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

Category: Military issues

  • The military must overhaul its education

    There’s been a sea change in attitude of the US military when it comes to the education of its ranks. Not so long ago post secondary education was considered the exclusive realm of the officer corps. Today, not only is the military leadership encouraging its enlisted men and women to seek out higher education, they’re actively spending billions of dollars as a matter of deliberate policy in order to achieve that goal. Unfortunately for everyone involved, including the taxpayer, this policy has been pursued in fits and starts with half measures and aimless, profligate spending.

    As it stands now the military spends almost $8 billion a year more than service members have put in for the Post 9/11 GI Bill. That’s billions of dollars engorging a hopelessly broken, corrupt and often anti-military academic system in order to attempt to educate troops who have already left the service, to very mixed results. To put that number in perspective, that’s about 50% more than the 42,000 student, globally ranked Top 20 University of Washington spends in the same time frame , including it’s $1 billion research budget. Or, it’s the collective endowment of the entire University of California’s eleven campuses serving a quarter of a million undergraduate and postgraduate students. This is, largely, a consequence of The GI Bill being a law structured to garner political support by feeding the beast and institutional military support by attracting recruits during the hard years of 2005-2008. What it should be is designed to educate service members for the purpose of empowering the force, improving retention and setting up them for success when they transition out of the armed forces.

    Not to mention, do you really want your tax funded GI Bill paying the tenured salary of the likes of Bill Ayers, Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky?

    All that’s not to say that the military is only spending money on vets. In 2011 the military spent $542 million on tuition assistance for active duty troops and some of their dependents. TA grew so quickly and to such heights that Congress moved to slash it by 25%. With this deluge of largely unaccountable money, online and distance learning schools have popped up on bases around the world. On nearly every base you can find a learning center with several different, often for-profit, schools offering all manner of courses. The for-profit American Public University System, which runs the popular American Military University, alone has over 100,000 students. Unfortunately there’s little to no coordination between the military and the school’s faculty when it comes to the individual service member’s needs or academic progress. Consequently, these money gobbling schools are often difficult for young troops to complete and most have graduation rates well below 50%. As for the actual course work? It’s not pretty.

    This sad state of affairs is even more astounding when one considers that the US military has successfully been in the business of higher education for over 200 years and is, today, the largest educational apparatus in the country. The Department of Defense and it’s various bureaucratic affiliates are directly responsible for, or directly pay for, the post secondary education of more people than any other entity in the country. The Department of Education can’t even come close to providing the educational impact for adults the DoD does and it most likely never will. This doesn’t even touch the almost 9,000 staff in 200 DoD schools who are responsible for the K-12 education of almost 90,000 military dependents.

    Fortunately, within that depressing realization is also the answer to, not only fixing the military’s broken education promises but, reforming the entire way higher education works in the United States. (more…)

  • Israel calls for release of Pollard

    No American supports Israel more than me, but this one Israel probably needs to just forget about. The Associated Press reports that Israel is calling for the release of Jonathan Pollard, the former US civilian intelligence analyst at the navy intelligence Command who was convicted of releasing classified documents to the Israeli government 25 years ago;

    Pollard, 57, was sentenced to life in prison 25 years ago for leaking classified documents to Israel. Many Israelis believe the sentence was too harsh and officials often demand his release.

    Those calls took on urgency after Pollard’s wife Esther said he was hospitalized after suffering extreme pain last week.

    I don’t care if he was selling intelligence to Canada, a traitor to his country is a traitor and you can’t mitigate treason. We’re just lucky it he was only selling secrets to Israel. Before he began working for NIC and while he was working for Navy Ocean Surveillance Information Center, it was discovered that he was trying to establish relationship a relationship with South Africa’s intelligence agency. Pollard was a spy just waiting to happen.

    If the Israelis want to do something for his wife, that’s fine, but they need to stop picking at this scab and calling for his release.

  • Army future not so “Strong”

    In the competition between the military services, the Army is worried that they’re going to lose their edge on the battlefield to the high tech, long distance engagement capability of the Navy and the Air Force says retired ArmyMaj. Gen. Robert Scales in the Washington Times today;

    “We have an opportunity to take this experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and really achieve dominance on the ground, just like the Air Force achieved with the F-22 and F-35 and the Navy has achieved with its modern fleet of carriers,” said retired ArmyMaj. Gen. Robert Scales.

    “But for whatever reason, the Army is going to go into the future with no major platform modernization that I can see. It’s entirely likely that my grandchildren, should they choose to go in the Army, will be fighting with equipment I was using when I was a captain.”

    Ya mean like when I was a young sergeant and still using cold weather gear left over from the Korean War and weapons that had been made during Vietnam? Facing a 1990s threat with 1960s equipment? That’s the result of having an administration that hates the military unless they can make the administration look good. Like Jimmy Carter tried to do in an election year with his Desert One operation – but the equipment that the administration didn’t want to maintain failed them.

    This administration has been fairly lucky thus far, since the operations that they hoped would make them look good didn’t depend so much on equipment as they did on people. Still they had equipment failure on the bin Laden operation that has been fairly well ignored because the overall operation succeeded.

    You’d think that the failure of that one helicopter would give the administration pause, but it hasn’t so far. It’s much sexier to stand off from a few thousand feet, or a few thousand miles, and drop bombs. Much less sexier to fight with soldiers who have to hold terrain in order to make an operation successful. Fighting with soldiers requires losses and personnel costs which, in turn, costs votes at ballot box. But just wait until military members discover that their future in the Army doesn’t look so bright and we have to take Cat IV during a relative peace time like we did during the Carter Administration.

  • Golden Knights selection begins soon

    For any of you folks out there who are interested, the Golden Knights are going to begin selection soon for some new members of their parachute team;

    You can get more information at their website, but your packet has to be in by July 31st.

  • New statue at Bragg

    The latest graduates of the Army’s Special Forces course donned their berets for the first time in front of statues which represent the meeting between President John F. Kennedy and then-Brig. Gen. William P. Yarborough which established the distinctive head gear as the standard for the unit. From the Fayetteville Observer;

    H. Ross Perot donated the 7-foot bronze statue that depicts Kennedy and then-Brig. Gen. William P. Yarborough during the presidential visit to Fort Bragg on Oct. 12, 1961.

    The larger-than-life likenesses of the two men stand on a marble base about 5 feet high in front of Kennedy Hall, one of the two main buildings on the campus of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.

    Special Forces were founded in 1952 during the Cold War at Fort Bragg for a possible role behind enemy lines if war broke out in Europe. In the early 1960s, Yarborough had been trying to persuade a reluctant Army to approve the green beret as the official headgear of the specially trained men well adapted for United States’ growing fight against communist insurgencies worldwide.

    “He found an ally in President Kennedy,” Perot said during the dedication and graduation ceremony.

    Kennedy called the green beret “a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom,” Perot said. Those words are inscribed on the base of the statue.

  • Nimroddery

    Someone sent the following photo which was posted in a Facebook group called ‘Wipeout Homophobia’ over the caption “hubbie in afghanistan raising a gay pride flag”.

    And now the US military is wasting resources to investigate the incident according to Stars & Stripes;

    Navy Cmdr. Bill Speaks, a Defense Department spokesman, was quoted in the Daily Caller report as saying the U.S. military has no rules “that would prohibit an individual servicemember from doing this.” But he noted that the International Security Assistance Force, which U.S. troops in Afghanistan fall under, may have different policies specifically for the Afghan theater.

    Military officials said in the article that they still haven’t determined where the flag was flown.

    The only person who should be worried about this picture is the wife of “hubbie”. Why would a straight guy risk raising a gay pride flag if he doesn’t have a vested interest in promoting gay rights? She might be in danger of losing “hubbie” to the other team. And i suppose it’s easy to believe that the military puts up flag poles every where for no apparent reason. Why would there be a flag pole outside of a maintenance hut? And even the guy who is a few feet away is more interested in doing his job than some nimrod flying a rainbow flag.

    Tony Perkins uses the event to predict the fall of the US military in Afghanistan (UK’s Daily Mail link);

    Mr Perkins compared the flying of the gay flag to the accidental Koran burnings earlier this year.

    He wrote: ‘After February’s accident with the Korans, American lives were lost.

    ‘What price will we pay because some want to use the military to show their gay pride?’

    And of course, gay rights groups are using it as their “Iwo Jima” moment.

    Drama Queens all. Knowing the mindset of military members like I do, I suspect that it was a prank. Everything gay is still funny.

  • Ditz disses Perry

    Y’all probably remember this video I posted a few weeks ago of Katy Perry’s “Part of Me”;

    Well, according to the Military Times, Naomi Wolf didn’t like it calling the video “shameful” and accusing Perry of being a paid shill for the Marines.

    Naomi Wolf, you may remember will go down in history as the chick who made Al Gore wear earth tone suits to help him win his election in 2000. Y’all remember President Al Gore, right? The color of his suits were his only problem.

    Now, I always thought that Naomi Wolf was totally do-able, but, inevitably, she’d have to start talking which would kill the mood. But, anyway, the video doesn’t show anything from war, it only shows training, but that doesn’t stop Wolf from claiming that the video glorifies and “prettifies” violence;

    Like Matthis, she knows all about war because she talked to people who had been in war. I’m sure that gives her some sort moral authority in her mind, but, she might as well said that her neighbor’s cousin’s father had been in war, so she knows what she’s talking about. And I’m sure she thinks that she caught the PTSD from her interviewees.

    Personally, I thought the video would scare away people who thought that military service is all glory and parades. If you’ve seen the video, you know it shows all of the tough stuff about training and none of the glory. There is nothing glorious or pretty about log PT on the beach.

    In my humble and carefully considered opinion, Wolf is just joining in the chorus of voices from the Left who never really supported the troops, they only mouthed the necessary words that were socially approved, probably by some central committee in charge of Liberal talking points. Now, that the wars are winding down, those same pretend Americans feel that it’s relatively safe to push back against anything that portrays the troops and military service in a positive light.

    Wolf says that we should boycott Perry, so I immediately went to Amazon and downloaded Perry’s album. What? That’s not what boycott means?

  • 3rd Infantry Regiment and the EIB

    The 3rd Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) has placed a number of photos on their Facebook page of their Expert Infantry Badge testing last week. For those of you who have no experience with the EIB, it’s a series of combat-related tests that an infantryman must pass in order to earn the coveted EIB;

    There is no room for error in the test, a candidate must have a perfect score on the test to earn the EIB. The photo at the top is during the final mile of the 12-mile road march at Fort AP Hill. According to the 3rd IR;

    353 candidates attempted to earn the coveted EIB; only 128 received it by the end of the week.

    Yeah, it’s a big f###ing deal.