Category: Military issues

Katie sends us an article about another story involving PTSD and Joint Base Lewis-McChord. A lieutenant colonel was apparently upset about the way his divorce was going and threatened to blow up the Washington State Capitol, hire someone to kill his wife and to kill a fellow officer. So naturally, the story gives the impression that the Army’s medical services have failed again. Well, until you read down the last few paragraphs;

Underwood recently underwent a psychological evaluation, according to court documents, and was cleared of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. However, when he was a child he witnessed his mother kill his two siblings before she shot him several times and left him for dead.

So, even though an Army evaluation cleared him for duty, there was this tragic thing in his past. I guess the Army evaluation only detects recent incidents which might affect his psyche, and not events that happened in his childhood. What part of “cleared of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” don’t they understand?

Court documents also say a woman Underwood was involved with found a naked picture of his daughter on his laptop. The woman apparently also went to Underwood’s wife and told her he paid a hit man $150,000 to kill her and a fellow officer.

Well, then they have him dead to rights on using his military training because they teach all of those things in every one of the officer basic courses. It all must be a direct result of his time at JBLM.

Kevin sent us a link this morning in Stars & Stripes to an ass chewing cloaked in pep talk terms that Sergeant Major of the Army Raymond F. Chandler III gave to some NCOs in Europe the other day in which he told them that they need to roll up their sleeves and get back to the work of being NCOs. Because, for some reason, they weren’t able to be NCOs what with a war going on and all. I wonder who’s been doing all of the NCO stuff for the last ten years. Must have been the officers, huh?

In an interview after his talk to the NCOs, Chandler said the Army would also be checking its databases to flag soldiers with repeated misconduct, including nearly 5,000 soldiers who committed multiple felonies while on active duty.

That could occur, he said “because as an Army we had some breakdowns in accountability for our soldiers.”

He elaborated on his post-Vietnam War comparison, saying the similarities included coming out of a long, protracted war and reducing size, at the same time that alcohol and drug abuse and other at-risk behaviors had increased.

I find it hard to believe that there are 5000 convicted felons not in jail still leading troops. I mean a felony is an imprisonable offense, isn’t it? And disparaging the 1975 Army is pretty weak. Yeah, I knew some NCOs who abused drugs in those years, but none of them had been to Vietnam. The Vietnam veterans who were left after the war were nothing but professional and they did the heavy lifting when it came to building up the Army after the war. Chandler’s misrepresentation of those years only highlights the fact that he wasn’t around, in fact, he joined in 1981, so he was in 7th grade in 1975. So he’s working from stories he heard once.

As evidence, Chandler, whose last assignment was commandant of the Army Sergeants Major Academy, said that half the sergeants enrolled in drill sergeant school or recruiter school “either don’t show up or can’t pass the PT (physical fitness) test.”

I wasn’t in the last wars, but I don’t think I’d show up for drill sergeant school if I was drafted either. Nothing against those of you who sacrificed part of your career to perform that important function, but I never liked the idea of being a drill sergeant or go through the epitome of garrison duty for however long the school is. I never even considered being a drill sergeant. Not being able to pass the PT test? There’s no excuse for that. Unless these guys are showing up for drill school right off a deployment, which I suspect might be the case. It took me months to get back to my PT score after six months in Desert Storm, so I can sympathize. But apparently the Smadge is more concerned with statistics than the reality.

Chandler also criticized highly visible and sometimes offensive tattoos – and sergeants for not counseling their troops against getting such tattoos.

That I go along with, sort of. I don’t have any tattoos, though. I’m too pretty to have to add decorations. And I’ve never been able to think of something I’d want permanently displayed on my perfect body. But to blame NCOs for their troops getting tattoos is probably a bit naive.

I got chewed out by my battalion commander once because one of my squad leaders, who was on crutches went downtown, got drunk and got in a fight and beat the snot out of someone with his crutch. Somehow, it was my fault. So I took corrective action by patrolling the “Iron Triangle” at 2am and loading my troops in my van and taking them back to the barracks – more often than not resulting in more unnecessary violence on the street. I’m not sure if that was a good idea now, but it illustrates how much influence an NCO can have on his subordinates. They knew I was coming around at oh-dark-thirty and they were still out there, and still misbehaving. You can tell a private to not get a tattoo (and “offensive” is subject to discussion), but it certainly won’t stop them if they think they’re being clever.

I’ll admit that I don’t like sergeant majors (no, you pseudo-English majors, it’s not sergeants major), never have. It seemed to me that a lot of good First Sergeants went to the Sergeant Major Academy and had their brains sucked out and came back only with vision that could spot a cigarette butt on the ground from miles away. If Chandler wants to clean out the ranks, get rid of every E-9 who refuses a command position, and every E-8 who won’t take a company. That’s where the problem begins.

ADDED: I was awarded 2 Article 15s during my years, one as an E-3 and another as an E-6, neither would have been an offense as a civilian and neither impacted my career significantly.

SnafuDude sends us a link to the Strategy Page which reports that one of the casualties of the Defense budget cuts is the M2-series Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. I was among the first squad leaders to lead a 10-man squad in the 26-ton Winnebago known as the Bradley back in 1983, I think. I was glad to see it come and replace the M113 Armored Personnel Carrier which was exactly that – just something to carry troops in. A squad leader had control over more firepower than ever in history. A coaxial 7.62 machine gun, a 25mm chain gun and anti-armor TOW missiles was added to the ten-man squad of infantrymen. It began a new era of battlefield supremacy for the US Army, and I was proud to be a part of it.

If we had faced Saddam Hussein’s army in 1991 with Jimmy Carter’s mechanized divisions, there might have been a different outcome because Saddam’s army out-matched our 1983 army. And our unit in Desert Storm had the oldest Bradleys in the theater and we experienced surprisingly few mechanical break downs because of the reliability of the Bradley IFV.

The Army’s reasoning for replacing the Bradley is it’s vulnerability to roadside bombs, according to Strategy Page;

The army is trying to come up with a new IFV design. The MRAP and Stryker are not adequate replacements because these wheeled vehicles have poor off-road capabilities. The design of the new GCV (Ground Combat Vehicle) is supposed to be ready by 2015, after which prototypes would be built and tested. At best, the army might have a new IFV by the end of the decade. Meanwhile, thousands of M-2s are still in service and would be sent into combat if it was believed roadside bombs were not going to be a major presence on the battlefield.

We knew from the beginning that Bradleys weren’t as impervious to anti-armor weapons as the M1, we were supposed to use the terrain for cover, keeping in mind that it was vulnerable. I guess it’s a little harder to use terrain as cover when the bomb is right next to you. I’ve heard that Strykers have their problems, too, but I never paid much attention to the debate, so i won’t comment on that.

But I hope the Army isn’t stupid enough to completely get rid of Bradleys until they have a new replacement. If it takes ten years to replace it, and they dump the Brad, you can be sure that we’ll need them sometime in the next ten years. That’s the nature of the business and our enemies.

I was going to pass on writing anything about the Associated Press article which discusses the distressing fact that soldiers are getting thicker in the Army, because it was an example of the Army half-assed “studying” more useless shit until I saw the picture that accompanied the article. First, though, the article;

In 2007, a pilot survey of 3,000 male soldiers on active duty found that they were, on average, as tall as soldiers who were measured in a 1988 survey. However, the 2007 sample of soldiers averaged two inches more around the chest, waist and hips.

So for some reason the Army thinks it’s needs more sizes in uniforms. But you know that it has something to do with the First Lady’s lecture to those clowns in a Fort Jackson DFAC a few weeks ago about eating their veggies.

But, anyway here’s the picture that encouraged me to write this today. Tell me you don’t think it’s funny;
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