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

Category: Military issues

  • Look, if you’re not serious, just forget it, OK?

    So Admiral Mullen tells the media that he expects that “most” of the 30,000 troops will be in Afghanistan a year after General McCrystal asked for them.

    The top U.S. military officer said Tuesday that he’s confident that most of the 30,000 additional troops that are being sent to Afghanistan will be there by August.

    Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters traveling with him in Afghanistan that the first 16,000 troops who already have orders will be in on schedule.

    So. What? Last August, they said they had plenty of time to decide what to do about McChrystal’s request because the season for fighting was almost over and they could get ready for next year. If you fucksticks are just playing at looking like you’re at war, just fucking forget the whole thing.

    For future reference, THIS IS WHAT FUCKING WITH TROOPS LIVES LOOKS LIKE!

    Too bad I’ve actually been to Iraq so I don’t qualify for membership because I feel like joining IVAW at this point.

  • Women in the military

    I found this over at Stars & Stripes;

    Female Veterans Finding A Place
    Afghanistan veteran and founder of American Women Veterans, Genevieve Chase, 32, of Alexandria, Va., poses for a portrait in Washington, Monday, Oct. 19, 2009. A staff sergeant in the Army Reserves, Chase said that after her service the same guys she’d been close comrades with in Afghanistan didn’t invite her to get drinks with them later because their significant others wouldn’t approve. “One of the hardest things that I had deal with was, being a woman, was losing my best friends or my comrades to their families,” Chase said. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

    The article about women in the military is here.

    SSG Chase is a great friend of this blog (even though she won’t admit it in public). If there are some female service members out there who want to connect with other females, I highly recommend you get a hold of SSG Chase.

    Actually, I just wanted to post Eve’s picture on the blog to see if it’ll draw traffic.

  • The Obama Surge a week later

    Despite the Washington Post trying to equate the Obama Surge to the Bush Surge this morning, in ways that really matter, Obama is a far cry from Bush. Last week, Bush-sounding Obama announced an anemic introduction of 30,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan with a proviso that they’d begin withdrawing next year.

    But yesterday, the Obama staff started backing away from the withdrawal (New York Times);

    The Obama administration sent a forceful public message Sunday that American military forces could remain in Afghanistan for a long time, seeking to blunt criticism that President Obama had sent the wrong signal in his war-strategy speech last week by projecting July 2011 as the start of a withdrawal.

    In a flurry of coordinated television interviews, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top administration officials said that any troop pullout beginning in July 2011 would be slow and that the Americans would only then be starting to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces under Mr. Obama’s new plan.

    The television appearances by the senior members of Mr. Obama’s war council seemed to be part of a focused and determined effort to ease concerns about the president’s emphasis on setting a date for reducing America’s presence in Afghanistan after more than eight years of war.

    His exact words;

    And as commander-in-chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

    After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

    What? One squad at a time?

    This strategy, for want of a better word, sprang from McChrystal’s briefing in June as reported by Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades from a WaPo article last Saturday in which the National Security staff discovered what McChrystal envisioned as his mission;

    His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a PowerPoint slide: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”

    “Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of the participants asked.

    I’d be more interested in what the Obama thought McChrystal’s mission is. Gabriel Malor writes;

    What is this bullshit? “Oh, I told him to kill the Taliban, but I didn’t think he’d take it so literally.” What. The. Fuck.

    What could it possibly have meant except “kill the Taliban.” I mean, with Obama, you never know, maybe he meant “hug the Taliban.” But he wouldn’t use the military for that, he’d go himself, right?

    So, you really have to wonder what is going on here. They didn’t know that McChrystal actually thought he should be killing Taliban and after telling America from West Point that the surge would end in 14 months, they’re saying that ‘no, it won’t’ now.

    Whether you liked George Bush or not, when he told you he was going to do something, he did it and his plan didn’t change with news reports and public opinion polls. That, coupled with the devotion of the troops to the mission, is what won in Iraq. How can the troops win when the mission and the perception of the mission changes every-damn-day?

    The troops are even fighting against Obama’s Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eickenberry. In a phone conversation I had this morning, someone told me that the military officers in Afghanistan are calling my former platoon leader “Douchenberry” – I like that. We called him “Dingleberry” – so some things haven’t changed much in 34 years. But what does he expect when, as a politician, he undermines the military solution in public?

    Our military wins when they’re given the equipment and political support for which they ask – when everyone understands the mission and the Administration stands fully behind them. I guess it’ll take a few years for that to happen, though. Say 2013.

  • Military Blogger under fire

    cj-grisham

    Thanks to Bouhammer for the photo.

    Among other things, the MilBlog community has been watching the case of MSG CJ Grisham closely to gauge the Army’s attitude towards active duty bloggers. CJ, in addition to being a senior NCO and a groundbreaking milblogger, is also a parent. When he opposed a local school district’s policy in regards to his kids, he complained at a PTA meeting. The school principal complained about MSG Grisham’s complaint to the Army.

    Grisham videoed the next PTA meeting in order to protect himself, then put it on his blog. The school district complained and Grisham was forced to shut down his blog by the Army.

    There’s more at Blackfive.

    CJ is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, so if you can see your way clear to help him out during this tight holiday, I’d sure appreciate it.

  • Rally for SEALs

    Today in Norfolk, VA, supporters of the 3 SEALs who’ve been put on trial for fattening the lip of the terrorist, Abed, who was responsible for the murder of four contractors in Fallujah. Here’s an interview Fox did with retired SEAL Don Shipley who’ll be on hand for the protest.

    Gathering of Eagles is there;

    Why: Show your support for our Navy SEALs, their families and our military serving throughout the globe

    When: Dec 7th, 2009 Pearl Harbor Day

    Where: Gate 5 of the Base, Norfolk, Va Hampton Blvd and B Street.

    Time: 7 am until noonish? Depending on how many citizens show up…. a PEACEFUL RALLY for support is the optimal goal. The media will be there to share with those that can not make it.

    Thanks to Concrete Bob and Bubba for the link.

  • No Gun Ri and Bagram

    Adirondack Patriot sent us this link to an Albany Times-Union article about the opening of a new archives for documents related to the alleged atrocity at No Gun Ri, Korea in 1950. Adirondack Patriot writes;

    There is so many things wrong about this. First, a non-historian professor is compiling history based driven by personal interest. A computer science professor with no military experience is going to dabble in amateur historical analysis and somehow it will be cast in stone as historical fact.

    Second, the person has already framed this event as a “massacre” by American soldiers, disregarding the work by an American infantry major who researched the incident and disproved the AP story (which was based on the accounts of three proven liars).

    Third, there is no new evidence to justify this “historical” project. Using taxpayer money to solicit historical accounts is a pretty crappy way of collecting reliable facts.

    Forth, this research will involve free and open access to the North Korean archives of the event, right? Yeah, right.

    In short, the campus liberals and the media are again portraying the United States military as murderers and using taxpayer money to do it.

    Honestly, I stopped paying attention to the No Gun Ri discussion when it was determined that one of the main witnesses, Edward Daily, was proven to have been no where near the incident. One of the charges was that US soldiers set up machine guns at the opposite ends of a tunnel and fired on the refugees. I guess the bullets in those days were programmed to only hit Koreans and not to hit the machine gun team at the other entrance.

    But there’s a similar story in the Washington Post this morning about two Afghan teenagers who claim they were held at a secret prison at Bagram Airbase and tortured. The Post is careful, in this case to mention that there’s no corroboration for the teens’ charges, but that doesn’t stop them from reporting ridiculous stories;

    The two teenagers — Issa Mohammad, 17, and Abdul Rashid, who said he is younger than 16 — said in interviews this week that they were punched and slapped in the face by their captors during their time at Bagram air base, where they were held in individual cells. Rashid said his interrogator forced him to look at pornography alongside a photograph of his mother.

    Um, why show them porn? What would it accomplish? It sounds like something the TSA would force me to do while my plane is pulling away from the gate, but to what end would an interrogator engage in that behavior? I mean, seriously. Their job is to get information not torture someone simply for the sake of torture – like I said, that’s TSA’s job.

    At the beginning of his detention, he was forced to strip naked and undergo a medical checkup in front of about a half-dozen American soldiers. He said that his Muslim upbringing made such a display humiliating and that the soldiers made it worse.

    “They touched me all over my body. They took pictures, and they were laughing and laughing,” he said. “They were doing everything.”

    It sounds like that episode of Family Guy when Peter got a prostate exam;

    I’ll never understand why the media is so eager to believe any story that makes the American fighting forces look like perverted, bloodthirsty monsters no matter how ridiculous the story sounds.

    I’m sure Mathew Alexander will have some information on this even though his time as an interrogator was more than three years ago and in a different country.

  • Soviet vs. US comparison in A’stan

    In this morning’s Wall Street Journal (it may require subscription), Yaroslav Trofimov compares the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the current US operations there;

    There are major differences between the two conflicts. For one, unlike the isolated Soviet Union, America operates in Afghanistan under a United Nations mandate, part of a coalition of 42 allies. Allied dead, currently 1,528, are barely one-ninth the Soviet toll. Afghan civilian deaths are a small fraction of the estimated one million killed in the 1980s.

    Afghans who compare the two campaigns acknowledge the differences, yet argue that these aren’t always in America’s favor. An examination of this debate over the Soviet experience offers an insight into what American troops are up against — and the issues President Obama must weigh as he decides the course of an unpopular and costly war he didn’t start.

    Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev also faced a troop-increase request during his first year, for a war he had inherited. Soviet generals in 1985 asked for tens of thousands more soldiers to bolster their 100,000-strong contingent, roughly the same size as the current Western force in Afghanistan.

    us-vs-soviets-in-astan

    Trofimov tries to give cover to Obama and Gates for taking so long to make up their minds about troop increases, but it falls flat. There is no excuse for delaying the inevitable. Obama knows he can’t re-elected if he quits in Afghanistan despite the unpopularity of the war – Americans don’t tolerate quitting and Obama would get all of the blame, no matter what Americans tell pollsters.

  • Politicians dawdle, soldiers soldier

    Now that Obama has finally made up his mind to continue the fight in Afghanistan, Now he has to fight his own party according to the Washington Post;

    Top Democrats have made it clear to Obama that he will not receive a friendly reception should he announce what is considered the leading option: sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The legislators have indicated that a request for more money to finance a beefed-up war effort will be met with frustration and, perhaps, a demand to raise taxes.

    Yeah, they’ll line up to raise taxes for the war – the one thing they’re spending money on that is actually a function of government (that whole “provide for the common defense” thing). And because Obama took so long to decide what he was going to do about Afghanistan, our so-called allies have decide to begin their dithering according to the New York Times;

    The administration confronts several hurdles to garnering more allied contributions. In Britain, which has pledged an additional 500 troops, Defense Minister Bob Ainsworth said Tuesday that Mr. Obama had taken too long to decide on a new strategy, harming the British government’s ability to rally public support for the war.

    The British government is facing opinion polls showing that around 70 percent of the public favors an early withdrawal. That figure has nearly doubled in the past six months, as the country has sustained its worst casualties — 97 killed so far this year — since it first deployed troops to Afghanistan after the Taliban were toppled in 2001.

    Germany and France have balked at committing any more forces to a war that has so little public support that they can barely maintain current troop levels.

    Yeah, 3 months of deliberations over the number of troops he’d deploy hasn’t exactly inspired confidence in Obama’s final decisions. Funny how that works.

    To his credit, the President did make phone calls to 10 service members yesterday.

    Meantime, JD Johannes of Outside the Wire sends us pictures of one Thanksgiving meal in Iraq at Tikrit. Stars and Stripes reports on the meal at COP Charkh in Afghanistan;

    “That was good as (expletive),” one soldier said to another after eating.

    And despite the rough conditions, the soldiers said they had a lot to be thankful for. Mainly each other, and that they were all going home. Though there have been many injuries, the company has only lost one soldier in Charkh.

    “I’m thankful that all my buddies are still alive and that I get to spend (Thanksgiving) with the guys to the left and right of me who watch my back every day,” said 1st Platoon’s Spc. William Brown of Milwaukee. “And I’m thankful I’m leaving in two weeks.”

    “I’m thankful I didn’t get shot at today,” said Pfc. Don Garab of Walkerton, Ind., of 3rd Platoon. “And for a good cigar.”

    “I’m thankful I’m not digging that foxhole anymore,” said Spc. John McDermott, one of the unfortunate 2nd Platoon guys tasked with that most un-festive of duties.

    “I’m thankful for ‘A cog’ scopes, M203’s and HEDP,” 2nd Platoon’s Sgt. David Lloyd said, military-speak for his rifle scope, grenade launcher and ammunition. “They’ve saved our ass a lot.”

    Another Stars and Stripes article reports on yet another Thanksgiving celebration in Barak-Baracki;

    Others let sentiment seep through their matter-of-fact, stoic shells.

    “We’re with our family just like we would be at Thanksgiving back home,” said Staff Sgt. Ben McKinnon, of New Haven, Connecticut, nodding toward the soldiers around him that have daily shared hardship, suffering and some elation over the past year.

    It makes you wonder how politicians can continue to allow the troops to hang their asses out without giving them the support they deserve, doesn’t it?