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

Category: Military issues

  • Air Force LTC says “walk test” discriminates (Photo added)

    I hate to pick on you Air force guys, but your peers make it so easy. The Air Force Times reports that a 56-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Chris Cote has filed an EO complaint against the Air Force because he says that their 1-mile walk test discriminates against his old ass (for the record, my son is in the Air Force, and I’m 56, so get your knickers untwisted). It seems that he just barely passed his one-mile walk, and instead of working out, he sat on his ass and did some math;

    Cote has since filed an equal-opportunity complaint with the service, claiming that his age meant he would receive a worse VO2 max score. The lieutenant colonel claims the formula penalizes older airmen because VO2 max scores naturally decline with age but Air Force formulas don’t account enough for that dip.

    Hey, Colonel Cote, here’s something you might not have considered – either work out more or retire. It’s a one mile walk, for Pete’s sake. They’re not asking you to run a three hour marathon. You’re old, but you’re not an invalid. Walk two miles every day and the one mile walk will be a breeze. I wish I could find a picture of him.

    See that’s the reason we all laughed when the Air Force made that commercial about AF Basic being tougher than the Marines.

    Thanks to ROS who found his picture. That hair hat might be slowing him down, along with his non-aerodynamic frame;
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  • Hijabs in JROTC uniforms

    About a hundred of you guys sent me links to various articles about the Junior ROTC allowing their cadets to wear their hijabs in uniform – completely disregarding the meaning of the term “uniform”;

    “We welcome the fact that Muslim and Sikh students nationwide will now be able to participate fully in JROTC leadership activities while maintaining their religious beliefs and practices,” CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad told the Orlando Sentinel.

    “I was like, you’ve got to be kidding me. I wanted to just break down crying right there,” Zawity told Nashville’s WTVF-TV at the time. “They‘re telling me I’m not allowed to march in the parade just because of a piece of cloth wrapped around my head. And to me it‘s not like it’s just a piece of cloth, to me, it’s like my symbol.”

    Well, you always have the choice to walk away from the JROTC program, ya know. Persoanlly, I think more women shoudl wear hijabs…I think they’re HAWT! Hijabs turn me right the hell on. Whenever I see a woman in a hijab, I just can’t take my eyes off of her and I fantasized how I can pleasure her. So more of you should be wearing them, just to please me. In fact, the Army should design a hijab for all women soldiers regardless of their religion so we can get back to the meaning of “uniform”.

    In fact, while we’re at it, we should adopt the culture completely – women should be in the back of parade formations, behind the men, where they belong. And they should run PT in their hijabs…all of the women, regardless of their religious persuasion. Let’s swallow CAIR’s bullshit whole hog.

  • Wounded vet shot at welcome home party

    Old Trooper sent us a link about 22-year-old Christopher Sullivan. an Army veteran of the Afghanistan War who has spent the last year recovering from an IED attack at Walter Reed. Home for the Christmas holiday, his family threw him a welcome home party.

    When his brother got into an argument with Ruben Ray Jurado, 19, over football, Sullivan tried to prevent a fight after Jurado threw a punch. Jurado drew a gun and shot Sullivan twice in the back, what with him being a coward and all.

    Two bullets struck Sullivan, one of them shattering his spine. Doctors have told family members that he will probably be paralyzed from the neck down.

    Police are still looking for the little dipshit coward;

    The police are asking anyone with information about the case to call Det. Michele Mahan at (909) 384-5619, Sgt. Gary Robertson at (909) 384-5663, or the main police department line at (909) 384-5742.

    From News8000.com;

    Sullivan and her family have been at her son’s bedside at a local hospital. A fellow soldier from Christopher Sullivan’s 101st Airborne Division brought the infantry’s flag to the hospital, Suzanne Sullivan told CNN.

    “He loved his platoon, he loved his fellow soldiers,” she said as she began to sob. “He was so proud to serve our country.”

    Tears rolled down Christopher Sullivan’s face when he saw the flag of the Screaming Eagles, the nicknamed for the division, his mother said.

    “I asked Chris if he wanted to me to hang it on the wall or cover him in it,” Suzanne Sullivan said. “He nodded that he wanted me to cover him with it. Once I did that he started to cry, which made me start to cry. It’s been really hard on all of us.”

    UPDATE: Kevin dropped a link in the comments that reports that Jurado turned himself in.

  • On Manning: Why so lonely in Leavenworth?

    A couple days ago in an article discussing the developing legal defense of the traitor Bradley Manning an important point was raised by Josh Gerstein, the point I personally find to be the most compelling of the entire episode:

    …the hearing also produced equally compelling evidence of the larger issue that is often overlooked in discussions of Manning’s alleged misdeeds: the systematic breakdown in security that enabled a low-ranking enlisted man to abscond with a staggering quantity of classified Pentagon and State Department documents.

    As I’ve said before, the reality of running an organization the size and magnitude of the U.S. military is that you’re going to get bad apples. It’s inevitable. Most of us know these as “the 10%”, that not so illustrious group our Drill Instructor and SNCOs warned us about. If you fall in those groups it’s the weak link you find yourself wasting so much of your time with. That motley lot of shit bags and degenerates who slip through the cracks.

    No amount of TS/SCI box checking by the Office of Personnel Management will catch them all. As always our last, and only true, line of defense is the committed professionals of the NCO and Officer Corps. Bradley Manning is what happens when those people don’t do their job. That sucks to hear but it’s the hard, ugly truth.

    Gerstein goes on to recount many of the ugly facts most glaring to those of us who have or still handle classified material for a living:

    Despite a series of violent outbursts and other indications he was in serious mental distress, Manning’s security clearance wasn’t suspended until he was arrested in May of last year. Some soldiers had long thought he was a threat to himself and others. At least one believed Manning had lunged for a weapon during a fight with another soldier.
    Yet Manning was allowed to spend about six months in a purportedly secure intelligence center in eastern Iraq with routine access to classified information — the same center where he sometimes sat at his computer or curled up on the floor, unresponsive to other soldiers.
    And the fact that a junior soldier was downloading 700,000 reports, most of them classified, didn’t seem to set off any alarms. Nor were there any questions at the time about why an analyst in Iraq needed vast numbers of military reports from Afghanistan, diplomatic cables about Iceland or assessments of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
    Security was so lax that anyone with access to the classified network could burn reams of “secret” data to a CD and simply walk out the door.

    Those of us who have worked with SIPR and JWICS in responsible environments well understand that a largely unsupervised and demonstrably unstable junior enlisted man having access to either terminal with a media device which can transfer data is the sort of thing that people lose stripes over. In the instances where it’s repeated, flagrant and eventually leading to the largest disclosure of classified documents during wartime in U.S. history I’m left to wonder: where are the rest of the Courts-Martial? Where is the accountability?

    I can imagine much of this is the result in the rush to “decompartmentalize” information. The scary revelations that things like 9/11 could have been averted if the CIA, FBI and local law enforcement had only been taking to each other prompted a total reassessment of how information is sequestered. I certainly remember passing hours upon hours reading Intellipedia on SIPR for no other reason than I found it interesting and I could. Did I need classified profiles of the Pakistani General Staff? No. Did I need to be reading about specific former Soviet assets in Kabul who were on the “go to” list for DIA? No. But I could and I did. I imagine many of these things on how and why we cordon off information will be worked out over the next decade. Most pressing for people like me, though, is the question of why we aren’t holding leadership responsible for these critical national security breaches.

    Merry Christmas.

  • Manning defense witness: The Army shouldn’t trust soldiers

    I guess the Manning defense team is trying to baffle the jury with bullshit, tossing all kinds of defense strategies against the wall until one sticks. So far, they’ve claimed he didn’t release classified communications to Scandi albino, Julian Asange, the Wikileaks founder, but if he did do it, it was only because he’s gay and it’s hard to be gay in the military. But today’s defense is that the military had the audacity to trust soldiers to not release classified documents to Scandi albinos (Associated Press link);

    But witnesses said soldiers routinely accessed music, movies and computer games over the network as well.

    “I remember thinking that was something we shouldn’t be so liberal about,” said Capt. Barclay Keay, who was in charge of a night shift Manning worked for a few weeks in late 2009.

    Hey, Captain, just how “in charge” were you if you allowed it to go on? Seems to me that someone who was responsible for the product generated by that shift could make his own policies. But, irrespective of this captain’s inability to accept responsibility for the actions of his crew, I assume they all had security clearances and had agreed not to release classified documents to Scandi albinos and they all knew the consequences of their malfeasance if they did.

    Keay’s impression of Manning was that he was a good soldier who “did good analytical work.”

    But Sgt. Daniel Padgett, one of Manning’s supervisors, said otherwise, recalling an incident when he sat down with Manning for a “counseling session” after the soldier was late for work.

    When Padgett tried to impress on Manning the importance of being on time, “his demeanor changed,” the former supervisor testified. He said Manning then stood up and overturned a table, spilling a radio and computer onto the floor. Padgett said he moved Manning away from a gun rack while someone else restrained him until he calmed down. Padgett said he didn’t remember reporting the incident to his supervisors.

    So, despite the fact that Ron Paul and Code Pink think that Manning was mistreated by the Army which therefore mitigates his malfeasance, someone in the Army was coddling him. Further evidence of the Amy coddling the sociopath;

    Former Spec. Jihrleah Showman, who was Manning’s supervisor, described a succession of outbursts by Manning at their Army base stateside and, later, in Iraq, leading up to a confrontation in which she said Manning “punched me in the face, unprovoked, and displayed an uncontrollable behavior.”

    And when Showman reported Manning to her supervisors for the assault, nothing happened. So where is the evidence that he was victimized by the Army because he was gay? It looks to me like they were protecting him.

    They should have imprisoned him the first time he was caught lip syncing Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”.

    ADDED: ROS sends this nugget;

    The Advisory Board of the Bradley Manning Support Network includes Robert Meeropol, whose parents, communists Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were convicted of violating the Espionage Act and executed for giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. Meeropol says “it is an honor to join a Board that includes Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, as well as Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, and filmmaker Michael Moore, among others, but also because I believe it is imperative for as many people as possible to raise their voices in support of Manning.”

    Emphasis is mine.

    I’m glad to see those traitorous genes still gainfully employed and in the proper company.

  • FBI: Gangs are stealing munitions

    Daniel sends this link from Business Insider and Military.com about gang members stealing military munitions from bases;

    The FBI released its gang assessment in October saying that of the 1.4 million gang members in the U.S., many are in the American military.

    I don’t know what “many of them” means, but I’m sure it’s meant to make us think that millions of gang members are in the military. At the Business Insider link there’s a picture of a 105mm artillery round found in a gang member’s home. What is a gang going to do with an artillery round?

    While it appears the Army has the largest problem with gangs, some experts feel other branches may be underreporting the number of gang members within the rank and file.

    “I think the problem — percentage wise — is bigger in the Marines but there are no statistics to back that up since the Marines fail to admit it ever existed,” said Richard Valdemar, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sergeant and gang expert. “In incidents I am personally familiar with, it seems to be mostly in the Marines.”

    Like that, Marines? No one can pin down numbers, so they’ll just paint with a broad brush.

    Former Marine and previous gang member T.J. Heyden told the Daily Press that none of this surprises him.

    “It’s a lot harder to get firearms and rifles off a base but artillery rounds aren’t that difficult,” he said, pointing out firearms are counted three times a day, but it’s much harder to account for artillery shells.

    “It’s easy to say you fired 10 rounds when you only actually fired eight or six.”

    Yeah, and artillery rounds come in so handy on the street, too.

    Gang experts feel a more stringent qualification process during recruitment plus continued vigilance and education about gangs and their practices could help identify gang members within the ranks.

    Recruiters want to tell us what the military can do? It sounds to me like the the gun thing with VoteVets, if they have a clean record, the only left to do is profiling.

  • Training Brain Operations Center Systems Integration Modeling and Simulation

    A TRADOC organization asked me to share their latest endeavor with you. The Training Brain Operations Center Systems Integration Modeling and Simulation is making 3D simulation training aids to help educate leaders and soldiers on various tasks. But I guess they’re havng trouble getting the word out on their products, so they want me to help them. Here’s an example of their work Establishing a Patrol Base;

    According to their email “Training Brain Operations Center Systems Integration Modeling and Simulation (TBOC SIMS) is a US Army TRADOC G2 organization that transforms actual combat events into unclassified 3D visualizations and gaming products within 96 hours.”

    Their social media sites are at Facebook and Twitter.

    I hope you active duty guys take advantage of these great training aids. The fellow, Brian, who wrote us said “…a Private or 2LT can request a video or VBS2 product from us and it costs him and his unit nothing.”

    TBOC SIMS provides tailored M&S Support that includes:
    Full battle event recreations (for example the Battle of Ganjgal)
    Geospatial terrain products
    Lesson Plan conversions to Windows Media File (WMV) from Power Point briefings
    Smartphone applications
    MMOG Development

    Yeah, I know, I’m just a tool of Big Army.

  • NOT Just Another Day.

    Commenter Doc Bailey and I have been swapping emails about this and that. I was rather surprised to learn that we have some things in common even though shifted 40 years in time.

    But he mentioned a coupla things I couldn’t directly relate to so I asked him to expand on them.

    Here is the first, in his words. Thanks Doc.

    —————————-

    Here is my account of 25 June 2007, and the events that happened to me that day. I have to put it out there because people have to know. please understand these events are painful for me to recount.

    It was a normal day like any other. We were all excited to be getting back, but i was exuasted having pulled a 6 hour gaurd shift right before getting off. We all sat around and joked. I could hear people laughing about the game “company of heroes” that Craig and WillieBo had played. They’d gone for 5 hours only to get their asses kickedby the germans. I was fretting over Jubi. I was a little upset, because he was supposed to have been evaced the night before for (what i would find out later) a slipped disk. I had given him morphine right before i thought he was going to go, he didn’t and i was bracing for the ass reeming i was going to get. I had spent all night fretting about a patient, and in the end i was pretty damm tired, everyone else on the otherhand were lively in a way only the loose cannons can be.
    Like always we had details to do, and things that needed to get done. Clean the pisser, sweep and mop, make the “gym” look pretty, Mop the mats, sweep the sleeping bay, and of course pick up cigarette buts. we did these, with the usual amount of bitching complaining and griping. It came time to load up and off we went.

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