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

Category: Military issues

  • The deceit of the DADT study

    We all heard Secretary Gates tell us that most of the troops don’t think that repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell won’t affect the military’s readiness. So Organizing For America couldn’t wait to jump on that tiny fact;

    The Washington Times however sees it differently;

    The Pentagon survey of all troops, be they in desk jobs or in the field, found about 70 percent said open gays would have positive, mixed or no effect on unit cohesion.

    By contrast, combat troops, who live in intimate surroundings while deployed, overwhelming reported that open gays would undermine military readiness, or preparedness for combat.

    60% of the Army and Marines think that gays would have an effect on readiness. I wonder why factoring in the Air Force and Navy would dilute the opposition to repealing the policy. Hey! I’m just wondering. Don’t get your nose bent out of shape, there, fella.

    The Army is further diluted by it’s large number of REMFs – I heard the ratio of combat arms soldiers to REMFs is 1:7. I have no reference, but it sounds right.

    But this goes to my post yesterday – why do it now if it effects readiness and while we’re engaged in a war? The people who actually pull triggers disagree with the desk jockeys. In fact that’s what the whole study boils down to; people who don’t care about the military (OFA, Congress, the White House, VoteVets) and REMFs against the people who actually face the enemy.

    Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s only a matter of time that punk-asses like Dan Choi (who I would throat punch even if he was a breeder) get their way. I’m just questioning the timing.

  • Deficit Commission recommends pay freeze for Congress

    The President’s own Deficit Commission stepped away from their draft proposal last month which recommended a pay freeze for the military and they added a proposal to freeze Congressional pay according to Stars & Stripes;

    “Unlike most Americans, members of Congress benefit from an automatic salary increase every single year – deserved or not,” the report says. “Before Congress can ask the American people to sacrifice, it should lead by example. The Commission recommends an immediate three-year salary freeze for all members of Congress.”

    The recommendation comes as outgoing House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, has called for a pay freeze for some troops.

    I wonder if the commission reads This Ain’t Hell.

    Thanks to Jeffrey Schogol for the link.

  • More military pay freeze talk

    Adirondack Patriot emailed us a link from Federal News Radio which stirs up the rumor about plans to freeze military pay.

    Fueling speculation on the matter, the co-chairs of the president’s panel on reducing the deficit have recommended a freeze on basic military pay and housing allowances for three years. The panel’s final report will be released Wednesday.

    Jeffrey Schogol, a Stars and Stripes reporter sent me a link to his article yesterday about the White House being evasive about a military pay freeze;

    The president has called for a 1.4 percent pay raise for troops next year, Jeffrey Zients, of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters on Monday afternoon. But Zients did not answer directly when asked whether the White House was also considering a separate pay freeze for troops, as recommended by the co-chairs of the deficit panel.

    “This freeze does not apply to the military,” Zients said before taking another question.

    Zients was later pressed by a reporter who asked whether a freeze in military pay was off the table.

    “The president will work with [Defense Secretary Robert Gates] and ultimately with the Congress to set an appropriate military pay increase consistent with the burdens of the military and what we’re asking of our folks in uniform,” he said.

    It’s difficult to tell what’s on their minds. So I guess we won’t know until tomorrow.

    But TSO and I are both going to be in DC tomorrow, but there are eleven other people who have posting privileges here (yes, eleven believe it or not) so if one of you happen to hear anything substantial, don’t be shy.

  • Gates reports on Pentagon’s DADT study

    So we were all treated to Secretary Robert Gates’ report on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell this afternoon. No surprises, I suppose, since we expected the civilian leaders to toe the Obama Administration’s line. The entire study can be summed up in this quote from Gates (Stars & Stripes link);

    “While a repeal of DADT will likely, in the short term, bring about some limited and isolated disruption to unit cohesion and retention, we do not believe this disruption will be widespread or long-lasting,” the report states. “We are convinced that the U.S. military can adjust and accommodate this change, just as it has others in history.”

    Um, I hate to be the guy who points to the elephant in the room, but, in the short term, we’re still engaged in a war. If the repeal will cause a disruption, why are we doing while we’re fighting a war? Doesn’t a disruption mean that people will be preoccupied with a stupid administrative adjustment while they should be focused on fighting an enemy?

    And this has been my concern from the beginning. After we wrap up this war, it’s certain to be followed by a time of relative peace during which we can decide who gets to put what in who – without distracting the force from it’s deadly business.

    The ONLY reason this is an issue now is because there’s a Democrat President and a Democrat Senate and the gays sense an opportunity to press towards their political goals. It’s disgusting and it’s not in the interests of our national security. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell doesn’t make us less safe, but the repeal may. I’d rather wait until these wars are through.

  • Hoyer: We should freeze military pay, too

    I mentioned earlier that the Obama Administration moved to freeze government employees’ pay today. Not to be outdone, Steny Hoyer, the soon-to-be minority whip from Maryland said that the president should also freeze military pay as well according to The Hill;

    Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said including the military would have increased savings and add “an element of fairness.” He made the comments in a statement about he president’s announcement of a two-year pay freeze.

    An added “element of fairness” would be to freeze Congressional pay including Congressional staff, wouldn’t it Steny? Ya dope. It’s funny because I got an email from a journalist this afternoon who told me that he couldn’t get a straight answer to his inquiries to the White House on the subject of the eventuality of a military pay freeze.

    The Maryland Democrat also urged the administration to back a more comprehensive program to reduce the nation’s soaring deficit, along the lines of proposals from the president’s fiscal commission and a separate debt panel.

    Yeah, after the Democrat Congress went on the largest spending spree in the history of the world, now all of a sudden Hoyer is Peter Pinchpenny. It sure is easy to be in the minority .

    Then Hoyer went on to demonstrate that he doesn’t understand this whole war thingie, he says;

    …with a strong exception for the members of our military and civilian employees risking their lives on our behalf in Afghanistan, Iraq, and anywhere else they are serving in harm’s way.”

    How would Hoyer freeze the pay of military members who are not in a shooting war and not freeze the pay of those involved in the war? Does he think that one group is perpetually at war while the other is perpetually not at war? I’d like to see his math on that one. Of course, he’s talking to a bunch of morons who don’t know any differently.

    Thanks to ROS and COB6 for the link.

  • Obama: Zero Tolerance for leaks

    So now that all of the horses are out of the barn, the president has decided to issue a warning that his administration will no longer tolerate any leaks. From the New York Daily News (by way of our buddies at Jammie Wearing Fool)

    President Obama has ordered a government-wide crackdown on access to classified information to limit the future airing of secrets by WikiLeaks.

    At Obama’s direction, the White House Office of Management and Budget sent out a memo to all agencies to make sure their workers can only see what they have to see to do their jobs.

    Do you mean that’s NOT how it was?

    “Any unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a violation of our law and compromises our national security,” according to reports.

    That’s new? Oh, I see, it’s new because the latest document release from Wikileaks actually affects this administration, not just the military or our allies. I get it now. Things that make the president look like a buffoon when the world finds out shouldn’t be made public.

    Oh, and to make sure that Federal Employees don’t disclose unauthorized information, the president also decided he’d freeze federal workers’ pay for two years today.

  • Keep Harvard out of range

    Peter, a student at Harvard, sends us a link from the Harvard Crimson written by student Sandra Korn entitled “Keep ROTC out of Range“. Obviously, Korn is a student for a reason – she teeters on the edge of being an ignorant twit in her opinion piece. Korn tries to make the point that allowing Harvard to reinstate the ROTC program in the event that the military’s policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is rescinded shouldn’t be a foregone conclusion. She makes several false allegations to illustrate her blunt point;

    [T]he U.S. Department of Defense has faced allegations of abuse ranging from torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to training Latin American soldiers in anti-humanitarian tactics and principles at the School of the Americas. The Iraq War alone has seen torture at Abu Ghraib, the Haditha massacre, and the horrifying shootings by Blackwater military contractors in Baghdad, as well as approximately 100,000 civilian deaths. Wikileaks recently exposed that within the last decade, the U.S. armed forces have engaged in countless non-humanitarian and debatably illegal practices in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. has provided military aid in support of Israel’s aggressive actions against Palestinian civilians.

    Sandra only has allegations, yet in her mind those allegations prove guilt. “Torturing prisoners” is completely a judgment call. If waterboarding is the worst thing that happened to prisoners, they weren’t tortured. The Abu Ghraib incident was carried out by soldiers themselves. Naked pyramids weren’t concocted in the halls of the Pentagon.

    Sandra, did you notice that no one has been convicted in the Haditha case yet? I wonder why. If you’reconvinced that the military is training Latin American soldiers to commit atrocities against their own populations, maybe you should talk to talk to some one who was actually at the School instead of the paranoid peacenik professors who’ve obviously wrongly informed you.

    Time and again, Korn praises the people serving in the military, yet she charges that the “Department of Defense” committed all of these things she considers horrible. Where is this machine called the Department of Defense? The people she claims to admire are the folks who would have to commit these “crimes” – there is no one to blame except real people.

    So I submit that the government cut off all of the funding and grants to Harvard until they stop churning out utter twits like Sandra Korn.

  • Canadian families plagued by fake casualty calls

    The Montreal Gazette reports that some soldiers’ families are receiving phone calls falsely informing them of their soldiers’ death;

    The Department of National Defence said the prank is not something it has ever dealt with before.

    “We are not aware of other similar incidents,” spokesman Major Martell Thompson said.

    He said the Forces are baffled at someone showing so little respect for the families of soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.

    “It’s pretty low. I can think of a lot of things one can do to voice their discontent with the mission and this would not have made my list of what people would do,” he said. “This does not fit into what a normal human being would do to another.”

    I hope they catch the little weasel and cut his nuts off. If he has any.