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

Category: Military issues

  • Charles de Gaulle “not what it used to be”

    This is not encouraging at all. And everyone wonders why we spend so much money on defense (from the Daily Mail);

    The French aircraft carrier which is set to play a key role in defending Britain over the next decade has broken down.

    As President Nicolas Sarkozy prepares to use a London summit this week to announce that RAF jets will fly from the carrier Charles de Gaulle, his naval chiefs have told him that she is no longer seaworthy.

    ‘She is meant to be heading to Afghanistan but is instead in her home port with a faulty propulsion system,’ said a French Navy source.

    Yeah, this is after three years of being refitted. The French and British have decided that they can get along with one carrier each and Britain’s isn’t built yet so they have to rely on France’s broke dick carrier which doesn’t seem to like being out of the hangar or dry dock or where ever ships go to get repaired.

    And so the the two formerly greatest military powers in the world roll over and play dead.

    Thanks to old Trooper for the link and reminding me that this is the beginning of another shitty week.

    Old Trooper sent this picture of the de Gaulle along side the USS Enterprise;

  • More shots fired at Marine Corp Museum

    The Stars & Stripes is reporting that more shot were fired at the USMC Museum at Quantico, VA overnight. The FBI has also linked the first three shootings last week at the Pentagon, the museum and a recruiting station in Chantilly, VA.;

    The museum was first shot at on Oct. 17, and investigators later said the incident is linked to subsequent shootings at the Pentagon and a Marine Corps recruiting station in the Washington suburb of Chantilly, Va.

    Museum staff discovered new bullet holes in the building’s glass and steel structure on Friday morning, museum spokeswoman Gwenn Adams said.

    It’s encouraging that no people have been shot to this point. But the Marine Corps Marathon is scheduled this weekend at the Pentagon and it will probably inspire visitors at the relatively close museum.

    Michelle Malkin recalls the Beltway Sniper.

    The Pentagon is changing it’s security preparations for the Marathon. I’ve never run the Marathon, but I’ve run the Army Ten-Miler a few times which used part of the same route, and I think they used to shut down the highway from which law enforcement believes the shots were fired. Of course, I haven’t run it since 2000, so the route may have changed.

  • Voting in Chicago this year

    Well, not just Chicago, but the whole state of Illinois has a different climate than most of the country during the election season. For example, the First Lady, Michelle Obama, was reportedly campaigning for her husband’s party while she stopped by to vote last week. According to the Chicago Board of Elections, no one has filed a complaint so they won’t be investigating.

    The Green Party candidate for governor, the one most likely to draw votes away from the Democrat candidate, Pat Quinn, had his name spelled wrong on the ballot. Instead of Rich Whitney, the ballot names him as “Rich Whitey”, a sure turn-off for some voters. The misspelling is blamed on some unnamed employee at Dominion Voting Systems.

    Absentee voting in Illinois got harder this year when 35 counties decided they’d ignore the MOVE Act and sent their ballots late. This essentially disenfranchised most of the military voters in Illinois. But, not to worry, Investors Business Daily reports that not all absentees will miss out on their voting experience;

    Meanwhile, the Chicago Board of Elections hand-delivers ballots to inmates in Cook County Jail. The board doesn’t even wait for the inmates to apply — it brings the applications with the ballots! More than 2,600 inmates have cast ballots — strikingly similar to the 2,600 soldiers who will likely not receive a ballot for Tuesday’s election.

    Yes, Chicago is more concerned about the votes of criminals than they seem to be about the votes of the folks who keep us all safe enough to vote.

    Thanks to Old Trooper for the link.

  • DoD wants to scan service members’ emails

    In an effort to foresee events like soldier suicides and the shooting spree committed by Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, the Pentagon provided $35 million to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) so they can develop a way to scan emails of service members according to CNN;

    “Each time we see an incident like a soldier in good mental health becoming homicidal or suicidal or an innocent insider becoming malicious, we wonder why we didn’t see it coming,” DARPA says. “When we look through the evidence after the fact, we often find a trail — sometimes even an “obvious” one. The question is: Can we pick up the trail before the fact, giving us time to intervene and prevent an incident.”

    Yeah, that sounds good, but privacy concerns aside, someone tell me what the politically correct military will do with this information. The FBI had emails between Hasan and radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki that should have raised flags and perhaps prevented the Fort Hood shooting spree, but the FBI didn’t even warn the Army about it.

    Of course, Hasan was making noises in his unit to commanders and supervisors that should have raised flags, too. So, given all of things they want to accomplish with this new system, the Pentagon and the military still failed. Throwing money at a problem and developing a new whiz-bang won’t do anything unless they correct their personnel problems first.

    This is like the TSA strip searching 80-year-old women. They want to act like they’re doing something, but the whole process is more about appearances than actual security. Unless they overcome the political climate, it’s just an exercise in mental masturbation.

  • WaPo: War against Taliban is unsuccessful

    The Washington Post’s Greg Miller writes this morning that “U.S. military campaign to topple resilient Taliban hasn’t succeeded” of course this is based on a single, unnamed “Defense Department official’s assessment.

    The Obama administration’s plan to conduct a strategic review of the war in December has touched off maneuvering between U.S. military leaders seeking support for extending the American troop buildup and skeptics looking for arguments to wind down the nation’s role.

    Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has touted the success of recent operations and indicated that the military thinks it will be able to show meaningful progress by the December review. He said last week that progress is occurring “more rapidly than was anticipated” but acknowledged that major obstacles remain.

    Well, if the Washington Post is right, they don’t bother to consider that the Obama Administration neglected to honor the assessment of General McCrystal when they gave him half of the troops he requested in 2009. McCrystal warned at the time that refusing to give him sufficient troops would result in exactly these results.

    Instead, the Washington Post blames solely the Pakistanis;

    A crackdown by Pakistan’s military on those sanctuaries probably would have a greater impact on the war than any option available to Petraeus, officials said. But given the Pakistani government’s long-standing connections to the Haqqani network and the Taliban, a move by Islamabad against those groups is considered unlikely, at least by the administration’s timetable.

    Ah, the precious timetable again. This administration considers the war a distraction from the president’s domestic policy and arriving at politically expedient decision in regards to the war is more attractive than the prospect of victory.

    I agree that Pakistan’s involvement in the war against the Taliban would be helpful, but given the fact that this administration more willing to throw the allies of democracy undr the bus to demonstrate his commitment to “smart diplomacy” why should the Pakistanis help us?

    The current administration’s penchant for a policy of waiting for foreign policy issues to work themselves out has only encouraged our enemies from North Korea to Iran. Our adherence to a timeline rather than total warfare in Afghanistan has done the same for the Taliban.

    Maybe if the media would stop praying at the altar of Obama and stop treating this war like a political issue, maybe things would turn in our direction for a change.

    Thanks to Jerry920 for sending this link.

  • Burn Pit: Hollywood’s veterans are back

    I guess I watched the same shows they watch in the TSO household (“TSO household” sounds so weird after years of “TSO basement” – my little guy is growing up), because I noticed the same thing he did the other night. Crazy veterans are back on our airwaves. I swear, it’s getting harder to watch anything on TV. But anyway, some guy by the name of Mothax at the Burn Pit wrote;

    Anyway, so last night, in the after-glow of my aforementioned Patriots win, I settled in with the wife and my mildly retarded Puggle to watch Criminal Minds. This is sort of our favorite on-call TV show, because it can generally found on between one and three channels 24 hours a day, seven days a week on our ATT U-Verse. Criminal Minds follows the FBI’s “Behavioral Analysis Unit” (BAU) as they track down serial killers. Last night I made it through two episodes before chewing some Excedrin PM to knock myself out.

    The first one was an Episode called “Distress” wherein a veteran of B 3/75th Rangers from Somalia one day just completely loses his mind and starts killing folks in Houston, Texas, thinking he is back on the streets of Mogadishu.

    Yeah, you should read the whole thing. I enjoyed it more because it included a link to one of my old posts and reminded me of the glory of my youth (last year before I bought a house which has become my third or fourth job). It was probably one of my best posts ever and I enjoyed reading it for the first time again.

    But Mothax, whoever he is, is right. We’re being subjected to the John Rambo version of veterans again…the fact is that it began subtly as soon as the war began. A blood thirsty, homicidal maniac veteran, who undoubtedly was a Ranger/SEAL/Green Beret/Force Recon/Sniper, is a much more exciting stereotype than a guy who comes back from the war, goes to college raises a family and becomes the best darned employee that ever existed. Unfortunately, for Hollywood, that’s how most veterans turn out, though. Ask us.

  • The military has the happiest employees

    The Christian Science Monitor tells the story that when an online career guidance firm, CareerBliss, polled folks in regards to their current employer, the top eleven employers included all of the military services and the Army Reserve;

    CareerBliss used independent reviews to evaluate companies based on opportunities for growth, compensation, benefits, work-life balance, career advancement, senior management, job security and whether the employee would recommend the company to others.

    In a review from the more than one thousand appraisals written by military members in 2010, an Army administrator in Georgia wrote, “Serving in the Army offered the ultimate job security, not to mention an unmatched benefits package. It was also a good source of gaining valuable technical and real-life experience.”

    It was the hardest job I’ve ever had to leave. Even factoring in all of the miserable days and nights and the low pay (I made $156/month as an E-1, which is more than I make as a blogger), it’s the only place (besides this job as a blogger) I got paid to be an asshole.

    The hardest thing I’ve had to do is be is a former soldier with world events swirling around me and I can’t be a part of it. I guess that’s why I volunteered to go back on active duty in 2006.

    “Despite challenges that may occur when serving our country, including the possibility of going to war, the military provides many of the essential elements to finding happiness at work, including having a meaningful impact on the world, having true camaraderie with your co-workers and having the opportunities to develop skills,” Brummel said.

    Only those who’ve never served can’t understand why we loved it so much.

  • DoJ cuts deal with States that violate MOVE Act

    Fox News reports that the Department of Justice cut a deal with Illinois yesterday to allow the state to screw absentee voters, including deployed troops. 35 counties in the state failed to send out absentee ballots before the 45-day time limit;

    Eric Eversole, a former Justice voting section attorney who runs the nonprofit Military Voter Protection Project, told FoxNews.com the deal effectively lets wayward Illinois election officials off the hook and does little to ensure the state’s military voters get their ballots in time.

    “For at least 29 counties, there were absolutely no consequences,” he said. “Illinois is precisely the reason why you can’t wait until a week before the election to try and resolve a clear violation of military voting rights.”

    So here we are a week before the election and the Obama Administration is perfectly willing to let voters in his home state get screwed out of their voice in the election this year. There’s an online option that deployed troops can use…if they have access to a computer in the next seven days. Apparently, the DoJ isn’t aware of the fact that not ALL service members have internet access ALL of the time.

    Bob Carey, director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, said in a written statement that voters from 39 states can access full ballots online.

    “That number includes New York and Illinois, where we have the most significant problems with late ballot delivery,” he said.

    Military voters can visit FVAP.gov to access the online system; all voters also can file federal write-in absentee ballots, which are available online and include federal candidates.

    Yeah, that takes care of federal elections, but what about their local candidates? Like I’ve said, the military and veterans along with retirees are second-class citizens. Our rights are negotiable.