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

Category: Big Army

  • 10 camouflaged patterns is nine too many

    When I left the military in 1994, there was one camouflaged pattern for all of the services – the “woodland” pattern, and we also had a desert uniform for people who were living in the desert. But as the Washington Post reports, the Pentagon has ten different patterns that it’s paying for with tax payer dollars;

    Today, there is one camouflage pattern just for Marines in the desert. There is another just for Navy personnel in the desert. The Army has its own “universal” camouflage pattern, which is designed to work anywhere. It also has another one just for Afghanistan, where the first one doesn’t work.

    Even the Air Force has its own unique camouflage, used in a new Airman Battle Uniform. But it has flaws. So in Afghanistan, airmen are told not to wear it in battle.

    In just 11 years, two kinds of camouflage have turned into 10. And a simple aspect of the U.S. government has emerged as a complicated and expensive case study in federal duplication.

    Somehow, people think that their uniform is an essential part of fighting wars. It really isn’t. Especially if you look at the Navy’s and Air Force’s uniforms which don’t hide anyone from anything. The Stars & Stripes has a chart which tracks the uniform changes over the last few years;

    The U.S. military's changing camouflage

    The Pentagon has spent billions of dollars going through the motions of picking “the best” pattern for their purposes and then changing their minds. But it’s all so much mental masturbation, since most of the wars we fought, the troops didn’t wear any camouflaged pattern and they still won the actual battles. The services are like a bunch of teenagers fretting over what cool new clothes they want to wear for the first day of school. But in the end, troops’ uniforms in combat all end up the same color – whatever color the dirt is in their particular area of operations. So all of that exercise that the pogues at Natick Labs go through has no real impact on the battlefield, but their jobs are secure for the next billion-dollar “back-to-school” shopping spree.

  • Dempsey on “decimated” al Qaeda

    Chief Tango sends us a link to the Daily Caller in which the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs tries to explain what the President said about the “decimated” al Qaeda;

    “My understanding of what the president has said is that the ‘al-Qaida core’ has been decimated,” Dempsey said at a lunch for reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

    “You know, the ideology, or the movement, has clearly spread to the Arab peninsula to Horn of Africa to North Africa to West Africa. And the president has been very clear that he recognizes the al-Qaida threat among its affiliates persists. But the al-Qaida core — that is to say those responsible for the 9/11 attacks and al-Qaida senior leadership that have heretofore provided their kind of ideological hierarchy — they have been, they have been decimated.”

    Now I don’t remember the President saying that the “core” of al Qaeda being “decimated”, he said the whole group of terrorists had been “decimated”, which probably coincides with my initial interpretation that decimated means to reduce the enemy’s numbers by 10%.

    I do wonder if the reporters on this particular story had to slide a microphone under the President’s desk in order to hear Dempsey, though.

    “I mean, that’s where the president is coming from, and I agree with that as a strategy,” he added.

    No shit, Marty? You agree with the President on something. A red-letter day indeed.

  • Bagram Batman

    I remember the “Energy Rapper” on AFN in the eighties who rapped about how we should save the military money “I’m the energy rapper and I’m here today telling people in the Army what I have to say, turn it off turn it down ’cause it’s comin’ around when the energy’s gone there’ll be none to be found.”

    But, now that military has discovered YouTube, they have more imaginative characters, like Bagram Batman;

    I’m thinking that Bagram Batman is a graduate of the Sergeant Major Academy. There’s also this one about being in war and not carrying your weapon;

    Who goes to Afghanistan and doesn’t want to carry their weapon?

    There are more public service announcements starring the caped sergeant major at DVIDS. Thanks to Chip for the link.

  • Balancing the budget on the backs of veterans

    I was in the room, back in August, 2010 when the president told the American Legion Convention in Minneapolis that he wasn’t going to balance the national budget on the backs of the military and veterans. Well, at that very moment, his Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta was planning exactly that. By that time, retirees had already seen two years with no Cost of Living Allowance increases despite the rocketing costs of gasoline and food. Last year, DoD tried to ram through increases in premiums for the military healthcare system, which were blocked in Congress. I’ll remind you that those increases were being shepherded by the Administration despite the fact taht there was a $770 million surplus in Tricare – which DoD promptly raided. Now it seems that the Administration is once again trying to fore go their committment to veterans as well as the active duty force according to the Army Times;

    The Pentagon again is seeking increases in Tricare fees with a revamped and more expansive proposal that would touch all beneficiaries but would fall hardest on working-age retirees under 65.

    For Medicare-eligible retirees in the Tricare for Life program, the budget proposes an annual enrollment fee based on a percentage of retired pay. For 2014, the fee would be capped at $150 for family coverage for most retirees and $200 for retired flag and general officers.

    And, oh, by the way, they capped pay increases for the active force at 1% – about half of what Congress had proposed. And they’re looking for more base realignment – while I agree that there are probably things they could do to save money, at some point, to keep hacking away at the Defense Department has to begin affecting national security – and hacking away at bases will have that exact effect.

    And if you think that the Chiefs of Staff are going to pull our fat from the fire, think again;

    Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the budget proposal “lowers manpower costs, reduces excess infrastructure, and makes healthcare more sustainable.”

    “Most importantly, it protects investment in our most decisive advantage — our people,” he said. “It treats being the best led, trained, and equipped military as a non-negotiable imperative.”

    I wonder how the reporters heard Dempsey when he, obviously, was under the President’s desk in the Oval Office.

    While I understand that the budget needs to be trimmed, manpower costs and legacy costs are not the place to do the cutting – since that will affect future abilities of the government to attract a volunteer force. But, then that’s probably what they’re shooting for – a seriously weakened defense structure – regardless of the fact that national defense is one of the things that the Constitution says that government does, not all of that other meaningless bullshit that isn’t on the chopping block.

    Thanks to Chief tango for the link.

  • Big Army; Beware those religious extremist Catholics

    religious_ap_636

    The above picture is supposedly a slide on religious fanaticism in a presentation to Reservists in Pennsylvania. For some reason, Evangelicals and Catholics make the list mixed in with the Muslim Brotherhood, the KKK, the Nation of Islam and Hamas. Yeah, because I can’t count the times that I’ve read about Catholics suicide bombers.

    It’s been decades since I walked into a church on a Sunday, but that doesn’t mean that I think that there are Christian extremists on par with al Qaeda (also on the list). I mean, they even have the Hutarees on the list. The Hutarees were (I said “were” because they’ve been disbanded) clowns looking for a college. But their presence on the list leads me to believe that the Southern Poverty Law Center is behind the class.

  • Three generals censured for misconduct

    The Washington Post reports that three more generals are being punished (I say “punished” in the way that generals are punished and not in the way that regular people get punished) for misconduct. They are; Army Maj. Gen. Ralph O. Baker, the commander of a strategic counterterrorism force on the Horn of Africa; David H. Huntoon Jr., the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; and Joseph F. Fil Jr., a former commander in South Korea and Iraq.

    Two officials familiar with the case said Baker was investigated for allegedly groping a female civilian employee after he had been drinking.

    […]

    The inspector general’s office said it did substantiate allegations of misconduct against Huntoon but would not describe them or comment on the Army’s statement.

    […]

    Records show that the Pentagon inspector general also upheld misconduct charges last year against Fil, another three-star Army general and former commander of the Eighth Army in South Korea.

    Fil was allowed to retire last year. Huntoon is also being allowed to retire. I guess the most worrying part of this is that Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, submitted as his solution to this obviously huge problem, that generals and admirals get some power point presentation on how to behave in public and apparently that hasn’t worked. But there’s something fundamentally wrong with a bunch of flag officers who don’t know that groping women is wrong, although we’re not sure that Huntoon and Fil were relieved for that, but Baker certainly was fired for that reason.

    I can’t even imagine how long a class on ethics would last that could teach grown men my age to behave themselves. Unless the class was supposed to follow them around for every moment the rest of their career.

  • The Purple Heart for Fort Hood victims

    Derek and MCPO Ret. in TN send us a link to CNN which discusses the reasons that the Department of Defense won’t award a Purple Heart to Nidal Hasan’s victims, and it has to do with lawyer shit;

    The Defense Department argues that awarding the Purple Heart to the Fort Hood victims would make it harder to convict Hasan in the death-penalty case and “deprive the victims of these crimes the right to see justice done.”

    “Defense counsel will argue that Major Hasan cannot receive a fair trial because a branch of government has indirectly declared that Major Hasan is a terrorist — that he is criminally culpable,” the document states. That could lead to a delay of the case or the reversal of a guilty verdict on appeal, it continued.

    “This laudable sentiment mistakenly and unwillingly supplants the criminal trial process by infusing official, formal statutory conclusions about the motive, intent and culpability of the man charged with the crime,” the memo reads.

    It would make it “harder to convict Hasan”? How is that? The article continues that the prosecutors will tell the jury that Hasan yelled “Allah Akbar” while he shot unarmed people. Before the shootings, he was in communication with Anwar al-Awlaki, someone that the US government determined was a terrorist threat to the US and sent him a catered Hellfire lunch. I don’t see how it could be hard to convict Hasan of being a terrorist, since what he did is terrorism. From U.S. Code Title 22, Ch.38, Para. 2656f(d); the term “terrorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.

    I’m no lawyer, but some of you are. Maybe you can explain it to the rest of us.

  • Army won’t award Purple Hearts to Fort Hood victims

    ROS sends a link from Reuters in which the Army explains why it won’t award the Purple Heart, a medal traditionally given to soldiers and Marines wounded in combat, to the victims of jihadist Nidal Hasan on Fort Hood more than three years ago;

    The Army in a position paper said that awarding the medal to those wounded and posthumously to those killed in the November 2009 attack would ‘set the stage for a formal declaration that Major Hasan is a terrorist’ because the medal is presented to military members who are ‘wounded or killed in any action against an enemy of the United States.’

    “U.S. military personnel are organized, trained and equipped to combat foreign, not domestic, forces or threats,” the Army wrote. “To expand the Purple Heart award criteria to include domestic criminal acts or domestic terror attacks would be a dramatic departure from the traditional Purple Heart award criteria.”

    In other words, they’re sticking to the administration’s contention that Hasan’s brutal attack on soldiers preparing for their deployment to combat is nothing more than workplace violence. His motivations were influenced by a terrorist in Yemen who urged him to fight a jihad against his fellow soldiers. His intentions were to disrupt their deployment to the war. Hasan attacked unarmed soldiers intending to create terror in the community. The war came home, and politicians are trying to cover up that fact with twisted and mangled words. And Big Army falls in line.