Category: Big Army

The Army Times headlines an article “SMA defends 1SGT’s actions that earned her an ARCOM” about outgoing Sergeant Major of the Army Ray Chandler’s comments on 1SG Katrina Moerk’s Army Commendation Medal for trolling the internet and reporting other trolls to the Pentagon;

“When we raise our hand and become Soldiers, we accept many responsibilities. One of them is to uphold the high standards that the American people expect of us — and that’s 24/7,” Chandler said. “When we say or do things that bring discredit to the Army, even when we are out of uniform or doing it online, we’ve failed in those responsibilities and that undermines the trust that the American people and our elected leaders have in all of us.”

Yeah, he doesn’t really address the controversy at all, he just tells folks to behave on the internet. I haven’t heard anyone in Big Army talk about how she took her complaints to the Pentagon. She just didn’t get the trolls in trouble, she got fellow NCOs and some commanders in trouble when she complained that unit training for sexual harassment was beneath her standards. You know, instead of confronting the units with her evidence, her fellow first sergeants. She just went right over everyone’s heads.

You’d think that the Sergeant Major of the Army would want to remind everyone about using the “chain of support” before they use the “chain of command” to correct discipline problems. Sergeants’ business should remain among sergeants.

Bloomberg News says that the Department of Defense is asking for 20% less in funding for our adventures worldwide, ostensibly because our presence in Afghanistan will be reduced;

While the decline in war funding largely reflects the continued withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan — from the 10,600 now there to half that planned by year-end — it remains enough to draw questions about why the Defense Department shouldn’t pay to fight wars as part of its basic mission.

“The continuing drawdown in Afghanistan is not having a proportionate effect on” the war budget because it’s “being used for a lot of things other than Afghanistan,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

“It’s a budgetary shell game for getting around” the caps imposed by the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, Harrison said in an email.

You know what would really reduce our funding for wars around the world? If we fought our wars to a successful conclusion, well, that would help immensely. It would probably cost less if we went to war with an eye on killing the enemy and breaking his stuff rather than fighting a conflict within the parameters of some ideal about being the nicest army on the battlefield.

We should probably get over the thing that by unilaterally declaring victory before the war is won, the war has ended. Iraq should be a glaring example of that fallacy, but apparently, it’s not.

Dave sends us a link to Military.com which reports that the Army is looking into an MOS-specific physical training test; in other words, a PT test for an infantryman would be different from that of a truck driver, you know because a truck driver’s job isn’t as physically intensive as an infantryman. Jessica Lynch can fill you in on the details of that particular theory;

[Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond] Odierno said he saw a recommendation for a new PFT when he first became chief, but it was “inadequate.”

So he directed training officials to begin looking at qualifications for every MOS. The data collected from the effort will “help us to understand physiologically when we go to war, what are the requirements that we have to have for somebody to be able to do their job under stressful conditions.”

Sgt. Major of the Army Raymond Chandler III said the effort will help the Army be sure it has the right people in the right jobs.

“Can you do the physical tasks associated with your MOS?” Chandler said. “If not, let’s see if there is another place where we can help you continue to serve but maybe not in the same MOS.”

The Army is also looking at standards female soldiers will have to meet if they want to serve in combat-arms units. All of the services have until 2016 to come up with a plan to meet the Pentagon directive.

We all know, as in the last war, folks find themselves in situations in which they weren’t trained to respond, Jessica Lynch’s firefight and capture by Iraqis is but one example. I guess this is one way the Army plans to get around the folks who argue that women and men have different PT standards so how can women be expected to function in combat arms units to the same standards as men. So the Army gets around it’s promise to not change standards for women by changing everyone’s standards.

Can someone explain to me how this helps the Army kill more of our enemies?

Sorry, that’s just me being subversive again.

Folks have been sending the link to the Army Times article about the dust up of the ARCOM for 1SG Moersk, who trolled folks on a video, apparently. I say “troll” because I’m fairly convinced that is what she did, given my experience with her since I commented on the story earlier. As soon as she saw my post, she emailed it (via Twitter) to Sergeant Major of the Army Ray Chandler as well as the Pentagon’s G-1 and to the chief of the SHARP Program. And then she took the time to call me an “asshat” on Facebook.

Then she went to her blog and accused us of calling her a “whore” (no, we didn’t) and said that we accused her of Stolen Valor (again, no we didn’t). Thanks to the magic of the internet cache here are few paragraphs that she wrote about the TAH post – and me;

So, I did what she did to the soldiers that she trolled – I looked her up on AKO and emailed her. When she answered my email, she cc’d her company commander. The first sergeant said that she didn’t understand why I would assassinate her character (which I didn’t – I couldn’t assassinate that which I couldn’t find).

Then, for some stupid reason, she emailed Bulldog at Guardians of Valor and asked him to influence me to remove the post about her. She said that she had asked me to remove it (she hadn’t) and that I had mumbled something about “freedom of speech” (I didn’t).

The rumor is that her command has instituted a “gag order” forbidding anyone in her unit from speaking about the same thing that the Department of Defense had issued a press release to celebrate. For all I know, that same gag order is instituted through out the Army.

The Lemon Party Triad thought that it was important enough that they sent a link for the blog post to outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel complaining that I complained about an Army Accommodation Medal – whatever that is.

So, I guess it’s time to clarify what my position on the whole thing is; Any NCO who updates any three-star general on their daily activities would look like those North Korean generals covered with ARCOMs. If generals ever knew what any sergeant did moment-by-moment they’d be amazed. I went back and looked at my ARCOMs and realized that the only times I earned any was when a general got to see me work. But, to me, I was doing nothing that I didn’t do every day. So if every First Sergeant in the Army had their own general, they could get ARCOMs out the wazoo.

Given First Sergeant Moersk’s behavior since I published the post, I have to guess that she antagonized the soldiers on the social media website into their bad behavior. I know she tried to goad me into saying things I wouldn’t ordinarily say to a woman. She was purposely obtuse in an attempt to frustrate me. Moersk mischaraterized what I (and you) wrote and since I don’t have a boss, she thought her own boss’ inclusion in our conversation would bully me, and as a last resort, she thought she could get my friends to influence me.

The other day, Hondo wanted to do a follow up to my initial post but I told him that we should just leave her alone – but her own behavior since then has influenced me to write this post. Who knows what she’s telling other people. But, yeah, she lives up to my initial description of her as a “troll”.

The Washington Post has noticed like the rest of us that the Army hasn’t made a public pronouncement on the Bowe Bergdahl case despite the fact that their investigation ended months ago;

The Army in June launched a new investigation into Bergdahl’s disappearance and capture, amid a raft of accusations from his fellow soldiers that he walked away from his unit on the battlefield and questions about whether the Obama administration handled the prisoner swap legally. But six months later there is silence about the probe from all corners.

Army Lt. Col. Alayne Conway, a spokeswoman at Army headquarters, and Army Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman for the Pentagon, both said Monday that they had no updates about the case. Bergdahl’s lawyer, Eugene R. Fidell, declined to comment.

I don’t know what they could be waiting for, the political damage has already been done. We already know that the war against terror is just a touchstone phrase when this administration and this Department of Justice needs something to make themselves feel better. We already know that terrorists count more than the rest of us. We already know that whatever decision the Army makes it will be the one that makes them look good on a particular weekend. We also already know what decision they should be making.

Added: Bergdahl owes those of us who kept our mouths shut for FIVE YEARS. He’s alive today because even though we knew he walked away from his post, we advocated for his safe return. We knew that he wasn’t worth a warm cup of spit, but we wanted him back alive, not the star of a beheading video. He owes us an explanation. He’s alive today because we kept our mouths shut for his well-being. He only had value alive to terrorists as long we didn’t tell what we knew.