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

Category: Military issues

  • Beret saleman Shinseki in over his head

    It’s a good thing Eric Shinseki isn’t working for a Republican administration or he’d be tarred and feathered and tethered to a railroad tie in front of his Vermont Avenue office at this writing. Lucky for him, Congress and the media carry water for Democrats;

    “A plan was written, very quickly put together, uh, very short timelines,” declared VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to the US House Veterans Affairs Committee yesterday as to why the VA had screwed up the payments for veterans attempting to pursue higher education. “I’m looking at the certificates of eligibility uh being processed on 1 May and enrollments 6 July, checks having to flow through August. A very compressed time frame. And in order to do that, we essentially began as I arrived in January, uh, putting together the plan — reviewing the plan that was there and trying to validate it. I’ll be frank, when I arrived, uh, there were a number of people telling me this was simply not executable.”

    So, instead of warning people, or negotiating temporary agreements with schools, or…well, anything, Shinseki let the dates chug up on him and then pass. Shinseki made empty promises to veterans that he had no intention to keep. From Stars and Stripes;

    A number of “complications” caused the payment delays, Shinseki explained. One factor was VA officials underestimated the number of claim processors they needed by the Aug. 3 start date. Early estimates were based on processing time under the Montgomery GI Bill program, he said.

    But processing Mongomery GI Bill payments involves two to three steps and takes an average of 15 minutes versus nine steps and more than an hour to process a Post-9/11 GI Bill application, Shinseki explained. Unlike Montgomery GI Bill benefits, Post-9/11 payments vary by school location and other unique factors.

    Yeah, unique factors like having a blivet head for a DVA Secretary. The Congress members really wore his ass out for being an incompetent boob;

    Both Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., committee chairman, and [Steve Buyer, R-Ind.] praised Shinseki for integrity and candor in promptly revealing and addressing problems that have surfaced at VA since he took charge last February.

    “We think you’re doing a great job,” said Filner. “I know you were called a soldier’s soldier when you were in the Army. And now I’m calling you a veteran’s veteran.”

    CNN blames veterans for applying for the benefits they earned;

    The department became a victim of the success of its new education program for veterans who have served since September 2001. The claims became so backlogged that the VA was forced to issue more than $70 million in emergency funds to veterans who were still waiting for money for supplies and living needs, weeks into the school year.

    The truth is; Shinseki and his staff could have done almost anything to curtail these problems, but instead they just smiled and waved at TV cameras until veterans got fed up with the pleasantries and broken promises.

    The good news is that Congress finalized a bill to provide the DVA with funding for medical programs a year in advance. I’m betting that Shinseki will screw that up, too.

  • Who needs bullets during a war

    An article at the Washington Times reports that Congress stripped out $2.6 billion from the Defense budget to fund 778 pet projects (read that: earmarks). Money that should have gone to buying ammunition, fuel and training instead found it’s way into more critical areas;

    $25 million for a new World War II museum at the University of New Orleans and $20 million to launch an educational institute named after the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.

    While earmarks are hardly new in Washington, “in 30 years on Capitol Hill, I never saw Congress mangle the defense budget as badly as this year,” said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate staffer who worked on defense funding and oversight for both Republicans and Democrats.

    So while the Obama Administration diddles on whether to supply our toops engaged with an enemy in a far away land, the Congress is busy wrestling their money away from them to buy patronage here at home for their political aspirations next year.

    The Kennedy museum thingie – that was from John “who wants to be the last to die for a lie” Kerry.

    “Sen. Kennedy served on the Armed Services Committee for 27 years, where he fought to deliver top-of-the-line body armor and armored Humvees to protect our troops and save lives. Educating Americans about these battles is a core mission for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, which showcases one senator’s ability to make a difference,” Mr. Smith wrote in an e-mail. “This funding will help the Edward M. Kennedy Institute become one the nation’s pre-eminent civic educational institutions, and Sen. Kerry is proud to have worked with Chairman Inouye to make it possible.”

    Oh, and let’s make the military buy stuff thay don’t need;

    In addition to the $2.6 billion in earmarks, the bill includes $2.5 billion for 10 Boeing C-17 cargo planes that the military says it does not need, and $1.7 billion for an extra DDG-51 destroyer not requested in the Pentagon’s budget proposal.

    What’s it costing the military to pay for politicians’ patronage?

    “Air Force and Navy combat pilots training to deploy are getting about half of the flying hours they got at the end of the Vietnam War,” he wrote in his analysis. “Army tank crews get less in tank training today than they did during the low-readiness Clinton years.”

    Yeah, Republicans did the same thing while they ran Congress – and they lost public and political support because of it. I haven’t given a penny to Republicans since 2004. Will Democrats do the same to their politicians? Fat chance.

  • Command restricts photos of dead US troops

    TSO sent us this link last night from Congressional Quarterly;

    The U.S. military command in Bagram, Afghanistan, confirmed Wednesday that it has barred reporters who embed with its forces from videotaping or photographing U.S. military personnel killed in action.

    Several senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee — including the chairman, Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, and the ranking Republican, John McCain of Arizona — said Wednesday they were not aware of the change in policy and wanted to find out more about it.

    As much as I disagree with restrictions on the press by government agencies, journalists brought it on themselves with their abhorrent behavior in the case of Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard whose final moments of life were sent out over the news wires.

    His family asked the Associated Press to not publish the photos, yet they did it anyway. And then, the entire media engaged in an electronic circle jerk to assuage their widdle feewings. For example, although his newspaper didn’t publish the photos, Stars and Stripes ombudsman, Mark Prendergast felt the need to give AP a handjob;

    It was a tough call, but the right one.

    As hard as it may be to view that picture, especially for the Marine’s family, it belongs in the public domain as a legitimate piece of visual history in a conflict that as of this writing has taken 562 American lives in combat, with no end in sight.

    It honors his death, and those of all others, by showing what it means to give one’s life for one’s country. It is also a testament to courage and comradeship. Two fellow Marines can be seen risking their own lives to tend to their fallen buddy under fire.

    Suppressing or withholding the photo would have ill served the open society that the dead Marine, Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard of New Portland, Me., gave his life to serve so well so far from home.

    So, in the age of instant imaging and broadcasting, Prendergast sees no problem engaging in this type of snuff journalism. Especially, working for a newspaper that’s claim to fame is “The Independent News Source
    for the U.S. Military Community”.

    What choice did the military have to protect the good order and discipline of the military by restricting the bad order and indiscipline of the press.

    If the Associated Press and the news outlets who chose to run the photos of LCPL Bernard had showed a bit of decorum, maybe they wouldn’t have had these restrictions placed on them. The government doesn’t usually regulate things that people and organizations regulate properly for themselves.

    Of course, we can probably count on snuff pornographers in the media to cry and whine, but it’s their own damn fault.

  • Joe Rocha revisited

    I’ve been getting my ass handed to me in my email from Ace of Spade’s Gabriel Malor and doubleplusundead‘s AliceH for not doing my homework on the Washington Post opinion piece I quoted yesterday. I should add that I’m getting my ass handed to me in a very genial manner.

    I’ll concede I was a bit rushed because my wife wanted to see the West Virginia mountains before the leaves all fall off of the trees (like they did last year and like they will again next year).

    Gabe wrote to say;

    Contrary to your commenters who claimed Rocha is a “failure at life” and your suggestion that he’s just “weak in the knees” and “looking for an excuse”, it appears that something went on over there and DADT played a part. Is it as bad as he says? Is he exaggerating? We don’t know (yet), but dismissing him outright avoids the facts.

    If, as you say, it’s bullshit then you have nothing to fear from pointing your readers at the investigation. On the other hand, if something did go on, you just libeled a good man (and encouraged others to do so) based on nothing but your gut.

    Either way, your post didn’t do a bit of good for any involved. Doesn’t make the Navy look better. Doesn’t rehabilitate DADT. It certainly doesn’t get us any closer to getting past the counterproductive status quo.

    So I went to digging and found a Navy Times article which said;

    In January [2007], Rear Adm. David Mercer, the commander of Navy Region Europe, Africa and Southwest Asia, sent a team of senior officials to review the working dog unit and others at Naval Support Activity Bahrain.

    Mercer subsequently added personnel to Bahrain, he said.

    Master-at-Arms Senior Chief Michael Toussaint, the man implicated in the investigation, works with SEALs in Virginia. He reaches his 20-year point in the Navy this coming January.

    It’s unclear if anyone was disciplined in the wake of the 2007 investigation.

    One sailor implicated in the probe, Master-at-Arms 1st Class Jennifer Valdivia, committed suicide in January 2007, the same day the investigators forwarded their report to her commanders.

    Her suicide was likely tied to the investigation, according to her family and Navy investigators.

    AliceH wrote to tell me about the circumstances surrounding Valdivia’s death;

    Petty Officer 3rd Class Jake Wilburn, who received a dishonorable discharge, told the newspaper he felt as though he became a scapegoat. He said Valdivia failed to stop the hazing after Toussaint’s departure.

    “Once he left, everybody had been used to being ruled by fear and intimidation,” Wilburn said. “She didn’t know how to lead any other way. Everybody completely walked all over her, and she just lost control. No one paid her respect, so she tried to overcompensate.

    As I learned my lesson about research, I chased down another Navy Times article;

    Master-at-Arms 1st Class Jennifer Valdivia’s apparent suicide came on the same day the investigators forwarded their report to the commander of Naval Support Activity Bahrain.

    “They told her to pack her bags; she was going to the brig. They were going to strip her of everything she ever got in the Navy,” her father, Chris Young, of Alpha, Ill., told Navy Times.

    Valdivia had been promoted to the kennel’s leading petty officer after Toussaint left Bahrain in March 2006, Young said.

    The Navy official familiar with the investigation confirmed that Valdivia was leaving the Navy but her commanders halted that move as a result of the investigation. It’s unclear whether her suicide was connected to the probe, the official said.

    So, apparently, something very wrong was going on at the Navy’s Working Dog Unit in Bahrain. Does it change my mind about Rocha? Nope. He blamed his supervisor at the Working Dog Unit for his PTSD and his decision for announcing his sexual orientation to his supervisors, but that’s not what he told the Navy Times reporter;

    While in Rhode Island, Rocha decided to tell his command that he is a homosexual because he disagreed with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. He said he wanted to pursue a career permitting him to acknowledge his homosexuality.

    He claims he made a political decision unrelated to his treatment. Valdavia was blamed for the same things that unit members said that her previous supervisor had done. And who were the witnesses about the behavior – Joe Rocha the politically motivated activist and Jake Wilburn, a sailor who has been dishonorably discharged.

    Rocha says DADT was the reason he couldn’t report the hazing to which he claims he was subjected, yet he had no problem taking his punishment at the prep school.

    Am I the only one who sees the flaws in this story? Having been railroaded by military subordinates a few times myself, I recognize the pattern.

    Might I be wrong? Yes, it happened before. Once. As I told Gabe, I made it clear that my opinion is based on nothing except my gut feelings. Since we’re only treated to one side of this story, (there’s nothing anywhere that I can find quoting Master-at-Arms Senior Chief Michael Toussaint) we have to assume we’re missing something.

    I haven’t changed my mind from yesterday, though. And if “getting past the counterproductive status quo” rests solely on my shoulders, I’m pretty sure this post doesn’t help.

  • “I didn’t tell. It didn’t matter”

    I spent twenty years in the infantry, and although we played a lot of tricks on people, mostly of a sexual nature, I don’t think I ever saw anything that comes even close to the antics described in this morning’s Washington Post by Joseph Roche. Based on absolutely nothing but a gut feeling I’m calling Bullshit.

    Shop talk in the unit revolved around sex, either the prostitute-filled parties of days past or the escapades my comrades looked forward to. They interpreted my silence and total lack of interest as an admission of homosexuality. My higher-ups seemed to think that gave them the right to bind me to chairs, ridicule me, hose me down and lock me in a feces-filled dog kennel.

    Now, why would someone think that lack of participation in discussions about sex make someone queer? We had ordained ministers and the average “Holy Joes” who wouldn’t participate either. And we certainly didn’t spend our entire work day talking about that stuff – you run out after a while and actual work intercedes. But my NCOs certainly didn’t do any of that stuff Rocha describes.

    I was the decoy, and I had to do just what Chief Petty Officer Michael Toussaint ordered.

    In one corner of the classroom was a long sofa, turned away from the door. When you walked into the room, it appeared that one man was sitting on it, alone. But I was there too — the chief had decided that I would be down on my hands and knees, simulating oral sex. A kennel support staff member and I were supposed to pretend that we were in our bedroom and that the dogs were catching us having sex. Over and over, with each of the 32 dogs, I was forced to enact this scenario.

    That makes no sense – are there sex-detection dogs in the Navy? Does the Navy use these sex-detection dogs to find Homos having sex? Can the dogs differentiate between homosexual and heterosexual sex? Do the dogs care if you’re having sex? Too many unanswered questions.

    I told no one about what I was living through. I feared that reporting the abuse would lead to an investigation into my sexuality. My leaders and fellow sailors were punishing me for keeping my sexuality to myself, punishing me because I wouldn’t “tell.”

    I was never in the Navy, but that just sounds ridiculous. I’m pretty sure the Navy has better things to do than try to get it’s members to out themselves. Rocha claims that the CNO is investigating this and I hope the results of the investigation are published because to me this sounds like a guy whose knees went weak during his Naval Academy years and bailed, now he’s looking for an excuse that makes him look good.

  • Statistics and lies

    Statistics don’t lie, but the people who interpret them do. Take for example this story in the Stars and Stripes from Associated Press about the disappropriate response of the military against lesbians entitled “Women more likely to be expelled under ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ ”

    Women are far more likely than men to be kicked out of the military under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy against gays in uniform, according to government figures released Thursday that critics said reflect deep-seated sexism in the armed forces.

    Women accounted for 15 percent of all active-duty and reserve members of the military but more than one-third of the 619 people discharged last year because of their sexual orientation.

    Throughout the article, the author, Lisa Leff, tells us that lesbians are booted from the military at a higher rate than males as she breaks down the service-by-service numbers.

    “It’s very clear the military comes down harder on women than on men, but the question of whether they come down harder on lesbians than on gay men is harder to answer,” said Palm Center director Aaron Belkin. “We don’t know whether the statistics reflect lesbian-baiting or just a higher rate of lesbians in the military.”

    Then why even bring it up? You know it could be that a larger percentage of ALL women are lesbians than men are gay. It could be that more lesbians are attracted to military service than gay men are attracted to military service.

    But, of course, rather than discussing the different answers to the questions, Leff would rather blame sexually frustrated men;

    But Frank and some women who served in the military said the gap could also be a result of “lesbian-baiting” rumors and investigations that arise when women rebuff sexual overtures from male colleagues or do not meet traditional notions of feminine beauty.

    “Often times the lesbians under my command were under scrutiny by the same men who were also sexually harassing straight women, so it was this kind of sexist undercurrent of ’You don’t belong here,’” said Anuradha Bhagwati, a former Marine who founded the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group.

    The only variants of the explanations that are discussed are based on personal observations while Leff makes it appear linked to the math.

    CNN’s Adam Levine left it like this;

    Of those discharged under the policy, 36 percent were women, although women make up only 14 percent of troops in the Army, the data showed.

    I suppose he thinks that the Army should have quotas, or bounties, to balance the numbers. For every lesbian they boot, the Army has to find seven gays to keep it proportionate.

  • This governing stuff is hard

    Last week, I wrote that the Obama Administration had decided to hike the inpatient fee for TRICARE recipients who were working age and using civilian hospitals. Of course we heard that the Administration was dumbstruck by the Defense Department’s announcement and we heard promises that the Administration would not let it fly.

    We waited. We waited. No news of the reversal – the Defense Department is an agency of the Executive Branch, so all it would take is the President telling them “no”, right? Still nothing.

    Today, the House-Senate conference for the 2010 Defense Appropriation Bill took action since the White House didn’t seem too eager to do the right thing according to the Stars and Stripes;

    The last decision made by House-Senate conferees negotiating final details on a fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill Tuesday was to insert language that will roll back an announced Oct. 1 increase in fees charged to TRICARE Standard beneficiaries for stays in civilian hospitals.

    The surprise fee increases, which were reported here last week, gave lawmakers a chance to ride to the rescue and, in effect, put a cherry atop the $680.2 billion defense policy bill, at least for working-age military retirees and their families who would have seen a $110-a-day bump in hospital bills.

    That was a fortuitous opportunity for the armed services committees because other pay and benefit initiatives in the bill are relatively modest compared to past years.

    Fortuitous? Screwing around with peoples’ health and welfare is fortuitous? No, actually, it looks like they were screwing around on purpose so they could seem to be doing something for military retirees. It seems it’s difficult to keep Obama’s campaign promises;

    Obama promised in his presidential campaign to extend concurrent receipt to all disabled military retirees. But White House budget officials were stunned to learn the cost — $45 billion over 10 years — and so lowered their first-term target to all Chapter 61 retirees, clearly an unpopular compromise.

    House-Senate Conferees also rejected two familiar Senate-passed initiatives as unfunded. One would have ended a reduction in Survivor Benefit Plan payments to 54,000 widows who also draw Dependency and Indemnity Compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

    The other provision tossed would have made 140,000 more reservists mobilized since Sept. 11, 2001, eligible for earlier reserve retirement. In 2007, Congress had lowered the age 60 start of reserve retired pay by three months for every 90 consecutive days that a Reserve or Guard members is called up for war or national emergency if they otherwise qualify for retirement. For lack of funds, Congress made the change applicable only for deployment time after Jan. 28, 2008. That restriction will remain.

    So they didn’t end the reduction from our military retired pay to pay for our own disability, they didn’t end the reduction in widows’ benefits (that their husbands earned for them) and they didn’t fix eligibility for Reserve soldiers who served in the war against terror. But they did fix the thing they inflicted on service members last week. What kind of childish bullshit are they trying to pull on us?

    I guess governing is harder than making campaign promises.

  • Virginia; we don’t need no stinkin’ absentee voters

    Ziggy sends us this link to an amazing story at Redstate in which the Virginia State Board of Elections claims they have no responsibility to get absentee ballots to military voters in time for their votes to count;

    The Virginia State Board of Elections argued in their most recent filing that they have no legal obligation to send out military absentee ballots in a timely manner. Restated, the State of Virginia has argued in a federal court filing that they can legally send out absentee ballots to active duty soldiers the day before an election. Restated again, theDemocratic Chairwoman of the Virginia State Board of Election (appointed by the Democratic National Committee Chair Tim Kaine, in his capacity as Virginia Governor) Jean Cunningham just claimed a legal basis for massively raising the barrier to voting for soldiers at war.

    You really need to go read the whole thing – it’s pretty instructive in how military voters are losing support in their home states now that their votes actually change the outcome of elections.