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

Category: Big Army

  • Pentagon suspected al-Qaeda links in Benghazi

    Rowan Scarborough writes in the Washington Times that military intelligence folks at the Pentagon were spreading the word there that it was al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia which had staged the September 11th attack on the Benghazi consulate, despite White House assertion to the contrary.

    A source familiar with intelligence reporting told The Washington Times that the Libyan militant group Ansar al-Sharia was singled out as the likely principal planner and executor of the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11.

    U.S. Special Operations Command quickly dispatched its troops to the region, but not into Libya directly, to stand by in case Ansar al-Sharia launched more attacks on Americans or took hostages.

    The early assessment that Ansar al-Sharia likely carried out the attack is at odds with the Obama administration’s repeated claims in the days after the bloodshed that the raid was a spontaneous protest against a video clip of a U.S.-produced movie that disparages Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

    It’s good that someone in the Pentagon pays attention to their own intelligence and ignores the White House BS political yapping about videos and the shortage of ice cream cones in Libya being the reason for the deaths of four Americans.

  • Your weekly Hasan beard update

    Hey, as long as Big Army wants to kowtow to Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer, I’ll continue to highlight their pretend concern about Muslim sensibilities. But, the appeals court in Fort Belvoir, VA has agreed to hear his lawyers’ protests about him being forced to shave, according to the Associated Press;

    A military appeals court wants to hear oral arguments before deciding if the Army psychiatrist charged in the Fort Hood shooting rampage can be forcibly shaved before his murder trial.

    Fort Hood released the decision late Tuesday from the Army Court of Criminal Appeals.

    Maj. Nidal Hasan says he grew a beard because his Muslim faith requires it, despite the Army’s ban on beards.

    Yeah, he grew the beard because he knew it would make Big Army look like clowns while they succumbed to the whims of their politically correct angels. The appeals court should have just refused to hear the case while holding up a copy of the AR 670-1 (Uniforms and Insignia Wear and Appearance of Army Uniforms and Insignia) instead of going through the motions of pretending to protect Hasan’s rights to be a cry-baby. Let’s hurry up and hang this turd.

  • Army “stands down” for suicide training

    I just got my letter from Army Chief of Staff General Odierno announcing that the Army is “standing down” world wide today for suicide prevention training. Associated Press reports;

    “The Army has decided that this issue is so important to us that we’re going to devote an entire day … that was otherwise devoted to something else and say `That’s not as important as this,”‘ the Army’s top enlisted man, Sgt. Maj. Raymond Chandler, told a news conference Wednesday.

    The Army is the largest of the services, it has the highest number of suicides, and it is the only branch planning the special training Thursday.

    For the first seven months of 2012, the Army recorded 116 suicides among active-duty soldiers, officials reported last month. If that pace were maintained through December, the year’s total would approach 200, compared with 167 total in 2011.

    There are a couple of excellent stories in the video “Shoulder to shoulder” that’s been linked in my sidebar for several weeks about soldiers who saved their buddies from suicide. I won’t claim to have a silver bullet cure for the rash of suicides this year, but I do know that one path to a cure is saying something to your friends whether you’re thinking about it or if you spot someone who might be thinking about it.

    I know that I’ve intervened a few times when I read a comment on the blog that seemed like a warning signal. There’s no one at VA or DoD who is going to look out for us like we do for each other. I feel the loss when I read about soldiers who took their own lives, whether I know them or not, and I’m sure that each of you feels the same way.

    It’s time to nip this suicide thing in the bud, and we’re all up to the task at hand. Dakota Meyer talks about his thoughts about succumbing to the demons;

  • Col. (Ch) Crews: Toleration doesn’t cut both ways

    Colonel (Chaplain) Ron Crews writes in the Washington Times that which will surprise no one at this blog. That since the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, the tolerance that gays demanded from the military is not being afforded to to their ideological opponents. Crews recites a litany of examples of intolerance of people, including chaplains, who oppose homosexuality on the basis of faith;

    Senior military officials have allowed personnel in favor of repeal to speak to media while those who have concerns have been ordered to be silent. Two airmen were publicly harassed in a Post Exchange food court as they were privately discussing their concerns about the impact of repeal. A chaplain was encouraged by military officials to resign his commission unless he could “get in line with the new policy,” demonstrating no tolerance for that chaplain’s religious viewpoint. Another chaplain was threatened with early retirement, and then reassigned to be more “closely supervised” because he had expressed concerns with the policy change, again demonstrating no tolerance for that chaplain’s religious viewpoint.

    Crews concludes, in regards to the recent report that life since the repeal is all rainbows and unicorns for everyone in the military;

    Obviously, the recent “study” (aka propaganda) claiming that the repeal went off without a hitch should be shredded post-haste. It has no connection to reality.

    Colonel Crews continues that chaplains are working with Congress to protect chaplains’ freedom of conscience. That it even needs to be done is a sorry statement on the whole process.

  • Officers and weird sex

    Old Trooper sends us a link to the story of an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel at CentCom who was arrested in Florida for enticing a teenage boy into a sexual relationship.

    The teen’s parents had alerted the FBI office in Maitland, near Orlando, to Facebook sex chats their son had been having with [Air Force Lt. Col. Stephen Michael Governale, 49], and provided the agency with copies of some of those messages, according to federal court records. The FBI then interviewed the boy.

    Apparently, the FBI persuaded the parents and the teen into trapping the perv into an explicit conversation on Facebook which led to his arrest after two encounters with the youngster over a two year period.

    Mr Wolf and Chief Tango send us a link to an Associated Press story about an 82d Airborne Division general who is being sent back to Fort Bragg from Afghanistan under arrest for forcibly committing sodomy;

    The Fayetteville Observer reported Wednesday that Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair faces possible courts martial on charges that include forced sex, possessing pornography and alcohol while deployed, engaging in inappropriate relationships and misusing a government travel charge card.

    From The Fayetteville Observer;

    Other charges are possessing alcohol and pornography while deployed, maltreatment of subordinates, filing fraudulent claims, engaging in conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman and engaging in conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline, or of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces.

    So while the command structure is busy forcing the troops to sit through endless training to preach about sexual misconduct, maybe the officers need it more than the troops judging from the cases we’ve witnessed recently on these pages.

  • DoD policy on “No Easy Day”

    Country Singer sends us the Memorandum for Official DoD Guidance Concerning the Book, “No Easy Day”. just like I said they would do when I wrote the review, they’re calling unspecific parts of the book “classified” and “sensitive unclassified” and forbidding DoD folks from discussing the book in public.

    So, this is for your information. We don’t want anyone getting in trouble, no matter how stupid the policy sounds.

  • You folks are so GQ

    Army.mil says that Gentleman’s Quarterly is impressed with your sense of style, or rather the sense of style at Natick Labs that outfits you. So, then, why is the Army trying to stealing Marpats?

    In an article entitled “Natick, Massachusetts: America’s Fashion Capital,” the venerable men’s fashion and style magazine states its case for the home of everything U.S. service members wear.

    “If America has made any lasting contribution to men’s style, its (sic) utility: functional clothing,” GQ wrote in a story posted to its website, Sept. 18. “And no one issues a louder clarion call for ‘function’ than the five-pointed Department of Defense.”

    From GQ:

    From that brassy, hierarchical order of military men and women, we’ve inherited the combat boot, the fatigue shirt, the camouflage print and the campaign desk–all items worthy of veneration. We also got the T-shirt, popularized after the Spanish American War (1898).

    The Army.mil article says;

    Annette LaFleur, team leader of the Design, Pattern & Prototype Team at Natick, Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, said that military clothing should be functional first but also have that ‘cool factor.’

    Yeah, “cool factor” that’s what keeps us in uniform.

    I’ll admit, I wore Multicam shorts everyday this summer, but just because the Army said the rest of y’all couldn’t wear Multicam in CONUS (I have a problem with authority, if you haven’t noticed). I wear some Converse desert combat boots because, for some reason, they’re the only shoes that I can wear without a brace to compensate for my “drop foot” which makes me trip over my toes. I haven’t, however, felt the need to get a Multicam blouse, parka or field jacket. I guess my “cool” threshold is lower than most.

  • Report warning of “insider attacks” ignored by DoD last year

    An article from the Associated Press on a report commissioned by the Pentagon last year which warned of the increasing green-on-blue attacks was not on ignored and pooh-poohed by Big Army, the researcher who wrote the report was cached and the report became classified out of the clear blue sky;

    Bucking the official NATO narrative, [Dr. Jeffrey Bordin] declared bluntly [more than a year and a half ago]: “The murders of ISAF members committed by Afghan National Security Force personnel do not represent ‘rare and isolated events’ as currently being proclaimed.”

    “The findings are not consistent with our assessment” of Afghan forces, then-coalition spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Colette Murphy was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal in June 2011. The study, she added, “was systematically flawed, and suffered from generalizations, narrow sample sets, unprofessional rhetoric, and sensationalism.”

    Bordin said that following the publication of his report, he was removed from his position as leader of a Red Team — a research group formed to find solutions to military shortcomings — and shortly afterward, a decision to renew his contract was rescinded and he had to leave Afghanistan.

    “I was basically persona non-grata,” he said.

    The Wall Street Journal article cited above reports;

    “His role is to paint kind of the worst-case scenario so we can respond accordingly,” said Lt. Col. Chad Carroll, director of public affairs for the coalition military command in eastern Afghanistan. “That’s one data point, and we really believe what he saw there is not indicative of something across the entire spectrum.”

    In the report, Mr. Bordin characterized the shootings of Americans by Afghan troops as “a severe and rapidly metastasizing malignancy.”

    In the five months before the report was circulated in early May, Afghan security forces were responsible for 16% of all hostile coalition deaths in Afghanistan, Mr. Bordin said.

    So, Big Army and CentCom, in the face of this damning research, decided for an entire year and a half to continue the failed policies which was leading to the deaths of American troops inside the security of their bases. Remember it was just a scant few weeks ago that they wrote a policy requiring US troops in a war zone to be armed.

    Even if the Afghans decided to tamp down the background checks of their police and military six months ago, like they claim (and I don’t believe for a minute), it was still a year after the report was released and then shoved in a drawer somewhere, just because it shed a bad light on ISAF’s efforts in Afghanistan and was counter to NATO’s propaganda. So Big Army could bow to it’s political masters. They should all be fired for failing those 57 troops who have been killed since.

    I don’t care how hard he tries, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey, looks weak now when he makes statements about how “seized” he is with the problem, now. You should have been seized with the problem a year ago.