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

Category: Military issues

  • Yes, all of this is free

    The LA Times reports that the Army came out yesterday and admitted that the wonderful life that we all led in the Army is free. That’s right, all of that living in the woods, eating crappy chow, jumping from airplanes, sliding down a muddy slope on a rope…you earned that adventure;

    You cannot buy your way into the U.S. military, Army officials reminded the public Monday, trying to clear up confusion in the Chinese American community after an El Monte man was arrested last week in connection with charging immigrants to join what authorities said was a phony military force.

    “Everything we do is free of charge; that’s part of our duty, giving back to the community,” said Manuel A. Perales, sergeant first class at the Army recruiting station in El Monte.

    Remember that next time you’re eating an MRE in neck-deep alligator-infested swamp water. Apparently there are people willing to pay for that experience and the Army has to have a press conference to announce that it doesn’t cost us a thing to live that life.

  • CSM Ian Fielding

    7-year-old Ian Fielding, battling muscular dystrophy, wished he could be a soldier and some Fort Riley soldiers made his dream come true. He certainly looks more intelligent and proficient than some sergeant majors I’ve known;

    His favorite activity was repelling – the makings of an ROTC cadet.

  • Pentagon clears Stan McCrystal

    Surprise, the Pentagon says they couldn’t verify the accuracy of the reporting in the Rolling Stone article which profiled General Stan McCrystal according to the Stars & Stripes – yeah the same article for which Dickbreath Michael Hastings won a Polk Prize;

    Pentagon investigators said they were unable to confirm the events as reported in the June 2010 article in Rolling Stone, and the inquiry’s final review challenged the accuracy of the profile of General McChrystal, who was the top commander in Afghanistan.

    The profile quoted people identified as senior aides to the general making disparaging statements about members of President Obama’s national security team.

    Raise your hand if you’re surprised that Hastings can’t verify his interviews. Yeah, me neither. Now he knows why his “men who stare at Senators” (hat tip to B5 for that phrase) story went absolutely no where.

    Nice move on the part of everyone who didn’t bother to lift a finger to defend him. Did I mention that US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry has been a dick for the whole four decades I’ve known him? So much for “civilian leadership”.

  • The Gender Justice conference

    Some douchebag organization that calls itself Miller-McCune takes up the “Gender Justice” issue with it’s focus on the “Gender Justice Conference” at West Point. it turns out to be nothing more than poisoning the well of future officers with unsubstantiated blather;

    Speakers at the two-day Gender Justice conference — hosted by the West Point Center for the Rule of Law — tackled a tight range of sober topics, and the Friday morning speaker presented the results of three years of research about a particularly troubling subject: rape and gender inequality in the military.

    According to her research, said Helen Benedict, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of the book The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, 1 in 3 women in the U.S. military is raped by another service member.

    yeah, you know where they got that “1-in-3″‘ number? From some broke-dick survey in which they polled every woman who worn a uniform since the Vietnam War and got responses from less than 1% of the women they polled. We’ve discussed this poll before. Don’t you think that if you were not a victim of violent treatment at the hands of fellow soldiers, you’d be less likely to respond to an obvious cheap shot at those same soldiers?

    Benedict is a novelist and short story fiction writer who stumbled upon this survey and decided to make it a work of her own brand of fiction. And now she’s taking it on the road to the service academies to poison the minds of future officers. At the behest of those same service academies. What possible contribution could a band of 50 cadets have to add to this travesty of research? They’ve never served in the military and their experience is solely at the academic level.

    Mickiela Montoya, one of the female Iraq veterans Benedict interviewed for the book, explained her experience of men’s treatment of women in the military: “There are three things they’ll let you be: A bitch, a ho or a dyke. You’re a bitch if you won’t sleep with them; you’re a ho if you have only one boyfriend; and you’re a dyke if you don’t like them.”

    Yeah, that sounds just like how I treated women who I encountered in the military. Well, except that I also treated them with respect they wouldn’t ordinarily get from their college classmates and respect for their rank and experience. And i was in the infantry – the branch that’s supposed to be the most misogynistic because it excludes women. The biggest “boys’ club”.

    And, oh, by the way, the Geezers For Sitting On Our hands have embraced Benedict’s “research” as a part of their anti-recruiter campaign. So WTF is she doing at West Point? Who’s next? Cindy Sheehan?

  • Larger helmets may protect soldiers better

    Larger helmet

    The USAToday reports that brain injury experts may recommend larger helmets for troops to protect them from IED blasts;

    Concussions are a common wound among troops knocked about inside armored vehicles or flung to the ground while on foot patrols by an explosion from a roadside bomb, or improvised explosive device (IED). The study’s findings offer an answer drawn from equipment the Army already has, researchers say.

    “This is what appears to be an off-the-shelf solution,” says William Moss, a Lawrence Livermore physicist who co-authored the study.

    Helmets normally weigh about 5½ pounds. A size larger headgear would add about 4 ounces, Moss says. The study, which was funded by the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) found that adding padding beyond an eighth of an inch provided slightly better protection…

    If proof exists, do it.

  • Kristof: Raise America’s Taxes

    Don’t you just want to throttle these lying little f**ks;

    There is no single reason for today’s budget mess, but it’s worth remembering that the last time our budget was in the black was in the Clinton administration. That’s a broad hint that one sensible way to overcome our difficulties would be to revert to tax rates more or less as they were under President Clinton. That single step would solve three-quarters of the deficit for the next five years or so.

    Kudos to Mr. Obama for boldly stating that truth in his speech — even if he did focus only on taxes for the very wealthiest. I also thought he was right to say that we need spending cuts — including in our defense budget.

    Yeah, Clinton balanced the year-over-year budget for two years by cutting the military so badly that when we needed them, during the Bush Administration spending increased dramatically. While the Clinton military actions consisted of firing off a few missiles left over from the Gulf War without replenishing the stocks. Clinton was dragged kicking and screaming towards welfare reform which saved him a pretty penny, too. As I mentioned earlier today, he benefited from Roth conversions in the first few years of that tax shelter that liberals now want to eliminate.

    It’s funny how liberals can only think of raising taxes – even though the Bush tax cuts increased tax revenues. The only waste they can see is in defense spending – even though rebuilding the military is always more costly than maintenance, in money and lives.

    ROS sends us this link from the Wall Street Journal;

    Mr. Obama then packaged his poison in the rhetoric of bipartisanship—which “starts,” he said, “by being honest about what’s causing our deficit.” The speech he chose to deliver was dishonest even by modern political standards.

  • First lady thinks Americans aren’t connected to the military

    ROS sent us this link, and I read the article yesterday, but I was hesitant to comment, because anything I might say can be construed as ungrateful and disrespectful. But anyway, Michelle Obama interviewed with Stars & Stripes;

    “Still most Americans don’t have a connection to the military community,” she said during an interview with Stars and Stripes on Tuesday. “This is a group of individuals who give so much and don’t want to fall into the shadows. They want to know they live in a country that cares about what they do.”

    So her solution is to ask Americans to volunteer to express “broader support from the entire country is needed to reach out to military families and offer them the respect they deserve”. My first reaction is not meant to be ungrateful, but, if you haven’t been moved to do these things in the last ten years, the troops really don’t need someone who wants to mouth the words and go through the motions because Michelle Obama told you to.

    Even IVAW complained that Americans were generally ignoring the troops and the war. It’s pretty much too late to pretend you care because it’s the next popular thing to do with your “Organizing for America” friends.

    When the wars began, I took donated pogie bait to the guys at Walter Reed, brought wives to my apartment so they could cook homemade meals for their husbands, smuggled them beer, contacted their representatives in Congress – before there was a better-organized effort by the new organizations which have sprung up. When they started doing a better job than I was doing, I got out of the way.

    And that’s the best thing that these newly converted supporters of the troops can do – send your money, but stay out of the way. Or enlist.

  • Dicksmith; What a decade of war looks like

    Dicksmith at VetVoice in an apparent and successful attempt at putting his inexperience in the military on display writes this about a “staff ride” he participated in recently;

    Last year, I had the opportunity to join a class from the Army’s Command and General Staff College on a staff ride to the Civil War battlefield at Chickamauga. Frankly, I was appalled. Most of the 30 or so field grade officers in the class behaved with less military bearing than the worst Privates I had led during my active duty time. My judgement was that these officers, who spend all their time in their home units as straight-laced examples of “squared away”, were just blowing off steam. The military historian who arranged our trip, a former Army grunt and current Naval Reserve intel officer, had a different judgement. “This is what an Army looks like after a decade of war.”

    The more I think about it, the more I think he was right.

    Funny, cuz, whenever I participated in an event that included a large number of officers and and relatively few NCOs, officers tended to act the fools. Even after a decade without war.

    But thanks for politicizing Every. Thing. You. Can.

    So how does this relate to discipline problems in the force? When this many mid-career Soldiers are popping smoke, you create a leadership vacuum. Sub-par or even poor Soldiers, who otherwise would not be trusted with much responsibility, become platoon sergeants or Sergeants Major, or are given command over some of the Army’s top units, like the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

    Yeah, funny how the Army survived after Vietnam despite the lack of support from the hippies and a large number of Americans. Somehow, there was a cadre of professional soldiers who built the Volunteer Army into the most effective force the world has ever seen. Yeah, we don’t need quitters and pussies like Dicksmith to rebuild our forces or set the example for us or to snipe at the active force from the sidelines – good riddance, dick.

    I still think the decision to go to war in Afghanistan in 2001 was the correct one, but the prosecution of that war has lacked any clear direction or stated metrics for victory for nearly a decade.

    As opposed to the clarity that the Obama Administration has provided? So we’re not sure if we’re in it for victory, or if we’re in it to just withdraw under fire. Dicksmith, you’re a real fucking rocket surgeon.

    Thanks to Blackfive who sent the above photo yesterday.