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

Category: Big Army

  • “Experts” want to restrict troops’ guns

    The Stars & Stripes reports that self-proclaimed “experts” are recommending to the military that they restrict troops’ access to private firearms in order to prevent suicide. But, I question their so-called research.

    For example, they say that, because of restrictive firearms laws in New York State, Fort Drum’s suicide rate is low. Well, that’s not exactly true – New York laws do indeed restrict handguns, but not long guns. I bought a number of long guns while I was at Drum, because the culture of fort Drum revolved around hunting. Just about everyone I knew had a rifle or two. Yes, suicide with a long gun is more difficult, but if the decision to commit suicide is a spur of the moment thing, like these experts say it is, any tool will work. They can’t have it both ways.

    “If you’re in a house with a gun, there’s a lot more of a chance you’re going to die,” he said.

    Living in a home with a gun increases the suicide death risk two- to 10-fold, Miller said.

    Firearms were used in 68 percent of Army suicides in 2010, according to an Army Health and Violence report released this year. Most often, soldiers shot themselves to death at home or in the barracks.

    Yeah, well, one of the “experts” who gets consulted for this article is our buddy Dr. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie and in a post I wrote last month on her “research”, she stated that less than half of the guns used in suicide attempts were privately owned. That means that more than half of the guns used in suicides in the military were service weapons. So do they intend to restrict soldiers’ access to their assigned service weapons?

    The “experts” say that the hard answer to reducing suicides is identification and treatment of soldiers who are at risk. So I guess that taking away their guns is the easy answer – and probably the one that Big Army is considering.

    While I agree that commanders should be able to restrict access to guns to people who seem to be at risk for suicide, to discuss a blanket policy that would affect the entire force is ridiculous and overbearing. But then, Big Army has never, ever punished the entire force for the actions of the few, have they?

  • Appeals Court allows Hasan to keep his beard, tosses judge

    Yes, the Associated Press reports that in yet another bow to political correctness, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces has decided that Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood gunman can keep his beard for his trial in contradiction to Army policy and despite the fact that the Army is paying the little turd. But, that wasn’t enough. They also tossed the judge who issued the order that he shave off of the bench;

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces ruled that Col. Gregory Gross didn’t appear impartial while presiding over the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who faces the death penalty if convicted in the 2009 shootings on the Texas Army post that killed 13 people and wounded more than two dozen others.

    But the court said it was not ruling on whether the judge’s order violated Hasan’s religious rights. Hasan has argued that his beard is a requirement of his Muslim faith, although facial hair violates Army regulations.

    “Should the next military judge find it necessary to address (Hasan’s) beard, such issues should be addressed and litigated anew,” judges wrote in the ruling.

    What a bunch of gutless turds. This beard thing could go on for decades with such cowardly crap being handed down by this appeals court. They also determined that Judge Gross had allowed the trial to become a war of wills between the judge and Hasan, for some stupid reason, because the judge made the defense attorneys clean up after their client when he found an adult diaper and a medical waste bag in the courtroom.

    This is the same kind of shit that led to the shooting in the first place. Big Army is scared to treat Hasan like they’d treat anyone else who was such a prick in their courtroom.

    Thanks to cakmakli, Athena, contin, Stacy0311 and Derek, for the link.

  • DoD to expand spy operations

    The Washington Post reports that the Pentagon is going into the spy game by expanding their Defense Intelligence Agency ranks;

    When the expansion is complete, the DIA is expected to have as many as 1,600 “collectors” in positions around the world, an unprecedented total for an agency whose presence abroad numbered in the triple digits in recent years.

    The total includes military attachés and others who do not work undercover. But U.S. officials said the growth will be driven over a five-year period by the deployment of a new generation of clandestine operatives. They will be trained by the CIA and often work with the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, but they will get their spying assignments from the Department of Defense.

    Among the Pentagon’s top intelligence priorities, officials said, are Islamist militant groups in Africa, weapons transfers by North Korea and Iran, and military modernization underway in China.

    Just what we need – another gigantic spy agency that won’t share information with other agencies. And while Congress has it’s heart set on slashing traditional military capabilities, let’s just throw the scarce money at something completely redundant.

    Unlike the CIA, the Pentagon’s spy agency is not authorized to conduct covert operations that go beyond intelligence gathering, such as drone strikes, political sabotage or arming militants.

    But the DIA has long played a major role in assessing and identifying targets for the U.S. military, which in recent years has assembled a constellation of drone bases stretching from Afghanistan to East Africa.

    Now, I’m no expert, but since the DIA will be trained and equipped by the CIA, why not just expand the CIA instead and force that agency to be more responsive to DoD’s needs? This is obviously an attempt to change DoD into something it isn’t. It’s supposed to break stuff and kill bad guys on a large scale, but this administration is making it into something akin to a Department of Peace.

    And, oh, I expect to see more fakes adding DIA operative to their phony narratives.

  • Female soldiers not flocking to combat jobs at Carson

    The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that the Army opened up some combat-related jobs and there were few takers. out of the 343 women who were eligible, only 53 elected to take the Army upon it.

    The Fort Carson pilot project allowed women to request a transfer into four jobs previously off-limits to them, including tank, artillery and Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicle maintenance. A fourth job allowed women to be radar operators subject to enemy fire.

    “I think maybe initially, there’s just a general hesitation to jump in with both feet into uncharted territory, which is sort of basic human nature,” said Greg Jacob, policy director at Service Women’s Action Network, a New York-based organization aimed at equal rights for women in the military.

    Opponents of the ban say 238,000 women were barred from positions across the armed forces, blocking them from promotions and other advancements open to men in combat.

    Yeah, I’ve always thought that it was all a bunch of hype that women are not happy with their career opportunities in the military. It was just like removing the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy – it was more about the acceptance than restrictions. 1-in-5 is actually quite a few females who took this opportunity. Being assigned to an infantry unit, even though you’re a mechanic, is lot different than being in a support battalion, and not attractive to many people, including male mechanics.

    As far as the “blocking them from promotions” argument goes, I had two cadets who were excellent, one woman who went into the Transportation Corps and another man who went into the Engineers. Both received a “5”, the highest grade, in Advanced Camp after their Junior year. They were both commissioned the same year and they both made Lieutenant Colonel in the same year. So I don’t know what these people are talking about.

  • Army adapts to spending cuts in the middle of a war

    Greg Jaffe at the Washington Post writes about the challenges the Army faces as they prepare to cut spending while they’re still fighting a war and this administration prepares to balance the budget on the back of our national security. While SMA Raymond Chandler is focused on the important issues, like tattoos and uniformity, the generals have an untenable wishlist;

    “I want an Army that is capable of many missions at many speeds, many sizes, under many different conditions,” Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the Army’s chief of staff, said in a speech this month.

    In recent months, the Army has announced a new plan to focus individual combat brigades and divisions on specific regions of the world, such as Asia, Africa or Europe. Soldiers in these units will receive special cultural and language training and could be dispatched on training missions to work with developing armies.

    Some Army officers, however, worry that Odierno’s pronouncements and the regional plans are too vague. “What bugs me is being stuck in an institution that doesn’t know where it is going,” said one senior Army officer at the Pentagon.

    While I agree that it would certainly be nice to have units dedicated to certain parts of the world, a six-year-old can understand that troop cuts and slashed spending make that a dream. We spent the eighties preparing to fight the Soviets in the Fulda Gap, but we ended up fighting the Iraqis in the waddies of Al Busayyah. Mostly, our training focused on basic soldiering, and that’s what won the day. The war turned out to be a very long Table VIII exercise at Grafenwoer without the trees.

    In the nineties, the Army tried to focus on “meals on wheels” training, to conform to that president’s vision of what the military should be used for, that resulted in depleted war-fighting skills, and depleted war-fighting stocks. I remember reading that MP units in Fort Hood couldn’t accomplish their semi-annual weapons qualification because there was no ammo. That’s indicative of a military that lost it’s focus. When the Army had to convert to door-kickers, they discovered that handing out MREs to civilians wasn’t good preparation for the MOUT operations in Iraq.

    An internal Army survey conducted in December 2011 found that only 26 percent of Army leaders believed that the Army was “headed in the right direction to prepare for the challenges of the next 10 years,” down from 38 percent in 2006.

    That will deplete the Army’s greatest resource and the greatest benefit of a decade at war – combat-experienced leaders. Many of our Vietnam veterans were gone by the time we went to Desert Storm and the ones who were left were an embarrassment to the profession. Retention should be the main goal of senior leadership, but the Pentagon’s plans to erode the reasons soldiers continue to soldier won’t help them maintain the level of expertise they need to face our next challenge.

    But, yeah, let’s throw people out for their tattoos and worry that everyone is the same uniform, because that doesn’t demoralize the force at all. In the article, some leaders are pleased that they don’t have to deal with substance abuse among the ranks like they did after Vietnam, but they seem bound and determined to create a substance abuse problem, because they know how to deal with that.

    I left the military, along with a bunch of my peers, because it was obvious to me that the Clinton Administration was engaged in dismantling the Army that we’d spent our young lives rebuilding since the Vietnam War. And the chance that will happen again is the greatest threat to our military and our national security.

    If I was going to focus on an area of the world where we’re most likely to fight the next war, I’d make the obvious choice. Iran has been at war against us for the last thirty years, but apparently we’re too naive to recognize that simple and obvious fact. A rational argument could be made that we should have done to Iran what we did to Iraq instead.

    Just because the politicians never learn from the past lessons of the post-war periods and plan on savings from national security expenditures, doesn’t mean that the military has to learn those tough lessons all over again. And those tough lessons are always paid for by the next group of military members who pay the price with their blood.

  • L’affair Petraeus widens

    Ya know, I’m not a big conspiracy guy, but there’s some really weird stuff going on. Tman sends us a link to Associated Press that says that somehow General John Allen, Petraeus’ replacement in Afghanistan, is involved in this whole Petraeus/Broadwell scandal;

    In a new twist to the Gen. David Petraeus sex scandal, the Pentagon said Tuesday that the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, is under investigation for alleged “inappropriate communications” with a woman who is said to have received threatening emails from Paula Broadwell, the woman with whom Petraeus had an extramarital affair.

    Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a written statement issued to reporters aboard his aircraft, en route from Honolulu to Perth, Australia, that the FBI referred the matter to the Pentagon on Sunday.

    Panetta said that he ordered a Pentagon investigation of Allen on Monday.

    And while that’s going on, The Blaze, in a link sent to us by Stu, reports that the FBI was searching Broadwell’s house last night;

    A spokeswoman for the FBI has confirmed agents went to Broadwell’s home in Charlotte on Monday night. However, FBI spokeswoman Shelley Lynch declined to say what the agents were doing there.

    FBI agents appeared at Broadwell’s home carrying the kinds of cardboard boxes often used for evidence gathering during a search.

    Obviously, the government is more concerned with investigating this illicit affair than they are interested in investigating the four deaths at the Benghazi consulate. Already, in four days, we know more about this affair than we know what happened in Benghazi over two months ago. And if it’s not related to Benghazi, at the very least, it was manufactured to distract us from the Benghazi investigation.

    Given the number of senior military officers who have fallen to scandal in the last several months, I think we need to clean house at the Pentagon. Or maybe flag officers needs a sensitivity class on how to conduct themselves, or at the very least a nice little semi-annual power point presentation on things NOT to do while in their offices.

  • Jimmy Carter’s second term

    To say that I’m disappointed in the results of the election is probably a bit of an understatement. What is most disappointing is to see my “friends” on Facebook who are veterans celebrating a second term of the President. I can’t figure out what they’re celebrating about. Retirees in five western states are being forced out of Tricare Prime and into Tricare Standard which means that, unless they live near a military treatment facility, their healthcare are going to skyrocket. What’s to celebrate?

    And I put the blame for this loss of veterans squarely on the shoulders of the Romney team. When I brought the above subject up to John Noonan, Romney’s defense advisor, he responded that he hadn’t heard the Obama camp mention it in the campaign – so I guess he thought it wasn’t going to happen. It’s going to happen in April, whether Noonan has heard about it or not. A moment’s Google would tell him that.

    The Obama Administration has raided our healthcare premiums to pay for other defense projects. If a corporation had done that to it’s retirees, the Obama Administration would be crawling up their ass with a microscope.

    And what about the most egregious decision of the Afghan war? The one that forbade US troops from having loaded weapons when they were in the company of our “allies” just to make them think that we trusted them. That bit of brilliance cost us more than 50 young lives this year before they finally reversed the decision this summer. And let’s not forget that this Defense Department ignored a report last year that predicted an increase in “insider” attacks this year.

    While we’re talking about the war, how about the overall strategy – what is the overall strategy if it’s not solely to withdraw? It’s a rush for the exits and a dependency on drones. The lowest infantryman understands that an Army doesn’t control anything that doesn’t have a soldier standing on it. Air attacks from several thousand feet above the battlefield doesn’t win anything, and this administration was unwilling, for purely political reasons, to put the number of boots in Afghanistan that a winning strategy required.

    But the troops are coming home. If Desert Storm taught us anything, it was that if you don’t complete the mission, you’re going to end up fighting the war all over again.

    While we’re at it, let’s talk about the Veterans’ Affairs Department which has squandered it’s increased funding. the rolls of veterans awaiting a decision on their claims for service-connected relief has grown despite the promises of the Department. They promised to end homelessness among veterans and they’re not really any closer than they were when they assumed office. Veterans are loosing money everyday when ever a college term begins because the VA can’t pay them in a timely manner.

    All of that without even mentioning sequestration, which the Obama Administration claims won’t happen. I’m not sure how they think it won’t happen because it’s a law.

    And then to top it all off, folks in Afghanistan wrote yesterday to tell us that TAH has been blocked in Regional Command (South) because we’re “extremist”. I guess it’s extremist to point out the things that no one else will, the failings of the Big Army leadership. The fact that the Defense Department is screwing over veterans and the troops and blaming them for the failures of their own leadership.

    So yeah, your guy won, but who is going to pay for your jubilant celebration? It’s not American Idol or a sports contest. There is a real cost to real people out here in the real world.

  • Hasan’s victims sue government

    Today is the third anniversary of Nidal Hasan’s attack on a processing center at Fort Hood, TX. Three years later, the victims are still waiting for a little justice while the military appeals system decides whether they’re going to try a bearded or clean-shaven Hasan who seems to be mocking our justice system.

    According to Stars & Stripes, the 148 victims have come together to sue the government as well as the estate of Anwar al-Awlaki who inspired Hasan to commit the act;

    The lawsuit alleging negligence by the government said that the Defense Department is avoiding legal and financial responsibility for the killings by referring to the shootings as “workplace violence” rather than as a terrorist attack.

    They claim that the government knew four years before the attack that Hasan was a radical Islamist from his thesis which had nothing to do with Psychiatry but everything to do with radical Islam.

    Staff Sgt. Shawn N. Manning, who was shot six times by Hasan, said that the terrorism designation which the victims are seeking would cover the cost of the medical services that he requires. The terrorism designation would mean that the wounds the victims suffered qualify as combat-related, resulting in “a huge difference in benefits,” said Manning, who was medically discharged from the military about a month ago.

    While I agree with them completely, I don’t see anything coming of the lawsuit, the government and the judicial syatem aren’t very good at admitting their mistakes. But maybe all of that will change tomorrow, or January 20.