the only Pentagon service that did not allow rolled sleeves, even in the hot summer months at places such as Fort Hood, Tex., and Fort Benning, Ga.

“The results were studied closely” – probably more closely than our participation in the war against terror.

The decision comes less than a year after Milley took over as Army chief and Dailey took over as his top enlisted adviser. Although it has no effect on operations, it’s the kind of cultural change that can endear senior leaders to their troops.

Yeah, the troops will forgive their leaders for collapsing to pressure from the politicians to cut their housing allowances, doing away with commissaries, jacking up their healthcare costs, changing their retirement options, not giving them a cost of living allowance for the past four years, but now they can roll up their stupid sleeves. Yay!

The Army Times tells the story of Sgt. Shelby Atkins who the Army is calling the first enlisted infantryman of the female gender after she completed some 2-week course alongside her 32 male classmates designed to make infantrymen in Wyoming’s National Guard. Well, see, I dispute the fact that any of them are infantrymen. I’m pretty sure that no matter how intensive the training is, that’s not enough time to teach someone to lead infantrymen into battle, no matter what they have between their legs.

Atkins, who was a horizontal construction engineer before switching military occupational specialties, was one of at least two female soldiers who attended the infantry qualification and transition course, said Deidre Forster, a spokeswoman for the Wyoming Guard. Atkins, who has deployed to Bahrain, was the only female graduate, Forster said.

Atkins was not available for an interview.

She, along with her fellow graduates, will be assigned to C Company, 1st Battalion, 297th Infantry Regiment. This company-sized element will be the first infantry unit in the Wyoming Guard in more than 100 years; it is scheduled to be activated in July, Forster said.

The company will replace the 1041st Multi-role Bridge Company, which officials last year announced would be deactivated.

The article says that real infantry NCOs trained them – well, then why aren’t the Iraqis kicking ass against ISIS? The US troops have been training Iraqis for months and years. If I had been sent to Wyoming’s Camp Guernsey Joint Training Center to train these people, I would have found it real difficult to keep a straight face.

The only school I ever attended in the Army that was two weeks in duration was the Cadet Command School which was basically a block of instruction on how to brief the Cadet Command CG (Commanding General) when he came around to your school. Two weeks isn’t time enough to learn anything except to prepare a PowerPoint slide show – certainly not to convince people that they’re ready to be infantry NCOs and lead troops into ground combat.

So my problem isn’t that the Army is calling Sergeant Atkins an infantryman, it’s that they’re calling any of those people infantryman.