Category: Big Pentagon

Andy11M sends us a link to Bloomberg which reports that China is drawing down the size of their military, and they seem to be doing a better job than the Pentagon. They’re buying out their careerists with payouts of tens of thousands of dollars and promises of pensions up to 80% of their active duty pay.

The Chinese want to put out three hundred thousand troops to reduce their end strength to 2 million soldiers.

“Soldiers have a deterrent and destructive power once they unite to do something together, and they could cause some social stability issues easily,” said Yue Gang, a retired colonel who served in the PLA’s General Staff Department. “Soldiers are less adapted to society because they may not have the skills that the job market wants and not be familiar with workplace culture. And that’s why they need more support from the government.”

Odd that the Chinese would understand the problem better than the US, even odder that they would treat their former military better than the Pentagon and Congress treat US veterans.

David sends us a link to the Washington Post which reports that the Pentagon is forgiving the tens of thousands of dollars that each member of the Pentagon bomb tech crew supposedly owned in back pay – the story we talked about the other day.

The waivers were completed despite some members of the bomb squad expecting that their cases would not be heard for several more weeks. Badger said the approval of hazardous duty pay — promised in offer letters to the bomb technicians — was “an administrative error made in good faith, but with severe financial consequences for the employees.”

“The pay was incorrectly authorized through no fault of the employees involved,” Badger said. “They could not have known it was paid in error, and we take this matter very seriously.”

The case pitted nine members of the bomb squad — formally known as the Hazardous Devices Division of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency — against the Pentagon bureaucracy. One member of the squad, Axel Fernandez, committed suicide in April, exacerbating the frustrations of those in the unit. According to emails and memos obtained by The Washington Post, the Pentagon told him he owed back in excess of $136,000.

Yeah, so the decision comes a little late for Axel Fernandez and his family, but then the Pentagon shouldn’t have started this pissing contest in the first place.

Dan Lamothe at the Washington Post tells the story of how the bomb techs at the Pentagon were overpaid, despite what they were told when they were hired, and were tossed in tens of thousands of dollars in debt;

In January 2015, members of the Pentagon’s bomb squad got some financially devastating news: They had been overpaid for years, the Defense Department informed them, and the government wanted the money back — all of it.

For some bomb technicians, that meant they had suddenly accrued debts of up to $173,000. And going forward, defense officials also told them, their annual pay would be cut by 25 percent.

All because of what the government described as a clerical error that the Pentagon bureaucracy itself — not the bomb squad members — had made.

The bomb techs thought they were getting hazardous duty pay. Some moved to DC to work the job for what they thought were higher wages – some are saying that they wouldn’t have taken the job if they’d known that remuneration was substantially less than what they had signed on for. But, the Feds work under different rules than those they force on the private sector.

The case has little comparison in the private sector, said Catherine Fisk, an employment-law professor at the University of California at Irvine. While most employees working on an “at-will” basis can be fired or have their pay cut with little notice, there isn’t a legal basis under which a company could recoup money it had promised to pay unless the employees did something clearly improper or illegal such as filing false expense reports, she said.

Lamothe reports that teammates claim that one tech, Axel Fernandez, one of the first hired to the unit, committed suicide because of the $136,000 debt;

Fernandez’s job offer letter, dated September 2008, said his base pay was $69,081, with a Washington-area cost-of-living supplement of $14,431, bringing the total to $83,512. With an additional 25 percent in hazardous-duty pay, the letter said, he would receive $104,390 annually.

Yeah, when I enlisted in the Army, I initially enlisted for three years. In those heady days following AIT, the drill sergeants offered us a chance to extend enlistments for a year for $2500 ($11,400 in 2016 dollars), so, you know, I figured what the hey. Well, four years later, after I’d done the year, some civilian figured that the bonus was paid in error. He couldn’t find the DA message that authorized the payment, and the Army decided that they wanted their money back, you know, even though I’d fulfilled my part of the bargain.

Working for the Feds has it’s pit falls.

Thanks to David for the link.

Basically, it’s just a rumor at this point, but anonymous sources have told the media that the Obama Administration plans to lift the ban on open transgender service in the military next Friday, July 1st, according to the Washington Times;

An unnamed Defense official said top personnel plan to meet on Monday to finalize the details of the plan, which comes after nearly a year of behind-the-scenes deliberations.

The official said Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work could sign off on it by Wednesday, with final approval coming from Defense Secretary Ash Carter by the end of the week.

LGBT-rights groups praised the impending announcement.

“At long last, thousands of brave transgender patriots will be able to serve our nation openly with the respect they deserve,” Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin said in a statement. “This historic announcement will not only extend long-overdue recognition to thousands of transgender service members, it will strengthen our military and our nation.”

Of course there are thousands of tiny details that need to be worked out beforehand, not to mention that someone needs to tell me how this helps us to kill more of our nation’s enemies. How, exactly, it “strengthens our military”. But, hey, the Army gets to roll up their sleeves – if they can work out the finer details of that huge issue.

The Military Times reports that the Pentagon wants to hire civilians who have never been in the military off of the street in pay grades as high as O-6 to fill positions in career fields focused on cyber warfare and space;

Some military officials fear that the demand for cyber operations is such that there’s not enough time for the services to grow their own cyber force from the ground up. Under the military’s traditional personnel system, it might take more than a decade to cultivate the cyber capability that the Pentagon needs, some officials say.

Currently, by law the Pentagon is limited to use lateral entry for chaplains, lawyers, doctors and dentists, and even for those career specialties, lateral entry is capped at the O-4 paygrade, or the rank of major and, in the case of the Navy, lieutenant commander.

Of course, the Navy and Air Force are fully on board.

The Navy, more than any of the other services, has pushed aggressively to expand lateral entry. Navy officials say it will help fill critical needs in existing career fields — but also to build new capability quickly in the event of a full-scale war.

“Right now the one we’re focused on is the cyber [community] because that’s the immediate need,” said Vice Adm. Robert Burke, the chief of naval personnel. “But we want this authority in place … because we want to be responsive when the need comes — we don’t want to start writing policy the minute we discover we need it.”

[…]

The Air Force is open to the idea of expanding lateral entries, particularly for people with cyber skills. “We’re still exploring it,” Brig. Gen. Brian Kelly, director of military force management policy, said during an interview in May. “We are looking at similar programs to what the Navy is talking about.”

An Air Force spokeswoman at the Pentagon added that lateral entries could have a positive impact on the culture. “We certainly see opportunity to create the kind of ‘ventilation’ and influx of ideas and talents that the secretary of defense has previously discussed,” Capt. Brooke Brzozowske wrote in a statement to Military Times.

Once, I was in an infantry battalion stationed on an Air Force base and there was definitely a clash of cultures. But, more importantly, you’d think that Edward Snowden would be an example of such a hiring process gone awry.

Thanks to HMC Ret and brian for the link.

The Associated Press reports that Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced that the Department of Defense will alter some of it’s security procedures for bases across the country in response to the attack on a recruiting station and a Reserve Training Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee last year;

Carter…said the military is clarifying its rules about when military personnel can carry weapons at recruiting centers and larger installations.

He discussed the steps during a change of command ceremony for the U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado.

The goal of the warning system is to notify personnel of a threat within a 20-mile radius in 10 minutes or less, Carter said. He gave no other details.

The Defense Department will spend an extra $100 million over two years on protecting personnel in response to the July 2015 shootings in Tennessee, he said.

Of course, the “warning system” can’t be activated until shots have been fired at military personnel, so the imperative, to me, would be to arm military personnel for their own protection.

[Carter] said Friday the rules are being clarified “so that members who are appropriately trained and authorized by the commander of the installation can be armed, are armed right now.”

So, the Pentagon is pushing the responsibility for next terrorist attack, the next death of a member of the military, down to local commanders rather than the Pentagon making the tough decision. But, then that’s what a bloated bureaucracy does.