Category: Big Army

Fox News reports that Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno says that the Army has no plans to arm recruiters;

Gen. Ray Odierno, chief of staff of the Army, told reporters that arming troops in those offices could cause more problems than it might solve.

“I think we have to be careful about over-arming ourselves, and I’m not talking about where you end up attacking each other,” Odierno said during a morning breakfast. Instead, he said, it’s more about “accidental discharges and everything else that goes along with having weapons that are loaded that causes injuries.”

I’d remind folks that during the “green on blue” attacks against our soldiers, which claimed more than 50 lives, Odierno presided over the policy that forbade some soldiers from having a loaded weapon around the very people who were killing them – Afghans in a combat area. The odds that Odierno would consider arming the people for whom he is responsible is negligible.

The “accidental discharge” excuse is intellectually vacant. He’s just dancing for his bosses who are scared of armed Americans. It’s simply ridiculous to assume that armed soldiers will start playing with their loaded weapons until an accident occurs. I’m sure the soldiers currently under Odierno’s command are heartened by his confidence in them.

Meanwhile in Hiram, Georgia, Americans are filling the gap that Army leadership won’t fill;

“To think the people who are supposed to protect and serve us are unable to protect and serve… protect themselves,” said Tewellow. “So if us, the citizens, who carry permits, are able to help protect them that’s, that’s what we’re gonna be able to do.”

News Radio 106.7’s Nathalie Pozo was at the recruitment center on Friday morning and reported that about 30 people answered the call to arms.

“This is who is fighting for us,” said Tewellow. “This is who is giving us our freedom, who allows us to wake every day and if they’re not here, and is taken down just like the Chattanooga incident, then how can we say that we are going to be able to wake up tomorrow?”

There, does that make you feel better, Ray? Now, people trained to defend themselves and handle their weapons as part of their lifestyle are being protected by random folks off the street with about 8 hours of training.

The same thing happened in Virginia;

At 8 a.m. Friday morning, one man decided to spend his day off standing guard outside of a military recruitment center in Winchester, Virginia.

He is not worried about another attack like Chattanooga here. But he is making a statement.

[…]

“I went into each office, the ones that were open, and I was received with handshakes and thank yous,” he said. “They constantly came by, and not only them, but their wives came by in tears thanking me for just being out here. They baked cookies for me and brought lunch by.”

[…]

“The police already came by and checked me out, cleared my guns, doing their duty,” said the man. “It was all good.”

He says that he never served in the military, but that he felt a need to serve the recruiters.

You might remember that we discussed Colonel Jeffrey Pounding last November when he was looking at a court martial for intentionally exposing a woman to AIDS, adultery and conduct unbecoming an officer. Well, the Army has decided that they’re going to drop the charges against him, according to the Army Times;

[Major General Jeffrey Buchanan, commander of the Military District of Washington] decided to dismiss the charges because of newly discovered evidence in the case and changes to military law based on a recent appellate opinion, Aberle said.

Aberle did not specify the nature or contents of the newly discovered evidence.

“The additional evidence that was discovered is of a sensitive nature and will not be disclosed in order to protect both parties,” she said.

The recent appellate opinion, released Feb. 23 by the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, was for U.S. vs. Gutierrez, a case with similar charges.

Here’s the decision US vs. Gutierrez (.pdf download), which seems to have turned on the term “likely” in regards to the transmission of the disease. It has nothing to do with the conduct or adultery charges, so I guess they were just hoping to get him on the assault charge. But, anyway, Pounding is getting away with conduct unbecoming an officer.

The Associated Press reports that Major Mathew Golsteyn was told by a panel of senior officers after a six-day hearing at Fort Bragg, NC that he should accept their offer of a honorable discharge for “conduct unbecoming an officer”.

Army Special Forces Command spokeswoman Maj. Allison Aguilar said Monday that if the decision is upheld by a review board Golsteyn would be discharged under honorable conditions allowing him to keep nearly all veteran’s benefits.

Golsteyn’s Colorado-based defense lawyer, Phillip Stackhouse, said the panel didn’t describe which conduct it found unbecoming an officer.

“Therefore, I can’t tell you what they found,” Stackhouse said in an email.

The story is that Golsteyn once took a lie-detector test with some CIA dudes during which he admitted that he had murdered a suspected Taliban bomb-maker. The Army has conducted an investigation and could find nothing beyond his admission that they could use at a trial, so they took an administrative action instead and removed from his records his Special Forces tab and his Silver Star medal which was being considered for an upgrade to the Distinguished Service Cross.

Iraq and Afghanistan Marine Corps veteran, Congressman Duncan Hunter has taken up Golsteyn’s cause and claims that he won’t stop until Golsteyn’s honors are restored and his Silver Star is upgraded to the DSC;

“Bottom line, the Army’s effort to discredit Matt began well before his Board was even organized, as evidenced by the Secretary’s actions to strip his valor awards in order to imply some sort of guilt. His valor awards are still owed to him,” said Hunter, a San Diego Republican and former Marine officer.

An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Ben Garrett, declined comment.

The Washington Post writes once again about the politics behind valor awards and the Army system for those awards. This article focuses on Sergeant First Class Earl D. Plumlee the hero of Forward Operating Base Ghazni nearly two years ago. The Post recounts the events of the day;

A narrative of Plumlee’s actions provided to The Post credits him with rushing to the site of the car bomb blast near the base’s airfield in an unarmored pickup truck. The vehicle took repeated enemy fire, including a 30mm grenade that hit the vehicle’s front passenger-side headlight, but didn’t explode.

Plumlee left the vehicle, but wasn’t immediately able to get his 7.62mm assault rifle to work. He drew a pistol and fired at several insurgents, and killed one of them with a hand grenade, prompting the suicide vest he was wearing to explode. As he continued to fire, suicide vests on two more insurgents also detonated, the narrative said.

Under withering enemy fire, Plumlee provided suppressing fire to allow other Americans to take cover, and then reloaded his weapon while shielded by an electrical box, the narrative said. He opened fire on two more insurgents, causing a third enemy suicide vest to detonate and pepper him and another Green Beret with fragmentation from the grenade.

[…]

Plumlee braved enemy fire immediately afterward and applied tourniquets, the narrative said. He then directed a civilian and a U.S. soldier nearby to drive the wounded to a surgical team on base. Plumlee and three other coalition troops proceed to sweep the area to make sure it was clear of additional enemy fighters.

For all of that, the following month, Plumlee was nominated for the Medal of Honor as the paperwork wended it’s way through the system, the MOH looked inevitable. Stars fell on the recommendation – nearly every senior commander signed off on the award as it sailed through the halls of the pentagon. Then in March last year, Army HRC wienies abruptly recommended that it be downgraded to a Silver Star and that is what Army Secretary McHugh signed. The reason?

It seems that Plumlee had been given a rifle scope as a gift from a contractor that he tried to sell. Army investigators thought that Plumlee was selling military sensitive equipment. It was determined that the scope was not sensitive equipment and Plumlee was cleared, but he was warned in writing and that’s what sunk his Medal of Honor recommendation. Nothing. Nothing but a bunch of petty wienies.

Our reader “Ohio” sends us a link to Fox News which reports that the new Operational Camouflage Pattern uniforms have finally been approved for wear by soldiers beginning July 1 when they appear at your local clothing sales stores.

“It’s important to the Army, and the reason it is important to the Army is because it is all about force protection,” [Col. Bob Mortlock, the head of the Army’s Project Manager Soldier Protection and Individual Equipment] said. “In the close fight, soldiers rely on camouflage to provide concealment, and that is critically important to their mission effectiveness.”

Army units are scheduled to receive an All Army Activities, or ALARACT, message today that lays out the service’s plans to transition from the current Army Combat Uniform in the digital Universal Camouflage Pattern to the updated ACU in the new Operational Camouflage Pattern.

[…]

When pressed to describe the visual differences between the two patterns, Mortlock would say only that OCP “has been optimized for performance across all the military operating environments that the Army may face. It has also been optimized for night-time operations.”

As far as the “visual, daytime characteristics, I’m not going to get into at this time,” he said.

Mortlock did provide some background on the development of OCP, which was formerly known as Scorpion W2.

Yeah, good job, Army, you were able to spend billions of dollars and come up with a new collar for the old MultiCams. That’s being frugal. I’m sure something will be wrong with the new design that they’ll discover as it rolls out to the troops and require more research to keep the field grades employed.

I guess it really doesn’t matter that after ten minutes in the mud and dust, all camouflage patterns look the same – what’s important is that everyone looks like a life-taker in garrison, isn’t it? I’m sure that the Operational Camouflage Pattern looks fabulous in the maternity version.

I’ve heard from separate, unrelated sources that none of the eight remaining female Ranger students currently in the course will be advancing to the Mountain Phase. If you follow this blog, you’ll know that I’ve been pulling for at least one female graduate in order to save the course standard from the social engineers.

The fact that there will be female Rangers is not in dispute, Big Army has made up their mind – all of the preparation work that the female students got prior to the beginning of this particular class is proof of that.

I’m hearing that none of the women students had a “go” on either of their patrols and some of them dropped. There may be some recycled students.

I’m sure the social engineers will be celebrating when this news hits the wires. Of course, they’ll have their angry faces on in front of the cameras, but their inner children will be jumping for joy. I’ve already seen them on Facebook asking why the standard should be so high.

Bobo sends us a link to the Washington Post in which they report that Army seems confused about how cadets ended up in high heels;

A spokesman for U.S. Army Cadet Command, Lt. Col. Paul Haverstick, said ROTC units across the country were directed to participate in Sexual Assault Awareness Month events on their campuses “to help stamp out sexual assault on the campuses where they have a presence.” But Maj. Gen. Peggy C. Combs, the cadets’ commanding general, did not direct how the units would do so, and had other events as options, Haverstick said.

“After receiving some comments about uniforms, we are currently reviewing how local universities implemented their participation in these events designed to raise awareness on the issue of sexual assault,” Haverstick said in an e-mail.

Who would have thought that professors of military science would take guidance from their commander so literally, huh?

I intentionally avoided the Arizona aspect of the story because it wasn’t clear – a single complainer posting an anonymous message to Reddit is not a reason to go off half-cocked. The fact that there was actual photographic proof from Temple made that part of the story easier.

But now the folks in Arizona are saying that they weren’t encouraged to wear their uniforms and that no one did that. This video supports that – everyone in the video wearing their ACUs is not wearing red high heels, but rather their boots;

Of course, this comes as no surprise to denizens of this blog, but the USAToday reports that an Army survey that polled active duty soldiers found a majority of them were dissatisfied with the prospect of their future service in the military. I’d warn pollsters, first of all, that most soldiers are always dissatisfied with their service, especially when they’re sitting around in garrison. There’s an old sergeant’s saying that “If they’re not bitching, the troops aren’t happy”. But from USAToday;

— Forty-eight percent or about 370,000 soldiers showed a lack of commitment to their job or would have chosen another if they had it to do over again. Only 28% felt good about what they do.

— About 300,000 soldiers or nearly 40% didn’t trust their immediate supervisor or fellow soldiers in their unit or didn’t feel respected or valued. Thirty-two percent felt good about about bosses and peers.

— In one positive trend, more than 400,000 soldiers or 53% said they were satisfied or extremely satisfied with their marriage, personal relationship or family. About 240,000 expressed dissatisfaction.

— For physical fitness, nearly 40% were in good shape, 28% were borderline, and 33% did poorly.

I’d say that there are other things at work here, things like the service chiefs and senior sergeants testifying to Congress that the troops are looking forward to lower pay, that cuts to benefits would improve their combat effectiveness. These are the guys that the troops depend upon to fight for them in the halls of Congress, and clearly those people aren’t representing the troops well.

In addition, the service chiefs are trying to disarm the troops by taking away their most effective weapons systems – like the A-10 Warthog – while scraping and bowing before their political masters, completely ignoring the needs of the troops.

Those same service chiefs are forcing useless social programs down the troops’ throats which waste valuable training time for trigger pullers and don’t make the force any stronger or better at their jobs.

Another factor is that the troops don’t believe that Americans support the job that they do – withdrawing from the war on terror before the job was done was popular among civilians in the later years of the war, and everything that the troops accomplished was lost in the last year or so, requiring them to reinsert their expertise into the same war again, even though that war has a different name now.

While the politicians are more than willing to take away the troops’ resources and their compensation, the rest of the government agencies are growing in leaps and bounds, social benefit programs are outpacing the military’s training resources. The White House calls for more cuts to the military while expanding programs in other directions – like free community college for everyone.

So do they really need to poll anyone to get these results? Wouldn’t that $300 million dollars be better spent elsewhere?

Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.