Category: Military issues

A reader who just returned from a deployment sent us this link to a Daily Beast article about a lawsuit that’s been filed against the Department of Defense pertaining to their inattention to rape cases;

[Rebecca Havrilla, a former sergeant and explosive-ordnance-disposal technician] and 16 others are now plaintiffs in a class action suit filed Tuesday against Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, alleging that their failure to act amounted to a violation of the plaintiffs’ Constitutional rights. The suit, brought by Washington, D.C. attorney Susan Burke, and filed in the Eastern Virginia federal court, charges that despite ample evidence of the problem, both Gates and Rumsfeld “ran institutions in which perpetrators were promoted; … in which Plaintiffs and other victims were openly subject to retaliation… and ordered to keep quiet.” The plaintiffs, in turn, have been “directly and seriously injured by Defendants’ actions and omissions.”

The person who sent us the link pretty much agrees that, whether or not the incidents or victims have judicial merit, the problem is not as wide spread to be characterized as a culture that was fostered by any unwritten policy. I understand that despite a published policy, some commanders may bend those policies, and that’s their discretion – that’s why they’re commanders. But to blame the entire DoD is just ridiculous.

Susan Burke was also the lead attorney against Kellog, Brown and Root’s burn pits, so I’m guessing she only chases military ambulances.

Picked this up at Ace of Spades; apparently the XM-25 has been used in Afghanistan to some success since November and the Army wants more;

“We disrupted two insurgents on an OP (observation point) and we silenced two machine-gun positions — two PKM positions,” said Lt. Col. Chris Lehner, Product Manager Individual Weapons for Project Manager Soldier Weapons at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., describing some of the scenarios he witnessed in theater where the XM25 had been used. “We destroyed four ambush locations, where the survivors fled.”

“And when we launched it at a longer range target, who was carrying a machine gun and it exploded near his target — it either badly wounded him or scared him good enough that he dropped his machine gun and ran away,” Lehner recounted.

Overall in Afghanistan, the five XM25s have been with two separate units. The first unit used the weapon on four engagements and fired 28 rounds in combat. The second unit was able to use the XM25 on five engagements and fired 27 rounds in combat.

“The troops are very excited to carry it,” Conley said. “We’ve limited who can carry it based on the number of folks that we’ve trained. But within that group of Soldiers that are trained on the operation of the XM25, I heard a Soldier say ‘hey, he carried it yesterday, so I get it today.’”

Kit Up records a conversation;

There’s certainly some posturing and whatnot between the Soldiers to try to get to carry it. We trained a guy on Christmas and he was literally thanking me saying “Wow, this is the best Christmas ever!”

Like I said in my first post about it, every soldier can be a Bradley.

I heard this rumor throughout my career, but I never paid much attention to it. It seems to me that the Army wouldn’t give me a primary weapon in the cupola of my M113 if I couldn’t defend myself with it. But the Rumor Doctor looks at the use of the devastating 50 cal. Ma Deuce against dismounted troops.

Legend has it that the .50-caliber is so powerful that the Geneva Conventions prohibit U.S. troops from using it against human targets, but does that make sense considering it is okay to fire much larger artillery shells against enemy troops?

Find out the truth at the link.

Thanks to the Rumor Doctor hisself for sending us the link.

We, at TAH, consider ourselves the antithesis to Veterans Today, which seems preoccupied with demeaning Jews. So, in that spirit, we present a link to the Jewish Daily Forward honoring “Profiles of Our Fallen“, Jewish Americans who have given their lives in the war against terror by Maia Efrem;

Later this year, the United States will mark the 10th anniversary of its military involvement in Afghanistan. March 20 will mark the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The Department of Defense reports that, as of February 7, 5,775 members of the U.S. armed forces have been killed in these theaters of war.

American Jews make up only a fraction of those casualties – by a reliable count, 37 men and women who lost their lives in combat. Experts say the number of Jews may be higher, as some soldiers don’t declare their religion, especially when serving in Muslim countries. Among the Jewish dead are the first female airman to die in Iraq and the only member of the U.S. Coast Guard killed in action since the Vietnam War.

The Stars & Stripes reports that nearly a third of voters overseas were screwed out of their votes;

According to a new survey by the Overseas Vote Foundation, about 18 percent of voters living abroad never received their absentee ballot, and nearly 13 percent did not receive the forms in time to successfully vote in the mid-term election.

But the foundation called that encouraging.

Well, it would be encouraging if your only looking at year-over-year improvement, but not if you’re hoping for the law to be enforced. “Good enough for government work” is an outdated platitude. Hpw ’bout government workers just do their damn jobs for a change.