Category: Big Army

I was just talking with TSO the other day about John McHugh, the Army Secretary. I was pretty clear that I thought he was a moron. Well, Country Singer sends me ammunition to bolster my opinion;

I guess my first question to Secretary is; do you know there’s war going on somewhere? That war isn’t happening in the Asia-Pacific region, so why didn’t you mention the war we’re waging in the Middle East and Africa at the moment. I’d also ask the Secretary if he’s aware that actual training for war might be a rational soldier’s priority.

But this list is nothing more than a politician’s wish list. of course, that’s what I’d expect from McHugh – his only experience with the military is his successful and laudable battle to keep Fort Drum open while he was a Congressman of that district. But it was only for political reasons as Fort Drum was the largest employer of Jefferson County, NY.

But these aren’t the priorities of a “Defense Department”, they’re more like the priorities of the EPA or the Interior Department.

Twist sends us a link to Stars & Stripes which reports that the Armed Forces network has cancelled sports programming to troops overseas because of the government shutdown.

The American Forces Network, reduced to just a news channel this week by the government shutdown, says it has no plans to screen football, baseball or other sports until things get back to normal.

The hopes of sports fans — raised this week when AFN started showing ESPN’s “SportsCenter” on the news channel — were dashed in an email from AFN on Friday that ruled out screening actual sports events during the shutdown.

Navy Senior Chief Mass Communication Specialist John Harrington, an AFN spokesman, said in an email that the broadcaster’s lawyers had determined there is no sound policy or legal basis to air sports.

You might think I’m an agent of the Taliban or something, but this news gets a “meh” from me. [In a crotchety old man voice] In my day we always got the games a week after they played, a week after we knew the scores – the reason I quit watching sports. Training and preparation didn’t suffer a whit. I mean, I know getting live sports is a real morale builder (we got the Super Bowl live the last year I was in Germany at like 2 o’clock in the morning) and I’m sure the President feels your pain and commiserates with you while he watches the games live. But, you know, you guys are getting paid (sometime) so you have to made to feel the pain. Everybody hurts for this shutdown, just be grateful that this is the best pain they could come up with for you.

Chief Tango sends us a link from the Associated Press which reports that the Army paid $16 million to deserters and folks who were AWOL during the 2010 – 2012 period.

Auditors found that commanders weren’t filling out paperwork on absent soldiers in a timely manner, so the orders to stop pay weren’t being processed and absent soldiers were still being paid. The latest audit comes as the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps are projected to slash $52 billion from the defense budget for the 2014 fiscal year under automatic spending cuts that kicked in March 1.

The Army classifies a deserter as someone who drops from the rolls of a unit after being absent without authority for 30 or more consecutive days. Soldiers who join the military of another country, seek political asylum or live in a foreign country are also considered deserters.

Kutz included in the audit recommendations that the Army develop a strategy for tracking possible desertion cases and possibly initiating criminal actions against deserters who took unearned pay.

I think if I was a commander, I’d be slow to re-start a criminal’s pay, but johnny-on-the-spot to stop his pay.

$14 million for a rifle the Army doesn’t need, $16 million for people who don’t show up for work. This is starting to look like places that the Army can look to cut expenses rather than threatening to cut training and reducing cost of living increases. Not to mention raising healthcare costs to retirees and raiding their surplus. I guess it’s too hard to cut real waste and easier to just make personnel cost cuts.

We wrote a few months ago about the Department of Defense raiding the $770 million from our surplus Tricare premiums for other things while they were jacking up our premiums. Well, you’ll be happy to know that, despite the sequester and the cut backs in spending, your money is going to a good cause – the DoD is spending $7 billion on wind energy from Reuters by way of Hot Air (See how I linked to you, Hot Air? You should try it sometime);

The U.S. Army has picked 17 companies that will be eligible to receive orders for wind energy under an umbrella contract valued at up to $7 billion, the Pentagon said on Monday.

The companies include many large energy producers including Dominion Energy, a unit of Dominion Resources Inc ; the U.S. unit of Spain’s Acciona SA ; Duke Energy Corp ; the U.S. unit of France’s EDF Energies Nouvelles; and the U.S. unit of Spain’s Iberdrola SA.

So, that should put a smile on your face when you pay your Tricare premium this month.
Thanks to Paul for the link.

Greg sends us a link to The Army Times which reports that, in an effort to save money at the expense of lives in combat, The Army is planning on gutting combatives training – hand-to-gland combat;

The Modern Army Combatives Program, headquartered at Fort Benning, Ga., consists of four skill-level courses — a weeklong basic course, a two-week tactical course, and a basic combatives instructor course and a tactical combatives instructor course, each of which is four weeks long.

Proposals from Training and Doctrine Command call for eliminating all four levels of training and creating a master combatives trainer course that would be no more than two weeks long.

In an email obtained by Army Times, officials from TRADOC call for “implementation of the new program as quickly as possible.”

We’ve read countless stories about modern soldiers who had to resort to combat by other means when their weapons jammed or they ran out of ammunition. TRADOC, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command hasn’t responded to The Army Times inquiries to this change in training, and I don’t blame them.

You can talk about reducing pay raises, jacking up healthcare costs and such, but when Big Army decides to reduce essential training opportunities, that will cost lives. A few years ago, Big Army decided to cut back on bayonet training and now hand-to-hand training? Do they think the troops live in a perfect Hollywood world in which they never run out of ammo and their weapons always function?

It’s too bad the troops don’t have a Sergeant Major of the Army worth a shit to stop this loss of a valuable skill. The one they have now is more worried about neck tattoos and cultural sensitivity, though, to be bothered with having a lethal fighting force.