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

Category: Military issues

  • I hate to say “I told you so”

    Just this morning I said “So which is easier to cut, weapons or personnel? Weapons create jobs. So that leaves…well…you.” As if to make me look brilliant, Stars & Stripes reports;

    Defense officials will slash $78 billion in program spending and begin cutting up to 70,000 soldiers and Marines as federal budget officials tighten the purse strings on military spending.

    Defense Secretary Robert Gates said none of the end strength cuts are immediate, but in the next five years, officials will begin trimming about 49,000 soldiers from the Army and up to 20,000 Marines from the Corps. He could not say how long the process may take, but it is expected to save about $6 billion and help close an anticipated $24 billion hole in defense spending.

    Like I said this morning, do you notice any other government agencies proposing personnel cuts, or cuts in their budgets at all? Do you mean to tell me that there’s not one useless person in every agency that they can do without? Yet there are 69,000 trigger pullers we won’t need five years from now?

    I remember when the Clinton Administration was buying service members out of their careers in 1993 and a year later they were asking them to come back…and they could keep their buy-outs.

  • DADT repeal and ROTC

    Ben sent us a link to an article by Daniel Flynn on Frontpage Magazine that recounts the history of the removal of ROTC from some college campuses during, and to protest, the Vietnam War. It reminded me of the events much more recently at the university where I taught ROTC for a few years. It was at the University of Vermont, and if I remember correctly, it was in 1989.

    We were a small unit with about 30 cadets and our office was a two-story house between the campuses and the residences. One morning I came in to do my daily PT and discovered that someone had broken the glass in the front doors and spread red paint over our porch in some weak attempt at intimidation. Like I said, it was 1989 – what pray tell was going on in the world that could inspire such an act of childish endeavor?

    There were usually posters stuck up near our building from Geezers For Sitting On Our Hands about the evil US war machine which was destroying corn crops in El Salvador with mini-guns. At the time each round of 20mm was about $50 a piece, so it always seemed to me that if the Army wanted to destroy a corn field, there were cheaper ways to do it.

    That same year, teachers at UVM shut down my Wilderness Survival class (a half-credit PE class) by complaining that I was abusing the chickens I bought for the students to kill and eat because I’d teach them to pull the heads from the chickens – a method approved by the ASPCA as humane. When that didn’t work, they disapproved of the way the chickens were stored in cages the night before our exercise. The recommendation that came from the board after my testimony was that we take the students on a field trip to a slaughtering facility. So, obviously, we weren’t going to get any rational alternatives and we shut down the program.

    Within a few months of that, the university decided that they needed our building for another department and they made plans to move us off campus – several miles away to the campus of Saint Micheal’s College, a Catholic college, to an ancient set of government quarters. Of course, the best part of being on campus was our access to students for recruiting purposes. Despite our protests, we were forced to move. Our cadets suffered most because they were unable to get our offices for help with their various activities.

    Anyway, this was all before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and it wasn’t until after they’d moved us someone made the connection to the gay issue as an excuse to keep us off campus. So I don’t expect the repeal of DADT to yield much more access to campuses.

  • First Female “Soldier of the Year”

    Congratulations to SGT Gallagher, a member of the Army Marksmanship Team and now 2011’s Soldier of the Year

  • More budget cuts for DoD

    Fox News headlines today a story this morning about outgoing Secretary of Defense proposing cuts to his department’s budget;

    Defense Secretary Robert Gates is announcing the latest round of cost-cutting measures for the military, including a plan to do away with a new amphibious vehicle that can ferry troops to shore while under fire.

    The plan is aimed at staving off potentially deeper cuts by the White House or Congress by showing that the Pentagon is taking seriously a call to rein in the U.S. deficit.

    Here’s a simple question: how many other government agencies are submitting programs they think ought to be cut? Before all y’all break Google looking for the answer, I’ll give it to you. None.

    Gates is on his way out and DoD is a favorite target of Democrats. Now they’ve all discovered that they can cut defense spending while we’re engaged in a war around the world and no one gets pissed.

    Newly elected lawmakers aligned with the ultraconservative tea party movement, including Sen. Rand Paul, have said that cuts to military spending must be considered if the federal government is to reduce its deficit.

    Yup, even Rand Paul, who convinced a lot of people that he wasn’t allied with Adam Kokesh, the IVAW clown who made a video with Rand Paul to highlight their similarities during Kokeash’s failed congressional race in New Mexico. Now, Paul’s true anti-war colors come out. Why isn’t he calling for cuts in the redundant Commerce Department, or the absolutely useless Education Department?

    So which is easier to cut, weapons or personnel? Weapons create jobs. So that leaves…well…you.

  • “Killing is a drug” vet turns out to be poser

    Paul wrote to tell us that according to Joe Gould at “Outside the Wire” the Army Times did what I didn’t and went to interview that veteran who wrote the “Killing is a drug” paper that got him suspended from his college.

    UPDATE: Army records say C.J. Whittington left the Army as an E-4 and his MOS was 92F, which is a petroleum supply specialist, serving with the 27th CS MSB, 4th BCT, 1st Cavalry (now Armored). His record does not reflect he received a Purple Heart or a Combat Action Badge. Army Times has interviewed Whittington, and he said he was not an infantry squad leader, but that he held a dual MOS: 11B and 92F. Thought y’all would want to know.

    I guess the article is in the print edition of the Army Times and I can’t get to it (because I don’t want to contribute to Rick Maze’ paycheck). Honestly, I’m getting sick and tired of questioning everybody’s service. Can’t I take anyone at their word anymore? I hope Charles Whittington gets throat punched. And stays supended from college and ends up filling ketchup dispensers at some greasy diner for the rest of his life.

  • The Rumor Doctor targets another bit of Marine Corps heritage

    Stars & Stripes’ Rumor Doctor, Jeff Schogol chases down the origins of the moniker “Teufelshunde” bestowed on Marines during the First World War;

    Indeed, a Marine Corps magazine, reported in April 1918 that Germans referred to Marines as “teufel hunden,” two months before Belleau Wood, according to Aquilina. The word “Teufelhunden” is a combination of the German words for “devil” and “dogs,” or “Teufel” and “Hunde.” But the possessive form of “Teufel” is “Teufels,” and the plural of “Hund” is “Hunde,” not “Hunden,” suggesting that whoever came up with the word wasn’t a native German speaker.

    Uh-oh. You’d better read the whole thing.

  • Navy relieves Capt. Honors (UPDATED)

    UPDATE: Associated Press is now reporting that the captain’s relief for cause is permanent.

    So the Navy decided to take the path of least resistance and bow to their civilian masters. They temporarily relieved Captain Owen Honors for his video productions more than four years ago while he the Executive Officer of the USS Enterprise.

    Wasn’t it the Agriculture Department who, a few years, found large numbers of their agency employees downloading porn on their government computers? They wouldn’t release the names of the employees and they all eventually returned to work. I guess that civilians are held to a different standard than military members.

    I can show you much worse stuff that my father recorded during his time in the Navy when his ship, the USS Saipan, crossed the Equator. Stuff involving crawling through garbage, a cross-dresser in mermaid garb – and that was during the Korean War. Does the Navy want to investigate that, too?

    People are finally watching the video rather than take the media’s word and folks just don’t think there’s much there to be outraged about. Well, except the Left, of course. One local TV station went as far as to call the video a “Navy orientation video”. That story has been pulled, but the internet remembers;

    The Huffington Post says that somehow these videos cast a pall over “the Navy culture”;

    The military has undergone a cultural shift in recent decades away from the loutish, frat-boy behavior that was exposed by the Tailhook scandal in 1991. It is now working to accommodate gays in its ranks with Congress’ repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Also, the Navy is opening its all-male submarine force to women this year.

    Actually, the uproar over the video only serves to highlight the growing gulf between our military and civilian cultures. No one would have thought twice about Honors’ video if it had emerged in a college fraternity. Well, most of the crowd who Honors was playing to are college fraternity-aged.

  • Fashion War

    According to a link from Old Trooper, North Korean soldiers have been spotted in the Demilitarized Zone dividing the Korean peninsula with camouflage patterns similar to soldiers from the South.

    Some North Korean troops stationed along the border have donned a camouflage uniform similar to that worn by South Koreans, apparently to practise intrusion drills, a defence ministry official said Tuesday.

    The move prompted the South to advance the supply of new uniforms for its own troops to avoid confusion, the official told journalists in a background briefing.

    “It’s been confirmed some North Korean frontline troops are wearing uniforms with woodland camouflage pattern which is similar to those of South Korean uniforms,” the official said.

    “Our judgment is that the North’s special forces stationed there are staging intrusion drills wearing the uniforms.”

    Sun Tzu would love this distraction, if he was ever a real singular person and if he was still alive. I would guess both sides in this impending conflict are regularly reading the Chinese philosopher’s tome since most of his observations are about combat between racially-similar opponents. Patterns on the uniform would only confuse the South Korean soldiers and get the Norks a couple of seconds advantage.

    The article goes on to mention the imprisonment of Major Cho, a South Korean spy who is being held by the Chinese, which brings to mind another article from Old Trooper about China buying it’s first carrier-killer missile. Obviously Chine sees itself having a role in the intra-Korean conflict and the purchase of this missile might be an indication of it’s intent to keep the US out of the war.