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

Category: Big Pentagon

  • Obama asks Congress to bust spending caps for defense

    The Washington Post reports that in the budget that is being delivered to Congress today from the White House asks for 38 billion dollars more in defense spending than is currently allowed by law. Mostly, the spending is to pay for half-assing the war against terror over the last few years. As a smarter man once said, the enemy gets a vote in deciding when a war ends. Because the last two presidents and the last four Congresses weren’t committed to that war, it continues.

    Defense is one of the few things that the Constitution says that government should be doing for the People, and it’s being done on the cheap and on credit cards. Imagine putting your mortgage and your food bills on credit cards to worry about paying it somewhere down the road while you load up on fancy cars and big screen TVs, too. That’s what is happening to the Federal budget. Instead of doing the necessary things like defense, the government is farting around with healthcare, free cell phones and needless food stamps – things Americans always did for themselves without freebies from Uncle Sugar.

    Meanwhile, liberal Democrats, eager to fend off the Republican critique that excessive domestic spending and government waste have caused the Pentagon’s budget woes, cite the supporters of the 2003 Iraq war as the real problem.

    “These are the same guys who voted for a war in Iraq and forgot how it was going to be paid for,” said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a possible Democratic presidential candidate. “You know how it’s paid for? It’s paid for on the credit card. We don’t know how much it will cost by the time we take care of the last veteran .?.?. $3 trillion or $4 trillion. They weren’t worried about that.”

    I guess that Bernie would rather have Saddam Hussein back in power in Iraq – you know he misses the 90s when Hussein would mass his troops on the Kuwait border and we’d spend billions moving troops to Kuwait to stare at the sand. Or he misses Hussein’s air defenses shooting at US and NATO partners as they protected the Kurds. Maybe he misses al Qaeda building up in northern Iraq. Not to mention the $25,000 bounty he paid to Palestinian suicide bombers’ families in Israel.

    And, oh, yeah, Mr. Sanders, all of that social spending that you’re doing for Obama phones and 3x/day school lunch programs is going on a credit card, too. Of course, Sanders wants to raise taxes on working Americans to pay for all of that, compounding the need for Federal spending on social programs.

    Sanders is as much a coward on cutting social spending as the Republicans. But our national defense can’t keep being the scapegoat for the country’s budget woes. I know this is obvious to my readers, but maybe we have so many problems with our security suddenly because both sides are slashing national defense with reckless abandon.

  • Dempsey sponsors essay contest to honor Saudi king

    Dempsey sponsors essay contest to honor Saudi king

    Here is another Defense.gov presser that I have to warn is NOT the Duffel Blog or any other satire. With everything else going on in the world, General Martin E. Dempsey, the top US military officer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has announced an essay contest to honor the recently deceased Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz;

    The king was a lifetime supporter of his country’s alliance with the United States. Abdullah ruled Saudi Arabia from 2005 to his death, and served as regent of the country from 1995. He is succeeded by King Salman Bin Abdul-Aziz.

    “This is an important opportunity to honor the memory of the king, while also fostering scholarly research on the Arab-Muslim world, and I can think of no better home for such an initiative than [ National Defense University],” Dempsey said in a statement announcing the competition.

    So, you fellows over there in Iraq and Syria, busting caps on those multi-national ISIS fellows, put down your rifles for a few minutes and submit your entry while you reflect on those ties that we share with Saudi Arabia. Maybe you can get that ARCOM you’ve always wanted.

    Sorry, I’m just being subversive again.

  • Hagel: “nonstop war” is forcing good troops to leave services

    Hagel: “nonstop war” is forcing good troops to leave services

    Proving why he was appointed by this White House to be the Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel tells NPR that folks are leaving the service because of constant deployments to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Hagel says that when, in a recent meeting, he spoke with a group of six promising young U.S. military officers, “five out of the six said they were uncertain over whether they were going to stay in the service and most likely would get out.

    “And why? Because of family issues, because of stress and strain,” he tells Inskeep.

    While that might be true in some cases, Hagel might want to look a little deeper into the subject before he talks about it in public. For example, why would the troops want to make those continuous deployments when they understand that the country for which they are fighting has no interest in actually fighting the war to a successful conclusion? Why would they want to remain in the service when they are encouraged to not engage the enemy with all of the ordnance at their disposal? Why would they want to stay in a service that is more interested in social engineering than in fighting wars? Why would they want to stay in the service when everything they do can get them tossed?

    Why would they want to make continuous deployments, make the sacrifices they make to family and health for a Defense Department that places more emphasis on recognizing a first sergeant who trolls social media than the door kickers and life takers in Afghanistan?

    They’re leaving because the people who are supposed to be fighting for their pay and benefits are doing their best to ruin the pay system. So, yeah, Hagel, you should go, but don’t lie about what the troops are facing on this side of the wars. They’d deploy nonstop if they thought that someone was watching their backs at home, but that has not been the case over the past few years.

  • Pentagon to downsize? Ha!

    You probably remember how Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel promised to downsize the headquarters personnel at the Pentagon. Well, here we are two years later and they can’t figure out how to do that, according to the Washington Post;

    [F]ederal auditors reported this week that the Defense Department has not produced a realistic plan to make the cuts — and can’t say how many people it has or needs at its management headquarters.

    In a new report, the Government Accountability Office described an unwieldy personnel system that seems unable to account for the size of military and civilian staffs at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff and the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force secretariats and staffs — all headquarters that ballooned in size after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and have only recently begun to level off.

    Compounding the problem, contractors form a large chunk of these employees, but DOD does not have an accurate handle on how large, auditors found.

    “Without a systematic determination of personnel requirements and periodic reassessment of them, DOD will not be well positioned to proactively identify efficiencies and limit personnel growth within these headquarters organizations,” GAO concluded in a 90-page report released this week.

    They know how to slash the hell out of combat formations, but they can’t figure out to slash that Specialist whose only job is to provide color to the Power Point slides.

    Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.

  • Hagel becomes angel of death for troops’ compensation

    Hagel becomes angel of death for troops’ compensation

    Chuck Hagel, the out-going Secretary of Defense is touring the country to say goodbye to the troops and to tell them that they’re going to get screwed in their wallets soon, according to the Military Times;

    “We cannot sustain the current trajectory that we are on with the current system we have,” Hagel said. “We have opportunity here to make some shifts, some reforms, early on over a period of time, which assures that no one gets hurt on this. And the longer we defer it and not make these decisions on how do we come to grips with these realities, the more difficult it’s going to be and in particular the more costly it’s going to be, I think, for the men and women in uniform.

    “We’ve got to address this. And we have to be honest about it. And we have to deal with it,” Hagel said.

    Scaling back troops’ pay and benefits will be a careful balancing act, he said, because the military will need to offer a compensation package that is generous enough to continue to draw an educated and high-quality force.

    Hagel is talking about the recommendations of the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission which are due out next month to advise the Congress on how to change the compensation of the troops, you know, for risking their lives and spending years away from their families in service to their country.

    Remember the last two Secretaries of Defense went around on their way out of office discouraging and demoralizing the troops, too. It’s kind of a tradition now, I guess.

    There’s no word that the heads of other agencies, like the EPA, the Education Department or the Department of Commerce are visiting their employees with the same warning.

  • Dempsey defends brass’ perks

    Dempsey defends brass’ perks

    Martin Dempsey

    Remember how the chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey has been lobbying Congress hard to reduce military pay raises, change the retirement system, hike retirees’ health care costs? Well, he’s finally found something that the Congress needs to continuing to fund; generals’ pensions and the little perks that go along with being a flag officer, according to USAToday;

    The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff petitioned Congress last month to retain privileges for top officers that lawmakers are seeking to trim, including fattened pensions and the number of enlisted aides serving generals and admirals, according to a letter obtained by USA TODAY.

    […]

    “Making modest reductions to the number of enlisted aides is a common sense reform that will help the Pentagon cut costs,” said Ethan Rosenkranz, national security policy analyst for the Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan government watchdog. “It doesn’t surprise us that America’s most senior general is opposed to a smaller staff and more modest retirement package.”

    Yeah, I know, I could hardly believe that he’s that much of a weasel-dicked prick, either. But there you go. I foresee a bright future for Dempsey in politics. Obviously he fits under most desks.

  • SFC Alwyne Cashe and the MoH – Maybe We Can Help

    SFC Alwyne Cashe and the MoH – Maybe We Can Help

    I trust everyone reading this saw Jonn’s article about SFC Alwyne Cashe the other day. If not, you need follow the link and read it – now – along with the LA Times article to which Jonn links.

    While I trust that the Army will eventually do the right thing, that’s not a lock. Even then, doing the right thing may take a long time unless there’s significant external interest in the matter.

    With that latter, maybe there is something we can do to help.

    One thing that the Five Sided Asylum seems to notice is inquiries from Congress. And one thing that Congress seems to notice is stuff that makes the mainstream press. Hell, most Members of Congress appear to pray daily at the Altar of the Media Gods.

    Well, SFC Cashe’s story has now hit one of the larger media outlets.  So, tell me: what do you suppose would happen if a large number of Congressional Representatives and Senators started receiving mail from their constituents consisting of a polite letter asking them to look into SFC Cashe’s case – with a copy of that article attached?  (I’ve archived a copy in the event it ages off the LA Times’ website.)

    I can’t say for sure whether that would make a difference.  But I’d guess that if the Pentagon gets forty or fifty inquiries from different Representatives and Senators, they just might decide to move out smartly – if for no other reason than to “stop the pain”.

    This link seems to be a good source of contact information for Members of Congress.   (E-mail contact is found by clicking the state; you have to click individual names next to get “snail mail” addresses.) I’ve also taken the liberty of drafting a sample letter to Congress as a starting point. You can download the draft text for a letter here.  You’ll need to format/alter it to suit your own ‘druthers and situation.

    The above link for Congressional contact info has both electronic and USPS contact information. However, if you decide to send your Senators and/or Representative correspondence and can afford to do so, I’d suggest going the hardcopy route – or maybe doing both.  I understand hardcopy still gets more “weight” in Congressional offices these days.

    Again, this might or might not do any good.  But IMO, it’s certainly worth a shot.

  • Alwyn Cashe’s Medal of Honor moves slowly forward

    Alwyn Cashe’s Medal of Honor moves slowly forward

    Alwyn Cashe

    The LA Times, in their own way reports that Sergeant First Class Alwyn Cashe is still in the running for an award of the Medal of Honor, nearly a decade after he gave his life to save his troops from his burning Bradley. This has been my personal crusade – you know because Cashe and I are just alike – we were Bradley platoon sergeants. We look a lot alike, too – in the eyes. They issue those to us at ANCOC. His hair is a little short than I liked, though. I’d like to think that I would have done the same thing that SFC Cashe did in his circumstances;

    Cashe rescued six badly burned soldiers while under enemy small-arms fire. His own uniform caught fire, engulfing him in flames. Even with second- and-third degree burns over three-fourths of his body, Cashe continue to pull soldiers out of a vehicle set ablaze when a roadside bomb ruptured a fuel tank.

    […]

    Sgt. Gary Mills…was inside the stricken Bradley fighting vehicle that day. He was on fire, his hands so badly burned that he couldn’t open the rear troop door to free himself and other soldiers trapped inside the flaming vehicle.

    Someone opened the door from outside, Mills recalls. A powerful hand grabbed him and yanked him to safety. He later learned that the man who had rescued him was Cashe, who seconds later crawled into the vehicle to haul out the platoon’s critically burned medic while on fire himself.

    “Sgt. Cashe saved my life,” Mills said. “With all the ammo inside that vehicle, and all those flames, we’d have all been dead in another minute or two.”

    Four of the six soldiers rescued later died of their wounds at a hospital. An Afghan interpreter riding in the Bradley died during the bomb attack. Cashe refused to be loaded onto a medical evacuation helicopter until all the other wounded men had been flown.

    SFC Cashe succumbed to his injuries a few weeks later, at Fort Sam Houston’s Brooke Army Medical Center surrounded by his family. The Army awarded him a Silver Star, but that doesn’t go far enough, in my opinion and now, that’s the opinion of his leadership apparently. They claim that for nearly ten years some nebulous cloud of war hung over SFC Cashe’s actions that day that is only now lifting.

    In the article, the LA Times quotes now-Brigadier General Gary Brito, then SFC Cashe’s battlion commander, as saying that if the events of that day had been clearer, he would have nominated Cashe for the Medal of Honor then.

    Brito, who is still on active duty, says he has spent the last seven years locating soldiers and obtaining sworn statements, which he has included in the latest packet he is submitting to the Army.

    One statement is from Lt. Gen. William G. Webster, Cashe’s division commander, who wrote: “The pain he suffered must have been unimaginable, and yet he continued to suffer in the name of saving others. I cannot remember a story that is its equal.”

    Taluto, who also commanded Cashe, wrote: “In all my years of service I have yet to witness or hear of such an act of bravery.”

    The article quotes Cashe’s sister, Kasinal Cashe White;

    When Cashe was able to speak, White said, his first words were: “How are my boys?” — his soldiers, she said.

    Then he began weeping, she said. He told her: “I couldn’t get to them fast enough.”

    So, let’s get to Cashe a little faster, there, Pentagon.