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Category: Marine Corps

  • Todd Shane Tomko; retired Marine colonel faces child abuse charges

    Todd Shane Tomko; retired Marine colonel faces child abuse charges

    Mick sends us a link to the Virginian-Pilot which recounts the charges against retired Marine Corps colonel Todd Shane Tomko;

    Before his retirement in 2016, the decorated former Marine colonel served in the corps for 33 years, went on numerous combat tours and commanded the Wounded Warrior Regiment at Quantico. He was given a key to the city of St. Louis in 2011 during its Marine Week, which he helped organize.

    On Thursday, Tomko appeared before a Virginia Beach judge, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, handcuffs and leg irons. He was there to face several felony charges of child sex abuse.

    The 54-year-old is accused of assaulting three children during numerous stays at their Virginia Beach home from 2002 to 2009. The incidents include three counts of taking indecent liberties with a child, three counts of aggravated sexual battery and one count of child cruelty.

    Each of the victims, all now adults, offered emotional testimony Thursday during a lengthy preliminary hearing in Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court. Judge Randall Blow ruled that there was sufficient evidence to send the case to a grand jury.

    Tomko was court martialed before he left the Marine Corps in 2016 for conduct unbecoming, possession of steroids, violating a protective order and driving under the influence. He spent two months in the Naval Consolidated Brig in Chesapeake, Virginia.

  • Marine Corps Forces Reserve data breach

    The Marine Corps Times reports that the Marine Corps Forces Reserve sent the personally identifying information of more than 21,000 personnel to people who weren’t authorized to have that information outside of the Marine Corps.

    The compromised attachment included highly sensitive data such as truncated social security numbers, bank electronic funds transfer and bank routing numbers, truncated credit card information, mailing address, residential address and emergency contact information, Maj. Andrew Aranda, spokesman for Marine Forces Reserve said in a command release.

    That email was a roster sent out by the Defense Travel System, or DTS, Marine Corps Times has learned. DTS is a Defense Department system that assists military and civilian defense personnel with travel itineraries and settling expenses from official authorized trips.

    “It was very quickly noticed and email recall procedures were implemented to reduce the number of accounts that received it,” Aranda said.

    The upside is that we’re being told about the breach only days after it happened, as opposed to other breaches that we found out about months after it happened.

  • Brigadier General Norman Cooling suspended

    Brigadier General Norman Cooling suspended

    According to Military.com, Brigadier General Norman Cooling, who was until recently legislative assistant to Commandant of the Marine Corps General Robert Neller, has been suspended from those duties for creating a “hostile work environment”.

    Brig. Gen. Norman L. Cooling was removed after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis received a request from Congress to investigate his behavior, according to a news release. The Senate Armed Services Committee asked Mattis directly to review the command climate Cooling had created during his tenure at the post, officials said.

    The office of the secretary of defense is now investigating the allegations.

    A Marine Corps spokesman, Maj. Brian Block, said the length of the investigation would be determined by OSD; there’s no defined time limit to Cooling’s suspension.

  • Suspicious letter sickens Marines at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall

    According to WTOP, a suspicious letter received at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia has sent some personnel to the hospital;

    A hazardous materials team was dispatched after the letter containing an unknown substance sickened 11 and sent three to the hospital. The three have since been released from the hospital.

    The letter was received at around 3:30 p.m. on the Marine Corps side of the base, according to a news release from Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall.

    “Several Marines are receiving medical care as a result of this incident,” said a Pentagon statement Tuesday evening, before their release.

    Symptoms among those affected included nosebleeds and burning hands, according to sources familiar with the situation.

    From CNN;

    A law enforcement official said field tests for the letter all came back negative for any harmful substance, but the FBI is transporting it tonight to its lab in Quantico for further analysis.

  • Marine Infantry Officer Course standards change again

    According to the Marine Corps Times, the standards for folks in the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course have been lowered once again;

    Recent changes include the number of evaluated hikes required to pass the course, and the removal of the physically demanding Combat Endurance Test as a strict requirement to graduate.

    Under the new requirements, only three of those nine hikes will be evaluated, and Marines will have to pass all three evaluated hikes in order to graduate.

    The condition that Marines at IOC participate in nine hikes remains unchanged.

    Under the previous rules six of those hikes were evaluated, and Marines had to pass five of those six evaluated hikes.

    The Corps in recent years has struggled to meet its goals in graduating an adequate number of new infantry officers. Attrition rates reached as high as 25 percent in 2014.

    Yeah, well, there are plenty of military training courses which lose graduates due to physical standards at rates higher than 25%. The Corps denies that the reduction in standards has anything to do with accepting females in their ranks;

    The recent changes, the Corps argues, have nothing to do with gender integration in the combat arms job fields or a watering down of any standards.

    “Technically what we have done is we have modified graduation requirements, but we actually tie our requirements now more to the T&R [Marine infantry training and readiness manual] standards.”

    No, technically, what you’ve done is what I predicted you would do years ago – the social justice warriors demanded that you lower standards so women can compete for slots they are not qualified to occupy. I hope the enemies on our future battlefields take these lower standards into consideration, you know, just to be fair.

    Thanks to MustangCryppie for the tip.

  • Failing the Combat Endurance Test no longer disqualifies Infantry Officers

    Failing the Combat Endurance Test no longer disqualifies Infantry Officers

    At the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officers Course in the recent past, failing the grueling Combat Endurance Test would disqualify an officer from completing the course. That has changed, according to the Marine Corps Times. Now, the Combat Endurance Test is just part of the overall grade of a student. Incidentally, with the participation of women in the course, the CET has eliminated all but one female candidate.

    The Marine Corps says that the change isn’t lowering the standards, just changing the standard.

    “The average attrition rate for the CET between 2012 and 2017 was less than three percent,” Training Command said. “The majority of the attrition in Infantry Officer Course is associated with a student’s overall performance on tactical movements and leadership.”

    The largest spike in attrition from the test occurred in 2015 ? with roughly 6 percent, or 22 Marines washing out of the infantry course for failure to pass the Combat Endurance Test. In 2017, less than 1 percent ? roughly four Marines ? failed the test.

    I’m assuming that a large number of those Marines who failed the CET were men, so there was nothing related to the gender of the candidates which caused them to fail. One woman was successful, so it wasn’t impossible for women to complete the CET.

    In the end, the only result of this decision is that the Marine Infantry Officer Corps will include that 1% of Marines who should not be there.

  • Tempe Fire Captain, Marine Corps veteran, Kyle Brayer murdered

    Tempe Fire Captain, Marine Corps veteran, Kyle Brayer murdered

    Yesterday, ten-year veteran of the Tempe, Arizona Fire Department and Marine Corps Iraq War veteran Kyle Brayer was murdered in the street. From Fox4;

    Police said 34-year-old Kyle Brayer was riding on the back of a golf cart with several others, headed southbound on Civic Center Plaza near Stetson.

    The suspect, Hezron Parks, was allegedly driving a red Scion coupe and began bumping the golf cart. When Brayer exited the cart to approach the driver, he was shot in the head. Brayer, an off-duty Tempe Fire captain, died from his injuries.

    Police said the suspect driver fled the scene eastbound on Stetson and then southbound on 75th Street, hitting several other cars.

    Fox News says that Parks turned himself in later. They say that Brayer spent nine months in Iraq before he deployed on a humanitarian assistance mission to the Philippines. His LinkedIn profile says that he was a Sergeant of Marines for four years.

  • Will Col. Roger T. McDuffie be forced to retire?

    Will Col. Roger T. McDuffie be forced to retire?

    Stars & Stripes reports that Marine harrier pilot Colonel Roger T. McDuffie faced a board of inquiry into an incident that occurred in Colombia. McDuffie was, apparently, drugged and led around by someone in a “sort of zombie-like state.” While he was drugged, McDuffie consorted with purported prostitutes and partied in off-limits facilities.

    Col. Roger T. McDuffie, a Harrier pilot, was the most senior Marine in a South Florida unit on a Jan. 21-Feb. 4, 2017, field trip to the Colombian capital to map out U.S. Marine operations there. An initial, internal investigation conducted by the U.S. Southern Command Marine affiliate found some Marines broke curfew, ventured into a forbidden zone, consorted with prostitutes and brought some back to their hotel — only to be robbed of government property and hospitalized.

    His lawyer, Aaron Meyer, tells a different story;

    “There was zero intent to violate any governing orders, binge drink, or carouse with women,” the attorney said by email. “Colonel McDuffie, as the senior Marine present, failed in his broader duty to set the conditions that might have prevented such a drugging,” Meyer said.

    Anyway, the board recommended that McDuffie be forced to retire at his current grade. The Navy Secretary will make the final decision.